The Last Boy (10 page)

Osteomyelitis can be chronic or acute; and it can recur without warning. Mantle never spoke of having a prior occurrence or a later one. But friends and family remember him as puny and sickly, with boils on his arms and legs. “Bad blood” was the common diagnosis. A nurse for the Tri-State Zinc and Lead Ore Producers Association, a local Florence Nightingale named Ruth Hulsman, inoculated children against typhoid fever, smallpox, and diphtheria and provided them with shoes and clothing. “One of her patients was Mickey Mantle who had osteomyelitis when he was nine,” wrote Velma Nieberding in
The History of Ottawa County
.

After Hulsman’s death, her daughter told the
Miami News Record
, “One of her biggest thrills was watching Mickey Mantle reach success since he was one of the children she took to Oklahoma City when he was just a boy for treatment of osteomyelitis. She would always watch his ball games and tell us, ‘That’s one of my children.’”

This account suggests the possibility of an earlier infection reactivated by the football injury. Certainly, that was Bill Mosely’s suspicion. “I felt like he’d had that all along and that it was holding him back,” Mosely said.

In June 1942, there was just enough penicillin in the United States for ten patients; two years later, 2.3 million doses were available to treat the wounded during the invasion of Normandy. The price dropped from $20 per dose in 1943 to 55 cents in 1946. But the patent for mass production of the drug was not granted until May 1948. It’s difficult to say which is more miraculous: that the drug was available in Picher, Oklahoma, in the fall of 1946 or that Mantle recovered from the disease after receiving approximately 7 percent of today’s standard dose. And Mantle wasn’t exactly
diligent about taking his medicine. His cousin Jim Richardson remembers “seein’ all those pills laid out there” on the ground outside the hospital room window.

According to the Ottawa County newspaper reprint,

It was during his third trip to the hospital that definite evidence of osteomyelitis was found, showing up in x-rays of the bone. This was Mantle’s longest stay in the hospital, beginning March 27, 1947 and ending April 10. The swelling of his leg became more prominent and the pain was more noticeable according to a hospital physician. During this stay an operation was performed on the injured leg with an abscess being opened and drainage started.

The procedure didn’t have a fancy name. “Scraped the bone,” Max Mantle said. It left an indentation in his shin large enough that “you could lay a pickle jar lid over it,” said Don Seger, a former assistant trainer for the Yankees. “And it wasn’t a pretty scar, either. It had a keloid effect.”

When they brought him home from the hospital, his mother had to carry him on her back to and from the outhouse. The infection and the mortification persisted. Lovell applied for public assistance in order to get the funds for him to stay at the Crippled Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City in late July and early August, where he received increased treatments with sulfa drugs and penicillin. “They gave him fifty shots of that stuff every thirty hours,” Max said.

He was in Children’s Hospital when Max’s father, Tunney, died of cancer at age thirty-four. Mantle was hospitalized in Picher for one more week at the end of November.

By the next baseball season, he began to look like a ballplayer. Probably it was just the natural order of things, a boy growing into a man, but the change in him was so immediate and so dramatic, it reinforced belief in a connection between the penicillin and the growth spurt that followed. “When he got that penicillin in him, boy, his body shot out and the muscles in his arms jumped out,” Mosely said.

In the sickly summer of 1947, Mantle was invited to join Barney Barnett’s Whiz Kids, a prestigious semi-pro team in the Ban Johnson Baseball League. He was so small that Barnett couldn’t find a uniform to fit him. Though he played in only four games (batting .056), Barnett saw something in him. Like Mutt, Barnett was a ground boss for Eagle-Picher. He called his boys “honey.”

Later he would talk Mantle up with the local birddogs and build him up with off-season jobs digging graves and hauling gravestones. He also got him a job as a lifeguard, which struck everyone as funny because Mantle couldn’t swim. In spite of his best efforts, when Mutt took Mickey to St. Louis for an early workout with the Browns, they took one look at him in uniform and sent him home. He didn’t even get on the field.

By the summer of 1948, Mantle had put on nearly forty pounds and four inches and had outgrown everything but his shyness. The Whiz Kids played in a small ballpark tucked into a hollow beside the Spring River. The water’s edge was a long poke from home plate—400 feet at least. One night Mantle hit three home runs—two right-handed and one left-handed—that headed straight for the water’s edge. The folks in the stands passed the hat in his honor—the $53 they collected briefly caused him to lose his amateur status.

That was the summer Tom Greenwade got his first look at him. Green-wade was a free-range baseball scout, though he didn’t dress the part. You wouldn’t catch old Tom in chaw-stained socks. Tall, lanky, and resolutely thin—the consequence of a bout with typhoid fever in his twenties—he cut a swath through the ball fields of Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma in a three-piece pinstripe suit and a crisp felt hat. Greenwade traveled the back roads in a shiny new Cadillac with a Babe Ruth jersey stowed in the trunk, a useful prop when trying to pry raw, young talent such as Tom Sturdivant, George Kell, Rex Barney, Bill Virdon, Jerry Lumpe, Hank Bauer, Ralph Terry, and Bobby Murcer away from the competition.
How would you like to play baseball in the biggest city in the world, son?

Greenwade had been a prospect once, with an arm live enough to stone rabbits for dinner. His pitching arm had gone dead one cold night in the Northeast Arkansas League when the temperature hovered in the thirties. After his playing days ended he went to work for a pipeline company and for the Internal Revenue Service; he studied law, managed in the minor leagues, raised tomatoes, voted Democratic, and befriended Harry Truman, who stopped by on occasion for a piece of pie at the kitchen table. He was hired by the Yankees in 1946 after scouting for the Browns and the Dodgers. He knew everyone in the territory, and everyone knew him. But Greenwade didn’t become a legend until he discovered Mickey Mantle.

It may be baseball’s most frequently and variously told tale. The way Bunch Greenwade heard it at his father’s knee, Tom was heading back home from a scouting trip in 1948 when he saw the bright lights Barney Barnett had installed for the Whiz Kids at their home field in Baxter Springs and stopped to catch a few innings. That first night, Bunch Greenwade said, “Dad went and talked to Mickey. He wanted to know how old he was. Mickey told him he was a junior. Dad told him just point-blank, ‘Well, I can’t really talk to you right now, you know, because I can’t ’til you’ve graduated from high school.’

“But he said, ‘I’m kind of interested in you, and I’ll be back sometime to watch you play. Would you be interested in ever playing ball for the Yankees?’

“Dad always kind of did that, to get their attention you might say.”

Mantle remembered the promise, but the way he heard it, Greenwade had come to scout the Whiz Kids’ third baseman Billy Johnson. Johnson never made it to the bigs and he never exchanged a word with Greenwade until 1955, when he was playing for an Air Force base team. Greenwade asked why he was pitching instead of playing the infield. “Someone’s got to do it,” he replied.

In another account sanctioned by local cognoscenti, Johnny Sturm, the manager of the Yankees’ Joplin farm team, had to stoke Greenwade’s flagging interest in Mantle by threatening to go over his head to the front office. Bunch Greenwade says his father was just playing possum. “Dad went back four different times, and he did it as secretly as possible, telling Mutt on the Q.T., ‘I want to watch Mickey play some. He might, possibly, someday, turn into something.’

“And then he would come home and worry.”

He had reason to be discreet: rules prevented scouts from talking to underage prospects; also, he didn’t want to drive up Mantle’s price by eliciting interest from the competition.

The night before Mantle was to graduate, Greenwade couldn’t sleep. “He sat up all night—he said he smoked cigarettes and drank coffee all night long,” his son said. “And he just knew that when he got to Commerce there were going to be at least three or four other scouts there trying to sign him. He was worried about the Cardinals because he knew that Mickey and his dad were big Cardinals fans.”

The next morning Greenwade went to principal A. B. Baker for help. Baker had already furthered the Yankees’ cause by telling the Indians’ scout Hugh Alexander that the school had no baseball team, that Mantle had been injured playing football and that he had arthritis in his legs. The principal’s motivation was unclear, but Alexander tossed the piece of paper with Mantle’s name away when he got back to his car. He would remember forever the scrap of paper carried away on the breeze.

The principal directed Mutt and the new Commerce baseball coach, Johnny Lingo, to see the superintendent of schools about getting Mantle excused from that evening’s commencement exercises. The biggest night in his brief academic career paled in importance to the Whiz Kids’ big game in Coffeyville, Kansas. Whatever the adult petitioners said, it was persuasive. Lingo described Mantle’s ad hoc graduation ceremony in a 1953 article by Milton Gross for
SPORT
magazine: “Albert Stewart, our superintendent of schools…came Friday and he handed Mickey his diploma in advance and told him he was graduated.”

The scholar was given no say in the decision. But he did get a new pair of baseball spikes. Because he had graduated, he had to turn in his school-issued equipment. Lingo told his wife, Charlene, “I ended up buying him a pair of cleats so he could play that night.”

That evening in Coffeyville, Mantle went 3 for 4 with two home runs, one from each side of the plate. Greenwade, who later claimed he didn’t
know Mantle was a switch-hitter until that game, played down his talents when he spoke to Mutt.
Marginal prospect. Might make it, might not. Kind of small. Not a major league shortstop
. Imagine how galling it must have been every time Mantle heard Greenwade later boast, “The first time I saw Mantle, I knew how Paul Krichell felt when he first saw Lou Gehrig.”

Greenwade told the Mantles he had an appointment to see Jim Baumer, another highly touted shortstop, the next evening but promised to return to see Mantle in Baxter Springs on Sunday night. Heavy weather was expected and it arrived as promised, along with Greenwade, who pulled his car onto the grass behind home plate. When the heavens opened up, the haggling over Mantle’s future began in earnest in Green-wade’s Cadillac. Whiz Kid Wylie Pitts swears that lightning struck the light stanchions—bulbs popping and fizzing and showering the field with sparks—the moment Mantle became a Yankee. “Just like
The Natural
,” he said.

Negotiations proceeded in the dark. Greenwade offered less than what Mantle could make working in the mines and playing semi-pro ball. Mutt objected. The scout affected some math on the back of an envelope and added a sweetener: “a bonus of $1150 to be paid by the Independence club as follows: $400 upon approval of contract and the remainder $750 payable on June 30th, 1949 if player retained by Independence or any assignee club.”

The salary for the remainder of the 1949 season was $140 a month. It was New York’s biggest steal since Peter Minuit paid the Indians $24 for the island of Manhattan. Mantle accepted, he later told Leonard Schecter of the
New York Post
, because, “I didn’t think anybody else wanted me.”

It’s not as if bonus money was unavailable; baseball didn’t impose limits on signing bonuses until 1955. Kal Segrist, who was signed by the Yankees in 1951 with a $50,000 bonus, played in twenty major league games. Jim Baumer received a $25,000 bonus from the Chicago White Sox and played eight games. But Greenwade spent the Yankees’ money carefully. He gave pitcher Ralph Terry a $2,000 bonus in 1953. “What gripes you about those scouts in those days is they sign a guy out of poverty and he’d make the big leagues and then they’d brag about how cheap they got you,” Terry said.

The Yankees sent Mantle to Independence, Missouri, a 150-mile round trip from home. Mutt wanted him close by—to eyeball him and to keep an eye on him. In June 1949, Mutt delivered him to a boardinghouse at 405 South Tenth Street in Independence, where he shared a double bed with his roommate, Bob Mallon. Mutt unloaded his luggage, spoke earnestly to his son, telling him to mind manager Harry Craft and to be a team player, and left.

The 1949 roster for the Independence Yankees of the Class D Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri (KOM) League was a melting pot of rawboned boys and veteran ballast, married men and teenagers, prospects and has-beens. The lights were bad, the pitchers threw hard, and Mickey Mantle was just another ballplayer. He answered to his given name, Mickey Charles, and addressed his elders as “sir” or “mister.” Bunny Mick, a Yankee instructor, thought, “He was Jack Armstrong.”

To his teammates, he was a fun-loving, prank-playing teenager whose idea of a good time was hanging boogers from the ceiling of a friend’s car. Dingleberries featured prominently in his comic patter. He liked to go frogging at night with Joe “Red” Crowder, another country boy with a taste for the local delicacy; one held a flashlight to blind the unsuspecting amphibians while the other grabbed dinner. Mantle also liked to spy on Crowder and his wife, who lived in the next apartment. “Mick would say, ‘Bob, come here, they’re doin’ it,’” Mallon said. “You’d hear the bed squeak. We’d get in the closet and listen.”

He threw his knuckleball relentlessly if not well. Teammates quit warming up with him. First basemen dreaded being on the other end of his strong but errant throws. “I’m a married man!” cried Cromer Smotherman in 1950.

Mantle proved a generous shortstop, making more than 100 errors in the 184 games he played in two years in the minors.
Hit it to Mantle and run like hell
was the opposing strategy. In 1949, he didn’t show much power either, hitting only seven home runs. Overmatched by pitching and
by homesickness, he pleaded with his childhood pal Nick Ferguson to try out for the team. “He probably would have came home right then if Mutt hadn’t insisted that he stay,” Ferguson said.