Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  By the winter of 1967, his skills greatly eroded and his future in baseball very much in doubt, Mickey was desperate to cash in on his celebrity. Frank Scott was constantly bringing in small endorsements, but the best offer came from a dynamic advertising executive named George Lois. Lois had practically created the sports celebrity TV commercial back in 1960 when he struck a gold mine for Puss and Boots cat food by having Yogi Berra talk to a cat, who told him how much he enjoyed the company’s product.‖

  Lois, perhaps the most important figure in the American advertising industry, would become famous in the late 1960s for his Esquire covers. In the early 1980s, his “I Want My MTV!” slogan would become an American catchphrase, as would his “In Your Face!” campaign for ESPN a few years later. When it came to sports stars, Lois broke the rules. For instance, instead of using Berra as a pitchman, he brought out Yogi’s sweeter qualities by having him engage in an intimate conversation with a cat; the commercial not only got men to laugh, it had enormous appeal to women, who, after all, bought the vast majority of cat food.

  In 1967 Lois was working on the sales of the maple-flavored oatmeal cereal Maypo. As usual, he decided not to do things the usual way. “Instead of a kid wailing at his mom for Maypo,” he wrote in his 2003 memoir, $ellebrity, “I made a 180 degree turn away from the obvious. Instead of kids crying I want my Maypo! I used the greatest superstars of professional sports to sell Maypo to small fry, five to twelve years old. Maypo had always been considered a baby cereal, and to really hit one out of the park, I had to appeal to the pre-teenagers. I showed Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, Wilt Chamberlain, Ray Nitschke, Oscar Robertson and Don Meredith, all in one television spot crying for their Maypo and shedding lifelike tears, here was the ultimate sissyfication of the American macho sports hero, a twisteroo on the unconscionable hustles by jocks who manipulated kids through hero worship. Instead, the sports greats in our spot sold obliquely, displaying self-mocking wit.”12

  Despite the rise of football by 1967, and despite his own decline, Mickey’s spot was still the most popular. Frank Scott, who was still handling occasional endorsement deals for both Mantle and Mays, mentioned to Lois that a spot with America’s two greatest sports icons might be a big hit. Lois thought it was a natural and invited Mickey and Willie to his studio. Mantle quickly did his “I want my Maypo!” face and, with a little artificial help from Lois’s assistant, burst into tears. When Mays’s turn came, however, there was a problem. He did take after take, staring into the camera impassive as a TV newscaster. No matter how Lois implored him, Willie refused to feign sorrow over being denied his cereal. “Willie don’t cry,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Willie don’t cry.”

  In desperation, George whispered to Mickey that they were in danger of losing the commercial. Mantle suggested that he take Willie for a brief walk to see what he could do. A few minutes later, they returned, a smiling Mickey with his arm around a stern-faced Willie. Mays sat down, recited his lines, and practically burst into tears without any help. Afterward, Lois thanked Mickey for saving the spot and asked what he had said to Willie. “Aw,” said Mantle, “I just had a little talk with him. He knows I love him.”

  On January 7, 1968, Mickey and Willie put in an appearance at a sporting goods fair at the New Yorker Hotel. By that time, they had become relaxed enough with each other to exchange a few good-natured barbs. “You sure you know how to use one of these things?” Willie quipped as Mickey held up a glove. “Man,” Mickey said in reply, as he tried on Willie’s mitt, “some people said I couldn’t carry your glove. Now I see why. It’s so damn big.”13

  The fair was also an opportunity for Esquire magazine to put together a photo shoot and dual interview, which appeared in the August issue: “Mantle Fans Mays/Mays Fans Mantle—Willie and Mickey Appraise Each Other in Relation.” Mickey’s text (written, as he revealed to me at a 1985 party for The Mick, by Dick Schaap, who had written Mantle’s paperback biography in the Sport magazine biography series) contained some genuine appreciation and insight: “Outside of Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays is the greatest all-around baseball player of my time. Certainly he’s been the most daring. Mays would steal home, a tough play and one in which you’ve got a great chance to look bad. Willie didn’t even think of that, he’d just go. Nine times out of ten, he’d make it.” (Mickey was almost right—Mays stole home eight times in ten tries in his career.)

  “He was always a better glove man than I was because he had that same confidence. I’d run up to a single to center, say, squat down and block it in case I missed it. I always had that little doubt in the back of my mind that I might not catch it. But Willie would come charging in, scoop up the ball on the dead run, and fire. The basket catch is easy for him, so he has fun with it. He makes it so easy that sometime people think he’s showboating. I think some of his style is for the fans, but I don’t see anything wrong with that.

  “I used to feel I was as good as he was, but now Willie has finally gotten out a little ahead of me. He’s kept his health better than I have. He seems to run as well as he used to, although not quite so much. He’s a leader, too, and I’m not. He’ll go to the young players and try to help them. [Note: As Sport magazine revealed several times, so did Mantle.] He talks it up on the bench. He wants to be a leader. I just want to be one of the players.”

  Mantle was surprisingly candid about another matter that was increasingly close to Willie: “People keep asking him if he thinks he can break Babe Ruth’s lifetime home-run record. What do they expect him to say? I’ll tell you that I don’t think he can do it. He came into this season 150 home runs behind Ruth. He’s 37 now. Say he plays three or more years. Even if he plays four more, he must average more than 35 home runs a year, and that’s a lot. But I hope he does it.”

  Toward the end of the piece Mantle grew reflective. “I suppose the toughest thing for both of us is the thought of quitting. Baseball’s our business, our life. But if we have a couple of days in a row where we strike out three times and don’t get a hit, people say, ‘Maybe he’s had it.’ You don’t want to reach a point where people just think you’re hanging on.”

  Clearly the subject was very much on Mickey’s mind.

  Mays’s essay—actually written by Charles Einstein—started with the Mantle performance that had most impressed him: his two home runs in the 1960 World Series. “I would rather be compared to Mantle than pitch to him. He didn’t just beat pitchers, he broke their hearts.”

  “It’s difficult to imagine a successor to Mantle; no one is likely to combine the speed and power and be able to hit so well both right-handed and left.

  “Mickey used to get booed a lot at Yankee Stadium. I didn’t have any problems like that until later when the Giants moved to San Francisco. Then I got booed. It wasn’t so much what we were, it was more what we weren’t. Neither of us was Joe DiMaggio.

  “I’ve seen ballplayers do the job on just guts, but I’ve never known a guy do it over so long a time. Mantle can still swing, but when he does, his legs almost seem to collapse. The man is in pain and hitting is tough enough when you’re feeling good. They tell me he bandages his legs from top to bottom before every game and that he’s been doing it for a long time. Everybody’s got an idea on how to help him. Even I’ve made a suggestion; I’ve got a machine that I think helped me, and I sent one to Mickey.” (According to Charlie Einstein, this was a kind of small whirlpool for the feet and knees. Mantle was hugely appreciative and sent Mays a case of wine in return—when Roger Kahn reminded Mickey that Willie didn’t drink, Mickey sent him a note of apology and a basket with some fine Russian caviar.14)

  “Two years ago, the Yankees decided to play him at first-base. Some guys wouldn’t have moved after all those years, but Mickey went to spring training and made himself learn the job. I watched him on television the other day. He’s never going to be a Gil Hodges, but he won’t embarrass himself, either. I don’t know when he’s going to quit, and I don’t think he does.” (Willie did not know it
, but Mickey had already made his decision.)

  “… Nothing’s worse than being the big man on a losing ballclub. They lose, and I know he’s thinking to himself, ‘They were expecting me to do something.’ ”

  In perhaps his most perceptive insight, Willie said, “I’d have to guess that he was always the biggest guy in his crowd.” And who would have known better than the biggest guy in his crowd?

  “More was always expected of him. A lot of the men in Mickey’s family, it seems, died at an early age. A man can’t help feeling some pressure from a thing like that.”

  According to Einstein, Mickey and Willie had a good time cutting up at the photo shoot. Willie made rabbit ears behind Mantle’s head; Mickey reciprocated with his middle finger. “Hey, man,” Mays said when they arrived at the studio, “I want to see what you wrote about me. What did you write about me?”

  Mickey replied, “I bet it’s better than what you wrote about me.”

  “Fact is,” Mantle admitted in one of his memoirs, “it’s hard for me to sit and listen to anything concerning money and finances. Today when my lawyer, Roy True, starts talking about a $100,000 contract, he’d better get it told in twenty minutes—thirty tops—or I’m out of his office and on my way to the golf course.”15

  And so, as Mickey Mantle approached his late thirties, his financial situation became desperate; he had learned nothing in all those years. Yogi Berra, despite his public image, was a shrewd, tough negotiator who could have given Mickey a great deal of advice in the subtle art of negotiation. In the same 1985 memoir, Mickey said, “The only regret I have is that in my day we were so dumb we didn’t know how to handle our financial dealings with the front office. They told me $32,500 was a lot of money, and I thought it was. When you go from making $35 a week in the mines to playing for the Yankees and within five years you’ve signed a $32,500 contract, it’s pretty hard to believe you’re worth more than that.”16

  Yes, but Mickey should have known better. The years should have taught him something. In some ways he had matured: he was no longer curmudgeonly to sportswriters, he did his best to accommodate autograph-seeking fans, and he went out of his way to offer advice and assurance to both teammates and young players on other teams. In June 1967, a story in Sport declared, “Willie Mays still is something special, still is one of the two most popular players in the game—Mickey Mantle is the other.”17 It was true. Willie and Mickey were baseball’s elder statesmen by that time. But in many ways—in their relations with women and with their children, in financial matters—they never grew up.

  As Mickey entered the 1968 season, it became apparent that after several years of unrelenting pain when batting from the left, he was now practically useless from that side of the plate, partially owing to the right shoulder injury he had sustained in the 1957 World Series, which had never quite healed. For his career, in fact, he batted nearly fifty points higher—.330 to .281—from the right side.a In addition to the chronic shoulder pain, nearly all the cartilage in both of his knees was gone; when he tried to run, he could feel the scraping of bone on bone.

  The 1968 All-Star Game marked the last time Mantle and Mays would shake hands in uniform. Forty-two years later, Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew recalled that looking at Mickey and Willie that day was “heartbreaking. It seemed that just a few years before these guys were, for me, a symbol of eternal youth—always smiling. Now they looked as if it took a big effort of energy just to crack a smile.”18 Mantle, a reserve on the AL roster, struck out in his only at-bat; Willie singled in the first inning off Luis Tiant, went to second on an errant pickoff throw, scooted to third on a wild pitch, and came home on a ground-ball double play by McCovey. It wasn’t much, but in a 1–0 victory it was enough to earn Mays his second All-Star MVP Award. (But that total is deceiving: the award wasn’t presented until 1962, by which time Mays by rights should have already had three All-Star MVP plaques.)

  By July 27, Mickey had dipped below his career batting average, .300, never to rise above it again. On July 29, he struck out four times in one game; on the way back to the dugout, teammates heard him mutter, “This is my last year.”

  On August 4, the Yankees, hoping to boost declining attendance, held yet another Mickey Mantle Day—officially, Mickey Mantle Banner Day. Mickey grinned wearily as a long procession of fans filed by with hand-painted Mantle appreciation banners, trying to win a handshake and season tickets. Five days later, Mickey lost his cool and cursed the home plate umpire for a strikeout call. It was just the seventh time since 1951 that he was thrown out of a game.

  The home runs were now few and far between. On September 19, two days after a powerful Detroit Tigers team clinched the AL pennant, Mickey hit a memorable home run—memorable because it enabled him to pass up Jimmie Foxx for third place on the all-time home run list and because it proved to be the most controversial of his career.b

  Denny McLain was the last pitcher in baseball to win thirty or more games—he would win thirty-one in 1968—as well as the only ballplayer to be convicted of extortion, racketeering, and drug possession.c He was also one pitch shy of being the last man to give up a home run to Mickey Mantle.

  In the eighth inning, when Mantle walked into the batter’s box, Detroit fans, realizing that this was probably their final chance to see Mickey, gave him a standing ovation. McLain stepped off the mound in a show of respect, giving Mickey the crowd’s full attention. Well on the way to winning his thirty-first victory, McLain decided to be gracious: stepping back onto the mound, he grooved Mantle a batting practice fastball. The astonished Mickey watched it go by, looked down at Tigers catcher Jim Price, and said, “What the fuck was that?”

  Price, knowing very well what McLain was trying to do, shrugged and said, “I dunno.” “Is he gonna do it again?” Mantle asked. Again Price shrugged. “I dunno.”

  Price started to walk out to the mound, but McLain waved him off and said, loud enough for both dugouts and many fans and Mantle himself to hear, “Just tell him to be ready.” But all Mickey could manage was a foul on the next one, and the count went 0-2. McLain gave him one more, same location, same speed, and Mickey drilled it on a line into the right-field seats. First baseman Norm Cash slapped him on the butt with his glove as he rounded first; as Mantle rounded second, characteristically with his head down, he yelled out to McLain, “Thank you thank you thank you!” All McLain could think was Jesus Christ, I’m going to get a letter from the commissioner. Just so he would not be misunderstood, on the next pitch McLain threw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball that put Joe Pepitone in the dirt.

  Sure enough, Commissioner William Eckert sent McLain a letter criticizing him for assaulting the integrity of the game and suggesting that an investigation would be forthcoming. However, no investigation took place. Apparently someone in Eckert’s office reminded him that the home run was hit by Mickey Mantle, the best-loved player in the league, and that any investigation would surely end in a popular denunciation of the commissioner. Two days later, Red Smith, writing in Women’s Wear Daily, summed up the entire affair: “When a guy has bought 534 drinks in the same saloon, he’s entitled to one on the house.”19 And on September 20, Mickey deprived McLain of the distinction of being the last pitcher to give up a Mantle home run when he laced number 536 off the Red Sox’s “Diamond Jim” Lonborg.

  In his final season, 1968, the thirty-six-year-old Mantle had his worst batting average ever, .237, but still hit 18 home runs and walked 106 times to finish with an OBP of .385. These numbers have to be considered against the backdrop of one of the worst periods for batters that baseball had ever seen. Carl Yastrzemski, at .301, was the American League’s only .300 hitter that year.

  Meanwhile, Mickey’s marriage had become a sham; he seldom saw Merlyn and spent even less time with their sons. Mickey Jr., who was fifteen the year Mickey retired and would one day schedule his dad’s business appointments and personal appearances, played Little League ball in the hope of getting his father’s attention. (After h
igh school, he made a halfhearted attempt at playing minor league ball.) In his teenage years, he scarcely knew Mickey Sr. at all. “My dad helped me some,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1985, “but you gotta remember he wasn’t around all that much when I was growing up.”20

  There was, however, one mitigating factor, and it was by no means a small one: a new generation had come of age in the wake of the Mickey Mantle legend, and these fans saw him in an entirely uncritical light.

  In 1968 they also began to see him in a nostalgic light. Crowds in other American League cities had once flocked to see their hometown heroes take a shot at bringing down the mighty Yankees; now, in their ruin, the Yankees remained gate attractions, almost entirely because of Mantle. Clearly, fans knew that the second half of the 1968 season was Mickey Mantle’s farewell tour.

  This time the crowds turned out to cheer him. The booing, the insults, the hazing over his draft status controversy were long forgotten.

  Though he had decided to retire, Mantle had several reasons for not yet making the announcement. For one, there was always the lingering hope that some miracle of medical science could restore a modicum of his former speed and take away the pain. Another was a reason that could not have been anticipated: Mickey Mantle made a gesture to help the players’ union.

  In his memoir A Whole Different Ball Game: The Inside Story of Baseball’s New Deal, Marvin Miller, the founder and first executive director of the Players Association, recalled: “After a discouraging discussion of the total lack of progress in the pension negotiations, they [members of the Players Association’s board of directors] decided to go ahead with the previously discussed policy of recommending that no player sign his 1969 contract until a benefit plan agreement had been reached. This was a strong move.” The board recessed so the player reps could contact their teammates for their approval.