The Last Boy (18 page)

The last ball he threw left a jet trail across the afternoon sky. It flew over the school and over a copse of trees beyond that. “Boy, you can’t strike that guy out,” the kid told Noren when he returned with the ball ten minutes later.

“You know why? That’s Mickey Mantle.”

“And I suppose
you’r
e Yogi Berra,” the kid said.

They were still laughing when they hit the road again. “Kid probably went home and told his dad, ‘Mickey Mantle drove up in a car and hit the ball over the schoolhouse,’” Noren said.

“And his dad probably told him, ‘I told you never to lie,’” Mantle replied.

Who’s better? Willie, Mickey, or The Duke?

Duke says the argument started in 1954, their first full season together in the majors. It began in earnest the moment Giants’ third baseman Hank Thompson claimed the final out of the Series from the sky.

You could get a fat lip in any saloon in town by starting an argument as to which was best.

Red Smith wrote the line on the occasion of Mays’s retirement in 1973. But he was talking about 1954. That year, New York was home to 7,891,957 true believers and kibitzers with at least that many opinions, loudly expressed.

Mantle makes balls disappear!

Mays plucks line drives out of thin air!

Snider is as smooth as Houdini!

Passions were fierce, often hereditary, and fightin’ words were backed up. Opinion was obligatory. New Yorkers argued on Brooklyn stoops, on Bronx fire escapes, in poorly lit stairwells of Queens housing projects, and in the pages of seven major (English-language) daily newspapers (not to mention the
Brooklyn Eagle, La Prensa, El Diario
, and the Jewish
Daily Forward
).

Baseball men argued between, during, and after helpings of rubber
chicken on the winter banquet circuit, with Leo “The Lip” leading the way. “Leo Durocher needed about ten seconds after the final 1954 statistics were posted to realize the publicity potential in the feud,”
SPORT
magazine reported. “ ‘Snider is wonderful,’ he said. ‘But my boy Willie just happens to be the greatest there ever was.’”

“Old Ty Cobb was one of those who rose to Leo’s bait,”
SPORT
continued. “Tyrus irritably barked, ‘How many years has Mays hit .300 or more for the Giants? In one season, I believe. How many years has he batted in 100 or more runs? Hell’s bells, at this point the discussion is ridiculous!’”

Neither “The Lip” nor “The Georgia Peach” made mention of Mantle.

Over the next three seasons, as their fortunes and their batting averages waxed and waned and the statistical evidence accumulated, the argument intensified. At the dawn of the last season for New York’s three franchises, the debate remained unresolved.

The nature of the Mantle-Mays-Snider argument is such that it changes every year. So who’s the best? Come around in 15 years when all the statistics are dry and we’ll know.

—April 17, 1957,
Newsday

And still there is no agreement.

Indians pitcher Bob Feller: “Mickey was a better all-around ballplayer. Mays was a better actor.”

Dodgers outfielder Tommy Davis: “I don’t care if Willie was pink, blue, yellow, beige, he would still be the best.”

Dodgers pitcher Carl Erskine: “The only thing Mays had over Mantle was durability. Duke was royalty. They never had much royalty in Brooklyn.”

Giants first baseman Willie McCovey: “We knew Willie Mays was head and shoulders a better player. We knew
he
played in New York.”

Yankees first baseman Moose Skowron: “They talk about Willie Mays. Willie Mays was in two World Series. I go by winnings.”

Leave it to Yogi Berra to make the most sense: “I’d like to have
that
outfield.”

The point of the argument was having it, not solving it. It was sustaining and somehow defining. Who you chose as your guy told you something
about yourself—who you wanted to be and
how
you wanted to be.

It was easy to want to be Willie. He was so blithe, levitating above green fields with weightless joie de vivre. To chase his example—to run with liquid abandon—was to cast off white propriety and prejudice in favor of freedom of expression. Who wouldn’t want to try on the accoutrements of incandescence?

Consistent, reliable, orthodox, The Duke never disappointed. He aspired to Joe D.’s understated grace and dropped the ball the only time he tried Willie’s basket catch. He made his major league debut two days after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. He hit more home runs in the Fifties than Mantle, Mays, or anyone else—forty home runs in each of five straight years. But it was his fate to be overlooked. He was the perfect hero for an underdog borough and every underdog kid.

If DiMaggio had grace, Mantle had insouciance. It informed his posture, the way he leaned on a bat, hip jutting one way, pelvis the other, in a casual frieze of male swagger. And he got better-looking with age, growing into his role and his musculature, offering hope to prepubescent boys everywhere. To assume his limp was to master how to function with disability and disappointment. To mimic his swing was to channel his power.

Mantle brought danger and expectation to the plate. With every swing there was a chance of seeing something “so fucking ridiculous,” said Billy Crystal. Or so fucking awful.

Though they appealed to different constituencies, Willie, Mickey, and The Duke had more in common than center field; they shared the same psychic real estate. All three were sons of semi-pro baseball players with large ambitions for their boys. All three knew what it was to be overwhelmed by expectation and major league pitching. All three spent time in the bushes their rookie year.

But they were peers more than friends. They coexisted in box scores and headlines, crossing paths chiefly on the base paths. Umpires enforced the no-fraternizing rule with $50 fines when $50 meant something.

Snider and Mays played each other twenty-two times a year, every year. There was little love lost between the Dodgers and Giants and less between their fans, as Mays learned after hitting two home runs in Brooklyn one Sunday afternoon. All four tires on his car were slashed when he returned to the Ebbets Field parking lot. He took the subway back to Manhattan.

Mantle and Mays played over each other’s shoulders in ballparks on opposite shores of the Harlem River, but they faced each other only twice, in the 1951 and 1962 World Series. Mantle and Snider played each other in every World Series—or so it seemed. But fate had a way of bringing them together in moments of drama and definition. Mantle’s first New York home run sailed over Snider’s head in an April 1951 exhibition game. Seven months later, Mays hit the fateful tweener at the Stadium that Mantle called “the ball that caused all my trouble.” When he told the story on the
Warner Wolf Show
in 1981—the first joint TV appearance of Willie, Mickey, and The Duke, which they did for free—Mays replied, “I thought you were playing center field.”

Who would believe that four years later, in game 6 of the 1956 World Series, Snider would catch a spike in the same drain, and in the same way. He even used the same language to describe the injury: “Something snapped.”

Snider saw Mays’s best catch, not The Catch that got all the attention “because it was in the World Series.” The one Mays made on opening day in Brooklyn in 1952, when he levitated himself in pursuit of a line drive and launched himself headfirst into the outfield wall. Knocked himself out cold but held on.

Snider witnessed Mantle’s best catch, in game 5 of the 1956 Series, when he outran Gil Hodges’ drive to the deepest reaches of Death Valley, enabling Don Larsen to throw the only perfect game in World Series history. “Probably the only good catch I ever made,” Mantle would say later. “I wasn’t that good of a fielder.”

His home run in the bottom of the inning broke a scoreless tie. It was his best World Series game, and nobody noticed.

After the diaspora, when the Dodgers and Giants decamped to the West Coast in 1957, Mantle had New York to himself. Arriving at the Los Angeles Coliseum for the Dodgers’ first home game in California, Snider found Mays waiting at the batting cage, pointing to the right field wall 440 feet feet away. “Hey, Duke, they’re burying you, man.”

Mays reigned supreme over DiMaggio’s hometown, but his accomplishments were fogged in by the elements at Candlestick Park and by East Coast newspaper deadlines. He feared he’d been forgotten. But when he returned to New York for the first time in 1961 for the Mayor’s Trophy Game at Yankee Stadium, Bob Sheppard’s introduction was drowned out
by the roar. Mantle turned to his teammate Al Downing and said, “Boy, they really love him here, don’t they?”

By 1962, The Duke of Flatbush had become as superfluous in Los Angeles as his nickname. One day, he overheard Dodger manager Walter Alston complain, “I can’t wait ’til I get rid of these old guys.” The Dodgers sold him to the laughable Mets on April Fools’ Day 1963 for $40,000. At the end of the season, Dodger general manager Buzzie Bavasi wrote him a personal check for $10,000 and admitted the Yankees had wanted him, to back up The Mick.

That fall, Mantle and Mays met in a World Series that was supposed to answer the question “Who’s better?” for once and for all. Their stunning haplessness prompted a shrill bleacher critic to ask instead: “Who’s worse?” When Mantle returned to center field after yet another futile at-bat, the arbiter offered this verdict: “Hey, Mantle, you win.”

Mays shone like a solitaire for five years after Mantle retired. In 1972, the Giants, who had promised never to trade him, sent Mays to the Mets for a belated New York encore. But it was too late. In October 1973, America winced as Willie staggered under a fly ball on a sun-drenched World Series afternoon. Like Mantle and Snider before him, the Say Hey Kid had become just another old ballplayer who had overstayed his body’s welcome. “I did,” Snider said. “We all did.”

The argument didn’t end when the record books closed. Daily box score tallies gave way to “what-ifs.” What if Willie hadn’t played two years for Uncle Sam? What if Mickey hit into that Candlestick gale? What if Mays had played center field for the New York Yankees? What if Mantle had played on two legs? What if Duke hadn’t had that short right field fence in Brooklyn or the damnable outfield wall at the L.A. Coliseum?

“Willie, Mickey and The Duke” became the occasion for endless confab and the subject of Denny Minogue’s 1981 anthem to the Fifties—“Talkin’ Baseball.” “I’m talkin’ Willie, Mickey, and The Duke (Say hey, say hey, say hey).” By then, Minogue had surrendered his major league aspirations and had adopted the nom de tune, Terry Cashman. The lyrics to his now ubiquitous melody evoke a singular era before fate dictated how history would sing their praises. On September 26, 1954, no one knew who would be judged best, but everyone cared about the answer.

By the time the song hit the airwaves, the terms of the debate had changed. The mathematical calculations of a simpler world, the five-tool judgments made by stopwatch-bearing scouts, gave way to a generation of stat-wielding revisionist historians with competing formulas designed to assess and compare the relative value of individual performance, past and present. Armed with a profusion of new and ever-improving metrics, Bill James and the heirs to his sabermetric revolution relocated the argument over Willie, Mickey, and The Duke from the street corner to sports radio, and then to cyberspace, where partisans armed with new ammunition continue the fight. “It’s kind of like the Civil War,” said Pete Cava. ”Just because they signed the treaty at Appomattox doesn’t mean the war is over. The debate still goes on.”

When the New York
Morning News
published the first primitive box score in 1845, no one could have imagined it would lead to this: Runs Created (RC), Runs Created Above Position, (RCAP), Runs Created Above Average (RCAA), On Base + Slugging (OPS), On Base + Slugging Adjusted (OPS+), On Base Percentage × Slugging (SLOB), Win Shares and Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP 1-3), Value Over Replacement Player (VORP), Offensive Winning Percentage (OWP), Marginal Value Above Replacement Player (MORP), and Defensive Wins Above Replacement (DWARP).

Branch Rickey, baseball’s most original thinker, planted the seeds of this new math by hiring the first team statistician in 1947—the same year he and Jackie Robinson defied baseball’s color barrier. Seven years later, he and his stat man, Allan Roth, pioneered the formula for on-base percentage. This arithmetic innovation was met with predictable disdain: “Baseball isn’t statistics,” groused Jimmy Cannon. “Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second.”

Jim Bouton seconded that opinion years later: “Statistics are about as interesting as first base coaches.”

Not even the visionary Mahatma could have predicted the statistical blitzkrieg that has changed the way players are measured and remunerated, how front offices assemble teams, and how managers manage games. By 2001, James, paterfamilias of the stat-geek generation, had conceded that clarity had been all but lost in the numerical dust storm of mutating calculations and shiny new algorithms. But he remained unequivocal in
the assessment first published in the 1985 edition of
The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
: “Mickey Mantle was, at his peak in 1956-57 and again in 1961-62 clearly a greater player than Willie Mays—and it is not a close or difficult decision.”

John Thorn, baseball historian and numbers cruncher extraordinaire, concurs—up to a point: “Mantle is superior to Mays—with a bat in his hands. If one is to judge them as all-around players Mays is superior because he was so much better in center field. For pure offense, Mantle is it.”

(For a statistical comparison of Mantle and Mays, see appendix 3, page 423.)

Mantle often joked about how many years you’d have to deduct from his eighteen big league seasons if you subtracted the number of times he struck out. The answer, according to Dave Smith of Retrosheet, is three. Mantle also made light of the number of times he batted without hitting the ball. Do the math, he advised: 1,734 walks plus 1,710 strikeouts means he batted 3,444 times “without hitting a ball. Figure 500 at-bats a season, and that means I played seven years in the majors without hitting the ball.”