The Last Boy (17 page)

Martin gave permission to Mantle’s worst instincts, not that they needed a lot of encouragement. Merlyn was left alone with an infant who was as allergic to milk as her husband was to domesticity. “All I saw of the two of them that winter was their backs going out the door,” she wrote in
A Hero All His Life
. “If they did all the hunting and fishing they claimed they were doing, the fish and quail population of Oklahoma and Missouri took a fearful beating.”

Elbow bending was their preferred sport. One off-season, the wise proprietress of Billie’s bar bogarted the keys to their car when the miscreants stopped to say goodbye on their way to spring training. She declined their IOU and the promise to send the money as soon as they got to spring training. “She said, ‘When you do, I’ll send you the keys,’” recalled preacher Jerry VonMoss. “They had to call Casey Stengel and he had to promise to wire the money. She still wouldn’t give ’em the keys until she got the money, and Western Union was in Miami, four miles away.”

Not all their scrapes were as easily resolved. Angie Greenwade, Tom’s daughter, recalled being awakened by the telephone in the early hours one winter morning. “This sheriff called to say that Mickey and Billy had been in a fight in a bar,” she said. “This sheriff had them in jail. He wanted to know what to do. Dad told him to keep them there. He got in his car, and away he went to get them out of jail.’”

They’d drive around the countryside in Mantle’s convertible with the top down, the country music turned up high, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the dashboard. “They’d shoot wildlife from the car, which we called ‘hot shooting,’” recalled Picher native Frank Wood. “The game ranger arrested them. He hauled them into the Ottawa County Jail. The sheriff let Mick go. But he wasn’t gonna let Billy Martin go free. Put him in the pokey for three days!”

On one such outing that winter, Mantle stepped into an abandoned prospecting hole. “That’s how he twisted his daggum knee,” said Wood, who got the story from his father. “Lots of times they’d plug them up and grass would grow up on it. If you had a hunting dog, you had to be careful they didn’t fall in.”

When the telephone rang at Dan Yancey’s Springfield home in early February 1954, his children immediately noted his agitation. His prize patient had developed a Baker’s cyst behind his right knee, a swollen, fluid-filled bulge that restricted his motion and set back his recovery. “The only time we ever saw Father get upset with a patient was Mickey Mantle,” said his daughter Alice Yancey.

Youngman flew Mantle and Cousin Max back to Springfield on his private plane. When he examined Mantle, Frank Sundstrom was as appalled as Yancey. “We learned he had been quail hunting. We took him back to the operating room, turned him over, and removed his Baker’s cyst.”

The surgery was performed on February 4, 1954, three weeks before the start of spring training. The procedure took thirty-five minutes. By the end of it, Yancey had recovered his good humor. He assured reporters that Mantle would run as fast as ever and would be able to report to camp on time.

Mantle had yet to sign his 1954 contract. On February 27, he agreed to a one-year deal for $21,000, ending a brief headline-making holdout, which was common in the days before unionizing came to the national pastime. A holdout was a player’s only leverage. But this did not improve his relationship with the Yankee higher-ups, who announced that Green-wade would be “put in charge of Mantle until he reported for training.” No more bird dogs or outings with Billy Martin.

Greenwade took Mantle home to his house in Willard, Missouri,
where his daughter, Angie, proudly relinquished her upstairs bedroom to The Mick. Sportswriters in need of copy for season previews poked and prodded. “Is He Really
Tree
-mendous?” one bold-faced headline inquired. “Casey Stengel has said he is but Mickey is
still
a problem.”

The accompanying story made much of the Famous Bubble Gum Incident of 1953, when Mantle was photographed blowing boyish bubbles in center field, not the preferred image of baseball’s most sober-minded franchise. (It was a lucrative misdemeanor. He got a $1,500 endorsement deal.)

When he arrived in St. Petersburg on March 2, he was unable to straighten his leg. He spent more time in Gaynor’s office than in the batting cage, thwarting Stengel’s plan to tutor him in the art of bunting. The Ol’ Perfessor wanted to teach him “a butcher boy swing,” hitting down on the ball to minimize fly balls and strikeouts. While Mantle limped, Stengel fumed. When he failed to show up for scheduled bunting sessions with Frank Crosetti, Stengel was livid. Later, in an interview with Bil Gilbert of
Sports Illustrated
, Mantle conceded, “I never learned anything.”

Even Martin—
the fresh kid
, in Stengelese—listened and learned. Stengel saw himself in Martin, who made the most of his limited ability with competitive ire and fire. He saw in Mantle the player he had wanted to be. To squander such a surfeit of ability was unthinkable, irresponsible, maddening.
What’s the good of telling him what to do? No matter what you tell him, he does what he wants
. This angry, frustrated refrain became the subtext of managerial disappointment.

In 1954, Stengel was still bearing the scars of derision that had greeted his appointment as Yankee manager in 1949. Five consecutive pennants, one more than the sainted Joe McCarthy and Stengel’s mentor John McGraw, had earned him the right to be taken seriously, he thought. Instead, he was greeted with this from Dan Daniel in S
PORT
magazine: “Is Stengel GREAT—Or Is He Lucky?” A sixth straight pennant would put that question to rest and elevate him to the Mount Rushmore of New York baseball managers.

For that, he needed a whole Mickey Mantle. Every torn muscle, every missed opportunity and game was a rebuke to Stengel’s legacy. He couldn’t see past his own ambition. “He couldn’t see past the fact that he was hurt,” said Robert W. Creamer, author of the definitive Stengel biography.

Stengel was an emissary from the old school; Mantle was the face of postwar America. Yet there was fondness between them and more shared experience than it appeared. They came from the same part of the world, and when Stengel had to send him to the minors in 1951, it was to the team he had signed with out of high school, the Kansas City Blues. Like Mantle, Stengel was a mischievous, rambunctious boy, shy in company, hot-tempered on occasion, and an indifferent academic. But unlike Mantle, Stengel was a serious and dedicated student of the game. He had played for the storied McGraw for three seasons, even living with him one year. He had watched McGraw’s careful, protective grooming of Mel Ott, nurturing an unrealized talent to greatness. The Ol’ Perfessor figured he knew how to raise himself a star.

But Mantle was unwilling. “I don’t think he knew what the definition of constructive criticism might be, because I don’t think he’d ever listen to it,” said his brother, Larry, the high school football coach. “Mickey developed this defensive mechanism to shut people out; he didn’t listen to criticism. I think his short temper was probably a defensive mechanism. He didn’t achieve everything, and he didn’t wanna hear people say things. Now, he mighta listened to it from Daddy, but I can’t imagine anybody else, maybe Casey when he was young.”

Mantle never openly defied Stengel’s instruction; he simply ignored it. Like a recalcitrant teenager, he could be sullen and volatile. He took out his frustrations on inanimate objects and turned his anger on himself. “Here,” Stengel said, handing him a bat after one dugout tantrum. “Why don’t you bang yourself on the head with this.”

Born in 1890, Stengel was Grandpa Charlie’s contemporary, but he wasn’t paternal. The nurturing, cuddly Stengel was a sportswriters’ invention. He coddled writers, not players. He spoke to Jerry Coleman only twice in nine years. The first time he said, “Nice work.” The second time, after hearing Coleman call himself “horseshit,” Stengel growled, “No, you’re not.”

“Casey was not a very pleasant guy to play for,” Coleman said. “He was very tough, very hard-nosed. He didn’t care if your name was Smith or DiMaggio. His goal was singular—winning the pennant. Who did it for him were the people who could play best that day. You look: the name’s on the board, you play. Name wasn’t on the board, you didn’t
play. No explanation, no nothing. He never called anyone into the office and said, ‘I’m not going to do this because of this.’ He did it. That’s harsh treatment for players who expect more.”

Mantle often said that Stengel was like a “second father to me.” If so, Creamer says, he was an angry father and Mantle was a stubborn son. Ryne Duren, the myopic flamethrower who became a Yankee when Martin was banished to Kansas City in 1957, saw clearly what was lacking in Mantle’s relationship with Stengel: “Casey should have been the father image rather than what he was, and he resented him for it.
Why can’t you treat me decently instead of being such an old bastard?
I think Casey took advantage of his vulnerability. Casey didn’t see the little boy in him that needed a father.”

Bunny Mick, a longtime Stengel lieutenant, sighed, thinking what might have been “if he had just taken that kid in his arms.”

With Mutt gone and Stengel stubbornly remote, Greenwade was deputized in loco parentis by the front office. But their relationship was infused with resentment Mantle harbored from being “outslickered” when he signed with the Yankees. “From early on Dad tried so hard to fill in for Mutt, tell Mickey the safe way to live and how to take care of his body,” Angie Greenwade said. “And Mickey didn’t take advice. He really, truly thought he was invincible, I suppose. Dad would say, ‘Well, he’s just going to end up in terrible shape or come to no good.’”

When Billy Martin was recalled by the Army midway through spring training in 1954, the Yankee wise men seized the opportunity to introduce a stabilizing influence—Bill Dickey informed Coleman that he had a new roommate. “I didn’t drink, so they put me together with him to steady him,” said Coleman, who found his new roomie to be shy, quiet, boyishly unassuming—delightful. On road trips, Mantle carried Coleman’s luggage up from the lobby. During spring training, they took turns driving to the ballpark. “One day I look out the window. It’s twenty of nine. He’s there in his car. I said, ‘Mickey, why didn’t you honk the horn?’ He said, ‘I didn’t want to bother you.’”

Mantle had been sitting outside for twenty minutes.

The Yankees tried surrounding him with family, putting three more Mantles in pinstripes. They signed his cousin Max to a minor league contract in March 1954 and invited the twins, Ray and Roy, to take batting
practice at Yankee Stadium, fueling the fleeting prospect of an all-Mantle outfield. Mantle always said they were better natural athletes. But they lacked his drive and his luck in receiving the fierce attentions of their father.

It was worth the gamble and the small financial investment. The twins were assigned to the Yankees’ Class D team in the Sooner State League. Greenwade drove them to McAlester, Oklahoma, in a black Cadillac just like the one in which he had signed their big brother.

Max was released a month before the twins arrived. They stuck around long enough to play in a Florida instructional league the following spring. Ray was drafted into the Army and never played again after he was discharged. Roy suffered a career-ending injury running out a base hit.

The twins’ visit to New York proved to be the highlight of Mantle’s year. At the end of April 1954, he was batting .175. In June, he was still unable to play both games of a doubleheader. When Stengel blew out the candles on his birthday cake, celebrating his sixty-fourth birthday on July 30, he bravely declared that he should be fired if the Yankees failed to win the pennant.

A month later, with his team losing ground to the Indians and the season growing short, reporters noticed a newly published book on his desk. Its title:
The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant
, a picaresque fantasy in which a Mantle look-alike unable to resist temptation makes a pact with the Devil to bring down the Yanks.

It was a gift, Stengel said. Hadn’t read it. Wasn’t going to.

“It’s fiction,” he growled.

On the last day of his fourth major league season, Mantle played the first meaningless game of his career. One hundred and three wins, four more than they had needed to win the 1953 pennant, and the Yankees still finished eight games behind the Cleveland Indians—“them plumbers,” in Stengel’s derisive lexicon.

He fixed the blame on Mantle’s slowness to heal from his off-season knee surgeries and his knuckleheaded refusal to act like an adult. “He’s gotta change a lot,” Stengel declared. “He’s gotta change his attitude and stop sulking and doing things he’s told not to do. He’ll have to grow up and become the great player he should be when he reports next spring.”

Perhaps that’s why he sent Mantle out to play his first and last complete game at shortstop, the position of his callow youth. Around the horn beside him, Stengel stationed an unlikely second baseman, Moose Skowron, and an improbable third baseman, Yogi Berra. “My tape measure
lineup,” Stengel called it. He did not point out that Mantle had hit only nine home runs since the All-Star break.

That sleepy Sunday was a slow news day in a year of momentous events: Joe DiMaggio married and divorced Marilyn Monroe; the Miss America pageant went prime time; Joseph McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate; the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
; and for the first time in six years, the Yankees failed to win the American League pennant.

The also-rans in the Bronx were knocked off the back page by a better story. Willie Mays had returned from two years in the Army to lead the Giants to the National League pennant and to complete the kingly triumvirate of New York center fielders—Willie, Mickey, and The Duke.

The coincidental ascendancy of Mays, Mantle, and Snider announced a golden era in baseball and ratified New York’s sense of itself as the center of things. “There was no other time,” said Yankees infielder Andy Carey. “No other ten years—Mays, Mantle, and Snider.”

There was no better time to be a baseball fan or a boy growing up in New York. Pete Cava, who still calls himself “a Mickey guy,” argued ardently on behalf of The Mick every day in study hall at New Dorp High School on Staten Island. His pals, Glenn Cafaro and Greg Bischoff, were equally partisan about Willie and The Duke. Bischoff spilled blood on Snider’s behalf, in a ritual card burial with his Mickey-loving best friend. “It was an alignment of planets,” said Cava. “If Homer is alive, Ajax is playing in the Bronx, Ulysses is in center field for the Giants, and Achilles is defending the field in Brooklyn.”

When the season opened, The Duke was baseball’s sure thing (the National League leader in runs and slugging percentage in 1953, when he tied with Eddie Matthews, at .627). Mantle’s right knee made him almost as much of a question mark as the Giants’ returning GI. If his unrealized potential was a vexation, Mays was a revelation—speed, grace,
and p
ower. When last seen in a major league uniform, nine days before reporting to the Whitehall Induction Center in May 1952, Mays was batting .236. Gladys Gooding, the organist at Ebbets Field, serenaded him after the game with her rendition of “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”

In his absence, Snider and Mantle dominated the footlights, starring opposite each other in the 1952 and 1953 World Series (Duke’s
Dodgers played the role of perennial foil). Oracles had confidently predicted another Yankee-Dodger World Series in 1954. So much for oracles.

Mantle rebounded from a desultory spring and was named the starting center fielder for the American League in the All-Star Game; Snider was his opposite. (Mays and his thirty-one home runs be damned.) But in the second half of the season, he and the Giants asserted themselves, overtaking the Dodgers to clinch the pennant on September 21.

By then, Stengel had grown irritable with Mantle’s imperfections. On September 10 in Chicago, Mantle went 0 for 4 and struck out twice, his ninety-third and ninety-fourth strikeouts of the season. His batting average fell below .300. Worse, he failed to run out a ground ball.

Casey Raps Loafing Mantle—
New York Post

Casey Stengel Incensed at Mickey Mantle’s Lack of Hustle

He bawled out the star on the bench last night when Mick failed to run out a grounder. White Sox players also said that Mantle had loafed in the field.”

Mantle had been working out at shortstop since July. Stengel bristled when reporters asked whether he was putting Mantle in jeopardy by exposing him to the uncertainties of a 6-4-3 double play. “He can get hurt in the outfield too, can’t he?” Stengel snapped. “Every time he’s been hurt, it was out there. Maybe I’ll never make the move, but he’ll be ready. I got him workin’ out here now so he’ll be used to the different throw. I don’t want him killing any customers in the grandstand.”

By the time the Yankees took the field on the afternoon of September 26, everything of consequence in baseball had been decided—the pennants won, the World Series starting pitchers named, the betting line posted—the Indians were 8
¹
/
₅
-to-5 favorites over the Giants.

Only the National League batting title remained unresolved. Quite improbably, Snider and Mays had arrived at the last day of the season in a virtual tie for the batting championship, separated from each other and Giants’ right fielder Don Mueller by hundredths of a point. “Close enough to be covered by the same handkerchief,” Arch Murray wrote in the
New York Post
.

“We were aware of each other,” Snider allowed.

How could they not be? “They had us side by side in the paper every day.”

They kidded each other around the batting cage but it quit being fun when Dodger owner Walter O’Malley began posting their stats on the scoreboard, a galling rebuke to a player schooled by Branch Rickey not to focus on individual statistics. “If you’re in first place, the numbers will be there,” the Mahatma preached. It was the prevailing ethos in an era before players’ agents prepared thick binders of statistics to market multimillion-dollar clients.

Baseball was in the air that afternoon as it had been all season, passed from stoop to stoop and borough to borough on competing AM frequencies. In the visiting dugout in Philadelphia, Giants’ manager Leo Duro-cher parroted Vin Scully’s play-by-play from Brooklyn. The Duke had earned The Lip’s disdain by sitting out against the Giants’ tough lefty, John Antonelli, the day after they clinched the pennant in Brooklyn.

If New York’s elders were attuned to the voices of the game, city boys like Denny Minogue and his crew from upper Manhattan preferred to spend the afternoon pretending to be the players they aspired to become. Minogue had sung at two Masses by game time in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia. Liberated from the liturgy, he raced to the playground at P.S. 152 to meet his pals Mike Green and Bobby Cook for an afternoon of stickball and bravado. Mike was a short Jewish kid. His affinity for The Mick wasn’t hard to understand. “Cookie” was a center fielder and his own man—you had to be if you were a Duke guy in upper Manhattan. Denny was an Irish Catholic choirboy who wanted to be black because of Willie Mays. On the playground at P.S. 152, they wouldn’t let him pitch because he threw too hard, but they couldn’t stop him from singing the praises of the Say Hey Kid.

When the sun went down that evening on the last day of the regular season, they headed to Freddie’s corner store, as they had every day, to learn how their guys had done. All over the city, boys like them were loitering in congested candy store aisles, sucking down an egg cream or a black-and-white, arguing until the newspaper trucks rumbled down the street loaded with heavy bundles of certainty to tell them who had earned bragging rights for the winter.

Spooner Fans 12 and Wins, 1–0—
New York Herald Tribune

Snider went hitless, eclipsed by the Dodgers’ pitching phenom, Karl Spooner, who struck out twenty-seven in his only two starts of the season. The Duke was stymied by Jake Thies, an unprepossessing rookie for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who described himself as “a sidearm, underhand pitcher.” Duke offered no comment.

Mays’ 3 Hits Nip Don for Title, .345-.342—New York
Daily News

Mays was subdued after winning the batting title in his first full season in the majors. “Sure, I was thinking about it,” he said. “Leo wouldn’t let me forget it.”

Mueller had nothing to say to the press. But the right fielder had a question for Mays. “Is it true you’re the best center fielder in baseball?”

“The best right fielder too,” Mays replied.

Yanks Lose Finale to A’s 8-6 Despite Power Shift

—New York
Daily News

Only 11,000 showed up at Yankee Stadium to see Stengel’s power lineup. “Mantle drew three passes to make 100 for the year, fanned to make 107, and singled sharply to right in his last try for the .300 finish,” Joe Trimble wrote in the
News
. He also played his old position, shortstop, without killing any paying customers. Stengel was in a more generous mood after the game, lauding Mantle’s patience at the plate—maybe the young fella was getting to be a more careful hitter after all. “He fell off in the last month an’ that bad knee of his had something to do with it,” Stengel opined.

Mantle’s comment was buried deep inside a page-two story in the
Herald Tribune
. He said his trick knee would probably prevent him from playing shortstop regularly.

That evening, New York’s three center fielders gathered at Lou Walters’ Latin Quarter for the 8
P.M.
broadcast of
The Colgate Comedy Hour
. Just the year before, Mantle, Martin, and Ford had celebrated the 1953 pennant at the nightclub by signing Dan Topping’s name to the tab. But this was Willie’s time, and Willie was running late. Ed Sullivan’s variety show on CBS,
The Toast of the Town
, aired opposite
The Colgate Comedy Hour
Mays
was
the toast of the town. So while Joe E. Brown warmed up the crowd at the Latin Quarter, Mays opened for Sullivan five blocks up Broadway at the CBS-TV Studio 50, then dashed downtown in time to be introduced with Mantle and Snider as members of
Look
magazine’s All America Team. It was the first time New York’s three leading men shared center stage in their four-year run on the Great White Way.

After the show, they went their separate ways. Mays tagged all the bases of newfound fame. He was paraded in an open car up the Canyon of Heroes in New York’s traditional ticker-tape embrace. He appeared on
The Today Show
with Dave Garroway and his cohost, J. Fred Muggs, the all-star chimp; and he was Steve Allen’s guest on the national premiere of
The Tonight Show
.

Snider headed west with the Eddie Lopat All-Stars for a barnstorming tour of the Hawaiian Islands. Mantle’s trick knee prevented him from joining them as planned. His roommate, Irv Noren, agreed to take his place on Lopat’s roster. Noren was leaving for California that night and offered Mantle a ride to Commerce in his brand-new, four-door Chevrolet. Mantle packed his bags. He couldn’t get out of town fast enough.

Noren’s pal Julie Isaacson, a union guy with all the right connections, told him to leave his Chevy on the sidewalk outside the Latin Quarter. After the show, he found two of New York’s finest—mounted police—standing guard over the car packed with all their belongings. “Nobody touched Mickey and Irv in New York City when Julie was around,” Noren said.

They stopped in Union, New Jersey, for a bite to eat before hitting the road. Their friend Frank Petrillo had a car dealership there—and a wife who prepared Mantle’s favorite Italian dish—spaghetti with “that cheese
that smells like feet.” The lady of the house hit him over the head with her dish towel after that remark. “What the hell do you know about good Italian food, you midwestern hick?”

Frank, Jr., age nine, and his baby brother, Jay, age two, were allowed to stay up late to see their favorite ballplayers. Mantle and Noren were in a playful mood. “Mickey and Irv were tossing my kid brother around,” Frank, Jr., said. “Jay’s head hit the ceiling. Anytime after that my brother did something wacky, my mother blamed it on Mickey and Irv.”

They took off after midnight in an autumn drizzle. There were no four-lane interstates; 55 miles per hour was an aspiration, not a constraint. Commerce was 1,271 long miles away. They didn’t stop except to eat and to stretch their aching legs. Noren didn’t let Mantle get behind the wheel until they were two miles outside of town. He had heard too many stories about Mantle’s driving.

They didn’t talk much baseball as they headed west. They didn’t listen to the radio broadcast of the first game of the World Series. “Listened to that damn cowboy music the whole way,” Noren said. “There was one song that was pretty tragic. This guy had hit his two kids, and they were saying, ‘What did you hit us for, Daddy?’

“Didn’t kill ’em or nothing. Mickey had tears in his eyes, and I did, too.”

Finally, Noren said, “Turn that damn thing off.”

They didn’t hear the radio announcers Al Helfer and Jimmy Dudley describe the top of the eighth inning from the Polo Grounds when the Indians’ Vic Wertz redirected Don Liddle’s first pitch toward the gully in the deepest recess of center field and Mays turned his back on expectation, setting off in pursuit of a ball no one thought he could catch—except him.

They didn’t stop to watch the first game of the last World Series broadcast without color commentary in stark black and white. They didn’t see The Catch that would become the defining moment of Mays’s career. They were on a dusty midwestern ball field on Route 66. Mantle had spotted a bunch of schoolboys shagging balls. “Hey, let’s have some fun,” he told Noren. “We’ve been driving all day and night.”

Noren pulled the car over and parked by the grandstand. He grabbed a bat and a few balls from the trunk and approached the biggest kid on the field and gestured to Mantle. “I told him I wanted to see if I could strike
this guy out,” Noren said. “I told him, ‘When we get through I’ll give you three brand-new balls.’ Then I told all the kids to go out four hundred feet.”