Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  There’s another area concerning speed that Mantle shows up well in: GIDP, or grounded into double plays. Researcher Neil Munro did some eye-opening work for Bill James on the subject of great hitters and their GIDP totals; let’s collect those numbers in a chart to compare Mantle with other Hall of Famers:

  That’s quite a variety of players, including great all-around hitters, sluggers, and base stealers, and it spans more than six decades. Ted Williams, considered by many to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, played in 109 fewer games than Mantle but hit into 84 more double plays. Luis Aparicio, who is in the Hall of Fame precisely because of his speed, hit into 71 more double plays in 198 more games. Mantle drew a lot of criticism from writers who worshiped Joe DiMaggio because Mickey struck out far more often. But in 1,000 fewer games, DiMaggio hit into 17 more double plays than Mantle—and we don’t even have the GIDP information for the first three years of DiMaggio’s career.

  And so, neither at bat nor on the bases can I make an objective case for Willie over Mickey. Perhaps Mays’s best chance is in the outfield. There are, after all, many people who still regard Willie Mays as the best defensive center fielder in baseball history. There were a couple of writers who thought Mantle covered as much ground as Mays, but none I know of who thought that in their prime Mantle was better or had as good an arm as Mays—though everyone acknowledges that Mantle had an excellent throwing arm. But what exactly was the difference between them in terms of value? For what it’s worth, Mantle’s career fielding average was a point higher than Mays’s, but most baseball experts don’t put much stock in fielding average. Throwing assists are also difficult to figure, if only because outfielders with truly great arms don’t get challenged very often. In 1967, his sixth full season, Roberto Clemente gunned down 27 runners from right field; he never had more than 19 assists in the rest of his career. Al Kaline, in his fifth full season, 1958, had 23; he never had more than 14 again. Joe DiMaggio had 20 or more in his first three seasons, then never topped 16 again. It’s a similar story with Mays. In 1955, his second season back from the Army, he had a career-high 23 assists; for the rest of his career, he topped 14 only once. Either these great players’ arms got weaker as they matured, or the runners wised up. The problem is that there’s no way to measure the runs prevented by an outfielder’s reputation.

  Mantle, too, may have developed an early reputation with his arm. In 1955 he had 20 assists; he never had more than 11 in any other season. For their careers, Mays averaged 10.6 assists per 154 games, while Mantle averaged 9.0. The difference between them might amount to a run per season.

  What, then, of range in the outfield? For his career, Mays averaged 2.56 fly balls per game, while Mantle averaged 2.26. That means, roughly, that Mays got to about one fly every three-odd games that Mantle didn’t get to. Both played in spacious center-field areas with plenty of room to move. Could the difference between them be accounted for by the Yankees’ pitching staff allowing fewer fly balls? Yankee pitchers almost always struck out more batters than Giant pitchers, and Casey Stengel, you may recall, always had a fondness for selecting pitchers who could “throw ground balls.” Maybe the other Yankee outfielders had more range than the other Giant outfielders and intruded upon Mantle’s territory more and took away a fly ball or so every three or four games. I don’t really think so. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe the difference represents anything other than Willie Mays being better—and probably, at their respective peaks, just a little better—at pulling down fly balls than Mickey Mantle.

  What does that mean in terms of runs prevented? Bill James in his Mantle-Mays comparison thought the difference between Mantle and Mays in the outfield to be worth five or six runs a year. I’m content to leave it at that.

  But even if, for the sake of argument, you allow Willie the value of, say, another five runs on the field, that’s not going to make up the difference between Mantle and Mays as hitters. The only conclusion I can come up with is that all the objective evidence points to Mickey Mantle, in his prime, being a better ballplayer than Willie Mays in his prime. I may not have convinced anyone else, but at least, after all these years, there’s no doubt in my own mind. Thank God my father isn’t alive to read this.

  Am I leaving something out? Should I consider all the qualities lumped together under the heading of “intangibles”? Willie Mays’s attitude toward the game was infectious and inspiring, while Mantle’s, we know, was childish and temperamental, at least until Roger Maris’s arrival in 1960 took some of the focus off him. But if you take in Mantle’s prime seasons—starting in his rookie year of 1951 and going through 1964—the Yankees won pennants in ’51, ’52, ’53, ’55, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’63, and ’64. And one of the years they didn’t win, 1954, they had their best regular-season record under Casey Stengel, winning 103 games. They won the World Series in ’51, ’52, ’53, ’56, ’58, ’61, and ’62—Mantle had more championship rings at a comparable age than Michael Jordan. Mays’s Giants won pennants only in ’51, ’54, and ’62, and went to the playoffs in ’72. (Willie also put in a stint for the Mets in their pennant drive in ’73.) Yes, I know, Mantle’s Yankees were a better team than Mays’s Giants. But when you win twelve pennants in fourteen years, how can you really say a guy’s attitude is hurting his team? To hear Mickey’s teammates in those years is to come away with the opposite impression. Practically to a man, they say that Mickey’s grit and determination to play while in pain inspired them.

  The effects of Mantle’s shoulder injury are usually overlooked by analysts. Let’s do a quick review. Mantle was always better hitting from the right side than from the left. But in 1956, when he hit his peak, he became one of the best left-handed hitters in baseball, batting .342 (with a .375 BA right-handed). In 1957 he was still among the best lefties in the league at .339 (with an overall .365 BA, the highest of his career and an awesome .425 from the right side of the plate). After 1957, though, something changed: in 1958 Mickey hit .377 right-handed and just .282 left-handed. In seven of his eleven subsequent seasons, he batted higher as a righty than a lefty—in most of them substantially better, the righty Mantle out-hitting the lefty Mantle by 95 points in 1958, 98 points in 1960, 80 points in 1961, 52 points in 1963, 83 points in 1964, and 81 in 1967. From 1958 through the end of his career, Mickey batted 3,145 times from the left side and 1,557 from the right; his righty self out-hit his lefty self by nearly 50 points.

  From 1958 through 1968, if Mickey had been able to hit left-handed with anything like the consistency he showed in 1956 and 1957, I think there’s little doubt that he would not only have finished over .300 for his career but possibly at .310 or better, with similar boosts in other batting stats. Would 600 career home runs have then been out of reach? I don’t think so.

  But here’s a really intriguing thought: What if by, say, 1959 or even 1960, Mickey Mantle had quit switch-hitting altogether? What if he had decided to just bat right-handed against all pitching? Suppose, for the sake of argument, he hit 25 points worse against right-handed pitchers than left-handed pitchers? He would still have been a healthy 25 points better than his left-handed self. What prevented him from doing so? It’s hard to believe that somewhere in Mickey’s psyche Mutt Mantle wasn’t looking over his shoulder, reminding him to do it the way he was taught.

  No matter what I write here, no matter what anyone writes, Mantle’s career will always be perceived in terms of what might have been—and there’s no doubt in my mind that if he had not contracted osteomyelitis after football practice back in Commerce, had he not stepped on the drain in the 1951 World Series chasing Willie Mays’s fly ball, and if he had not injured his shoulder in the 1958 World Series, Mickey Mantle would have been the greatest player ever. Here are some epitaphs about Mantle I saved from newspapers: “could have been one of the truly greats,” “never quite lived up to his enormous potential,” “squandered so much of his enormous talent.” Well, he did squander a lot of his talent.

 
; But what about what Mickey did do? We spent so much of Mantle’s career judging him from Casey Stengel’s perception as the moody, self-destructive phenom who never mastered his demons, and we spent much of the rest of Mantle’s life listening to a near-crippled alcoholic lament over and over about what he might have been able to accomplish. For an entire generation of fans and sportswriters who saw their own boyhood fantasies reflected in Mantle’s career and their worst nightmares fulfilled by his after-baseball life, Mantle’s decline became the dominant part of the story.

  It’s time to dispel this myth. Mickey Mantle played more games in a Yankee uniform than any other player in the history of baseball’s greatest team before Derek Jeter, more than Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, or Berra. He played more games than Ted Williams. Potential? He was a hitter with a terrific batting eye—as evidenced by one of the top twelve on-base percentages in this century, a better OBP than that of Stan Musial (seven batting titles), Wade Boggs (five), or Tony Gwynn (eight)—spectacular power, blinding speed, and superb defensive ability. He could do things none of his contemporaries could do—not Duke Snider, not Hank Aaron, not Ted Williams. He could switch-hit for high average and power, and he could bunt from either side of the plate, and no power hitter in the game’s history was harder to catch in a double play. He was an All-Star center fielder for eleven straight seasons, he won three MVP Awards and should have won several more, and he had seven championship rings. His life is a cautionary tale on the dangers of success and excess to be sure, but as a player he has a right to be remembered not for what he might have been but for what he was.

  I’m not going to make a proper argument about whether Mickey or Willie was better than Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, or the pre-Balco Barry Bonds. But I do believe that if Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays—in their prime—lined up together to compete against all other players in the record books at the same age and under exactly the same conditions, it would be obvious that they are the two greatest players in the history of the game.

  Appendix B

  Mickey and Willie Ranked by Total

  Player Rating and Win Shares

  Over the last few decades, several advanced statistics have been invented that seek to boil all of a ballplayer’s contributions to his team down to a single, easily compared number. I couldn’t resist seeing how Mickey and Willie stack up according to two of the best-known such measures, Total Player Rating and Win Shares.

  Total Player Rating, developed by sabermetrician Pete Palmer, is defined in Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball as “the sum of a player’s Adjusted Batting Runs, Fielding Runs, and Base Stealing Runs minus his positional adjustment, all divided by the Runs Per Win factor for that year.”

  This calls for yet more explanation. Adjusted statistics, explains the “Glossary of Statistical Terms” in the Baseball Encyclopedia, “means that the statistic has been normalized to league average and adjusted for home park factor.”

  Fielding runs are defined as “the Linear Weights measure of runs saved beyond what a league-average player at that position might have saved.… This stat is calculated to take account of the particular demands of the different positions”—meaning that center fielders such as Mantle and Mays are rated as more valuable than the corner outfielders because they must cover more territory.

  Positional adjustment is “a key factor in the Total Player Rating that addresses the relative worth to a ball club of the defensive positions. A man who bats .270, hits 25 homers, and drives in 80 runs may be an average performer in left field, no matter how good his glove; but credit those batting stats to a shortstop or second baseman and you have a star, because the defensive demands of the position are so much greater.” And “normally center fielders need more fielding skill and therefore do not hit as well as left and right fielders.” Which means that Willie and Mickey were rated as all the more valuable for their batting and base-running contributions because they were brilliant defensive players.

  A detailed explanation of Total Player Rating can be found on the website of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

  I begin with 1954 because it’s the first year that both Mantle and Mays played full seasons. I make the comparison only until 1964, Mickey’s last great season, though Total Baseball does not rank him among the AL’s top five players for 1963 and 1964 because he played too few games. (Though in 1963 he performed brilliantly for the 65 games that he did play, with a .441 on-base percentage and .622 slugging percentage, both numbers considerably higher than Willie’s .384 and .582.)

  NOTE: The number in parentheses indicates league ranking.

  * tied for first with Henry Aaron

  It should be noted that Mays was number one in the NL in Total Player Rating in 1965 at 7.5 and number four the following season at 4.5.

  Before we talk about these Total Player Rating numbers, let’s look at our other measure, Win Shares.

  Win Shares was developed by Bill James. It attempts to make the same “total” measurement of a player’s worth, but from the perspective of the wins the player contributed to his team that season. In the introduction to his 2002 book, James wrote, “What is a Win Share? Well, are you familiar with the concept of Runs Created? Runs Created is any formula by which we take the singles, doubles, triples, walks, etc. for each hitter and estimate from that how many runs the player has created.

  “Win Shares are, in essence, Wins Created … or actually, thirds of a Win Created. Win Shares takes the concept of Runs Created and moves it one step further, from runs to wins. This makes it different in essentially two ways. First, it removes illusions of context, putting a hitter from Yankee Stadium on equal footing with a hitter from Colorado, and putting a hitter from 1968 on equal footing with a hitter from 2000. Second, the Win Shares system attempts to state the contributions of pitchers and of fielders in the same forum as those of hitters.”

  Readers searching for a more detailed explanation of James’s method are urged to consult his book or go to his website, http://www.billjamesonline.com/.

  * tied for first with Nellie Fox

  † tied for first with Eddie Matthews

  Mays, by the way, was the NL’s number-one player in Win Shares in 1965, with 43, and in 1966, with 37.

  Two things: Willie’s relatively lower standing in the National League compared to Mickey’s in the American League is due in large part to his having to compete against better players—Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson.

  Second, Willie is number one in Total Player Rating an amazing nine times from 1954 through 1964; in Win Shares he’s in the top spot five times (tied for first place in two of them). That’s good enough for me: Willie Mays should have been the league’s MVP—or co-MVP—five times from 1954 to 1964. And he should also have been MVP in 1965 and 1966.

  Mickey finished number one in Total Player Rating seven times from 1954 to 1964. He finished number one in Win Shares an astounding ten times in eleven seasons; the only season he didn’t finish first was 1963, when injuries held him to 65 games—and the way he was playing in 1963, he would almost certainly have been the best in that season too.

  Again, that’s good enough for me. Mickey Mantle should have had at least seven Most Valuable Player Awards.

  From 1954 through 1966, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle both should have been MVP seven times.

  Notes

  Introduction: My First Game Was Better Than Yours

  1. Castro, Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son, p. ix.

  2. Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 693.

  3. The Definitive Story of Mickey Mantle (DVD), HBO Sports, 2005.

  4. Hano, Willie Mays, p. 12.

  Chapter 1: Fathers and Sons

  1. Robinson, I Never Had It Made, p. 172.

  2. Mays and Einstein, Born to Play Ball, p. 22.

  3. Piper Davis, interview with the author, 1987.

  4. Einstein, Willie’s Time, p. 12.

  5. Ibid., p. 13.


  6. Ibid., p. 12.

  7. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, p. 13.

  8. Mays and Sahadi, Say Hey, p. 19.

  9. Ibid., p. 19.

  10. Swearingen, A Great Teammate, p. 1.

  11. Hano, Willie Mays, p. 36.

  12. Mantle and Gluck, The Mick, p. 9.

  13. Ibid., p. 7.

  14. Ibid., p. 3.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Hall, Mickey Mantle: Before the Glory, p. 52.

  17. Mays, My Life In and Out of Baseball, p. 43.

  Chapter 2: Bred to Play Ball

  1. Mays, My Life In and Out of Baseball, p. 51.

  2. Hano, Willie Mays, p. 21.

  3. Ibid., p. 38.

  4. Mantle and Gluck, The Mick, p. 8.

  5. Hank Bauer, interview with the author, 2006.

  6. Mays, My Life In and Out of Baseball, p. 40.

  7. Mantle, Herskowitz, et al., A Hero All His Life, p. 117.

  8. Mantle and Gluck, The Mick, p. 37.

  9. Falkner, The Last Hero, p. 28.

  10. Mantle and Gluck, The Mick, p. 22.

  11. Falkner, The Last Hero, p. 25.

  12. Mantle, Herskowitz, et al., A Hero All His Life, p. 95.

  13. Mantle and Gluck, The Mick, p. 15.

  14. Ibid., p. 50.

  15. Ibid., p. 52.

  16. Mays and Sahadi, Say Hey, p. 173.

  17. Barra, Rickwood Field, p. 136.

  18. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, p. 36.

  19. Sahadi, Say Hey, p. 19.