The Last Boy (21 page)

Into a stiff wind. “All Bucky said was ‘Mmm mm, that would bring tears to the eyes of a rocking horse.’”

Between them, Pascual and Ramos gave up 4.3 percent of Mantle’s 536 home runs—Pascual 11, Ramos 12, tying him with Early Wynn for Most Victimized by The Mick. So Ramos didn’t take any chances when he faced Mantle a month after the close call with the Stadium facade—he walked him four straight times. When Mantle hit another disappearing-act home run off Ramos at Griffith Stadium in 1957, he sent the clubhouse boy to the Senators’ locker room with an autographed ball and a message: “Tell him to get a cab, and if he can find that ball I’ll sign that one for him, too.”

1n 1956, Mantle became a measuring stick for teammates and opponents, some of whom, in defiance of major league nonchalance, came out to the ballpark to watch him take batting practice. St. Louis Cardinals’ manager Tony LaRussa says Mantle remains a standard of comparison: “When a guy runs really well, does he run as well as Mantle? If he has power, does he have Mantle’s power?

Dodger pitcher Ed Roebuck saw the speed and the power in 1956. In spring training. “He bunted on me,” Roebuck said. “I fielded the ball. It sounded like a bunch of wild horses running by.”

That fall, in the sixth inning of game 4 of the World Series, Roebuck threw him a sinker that “hung out over the plate.” Not for long. Duke Snider admired the parabolic view in center field. “I don’t mind you not charging it,” Roebuck told him later. “But you don’t have to stop to see how far it went.”

Roebuck understood: length is a guy thing. Size matters. “Seriously,” he said, laughing. “That’s what made the male regard Mantle that way. Forget God. Mickey Mantle can hit the ball farther than anybody.”

Mantle was not a baseball scholar. Kneeling in the on-deck circle, he might inquire of a retreating teammate, “What’s he throwin’?” Doubtless he would have understood Ted Williams’s splendid reply to protégé Mike Epstein when he asked The Splinter about hitting
. Well, you just do it.

One hot July afternoon late in Mantle’s career, Epstein encountered his childhood hero in the Yankee dugout during early batting practice.
“The last two balls I hit were in the upper deck in right center or in right field,” Epstein recalled. “And I hear this voice in the dugout, and he says, ‘Boy, we could use that power over here. We got none!’

“And I looked over—there’s Mantle. He’s standing there in his undershorts and his shower shoes. So I went over and I said, ‘When you stride, do you feel your body doing anything?’

“And he said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’

“I said, ‘Do you feel your body moving in a certain direction or doing something that you can talk to me about?’

“And he said, ‘Mike, honestly, I don’t know nothin’ about hitting.’

“You know, he drawled it out. He said, ‘I just watch the other hitters.’

“In Yankee Stadium in those days, the bat rack was by the home-plate side of the dugout, and that’s where we were. So he just reached in and took a bat—left-handed, in the dugout—and he’s just taking some strides. I said, ‘You feel anything?’

“He said, ‘Nah.’ And then he said, ‘You know, actually, I sort of feel my body going backwards as I’m striding forward.’

“So I said to him, ‘Well, do you feel the same thing right-handed?’

“And he did it about five or six times, and he looked at me and he says, ‘No.’”

Mantle had no idea what he did right or wrong or differently batting right-handed and left-handed. More than likely he would have had little truck with present-day baseball pedagogy. Today’s students of the game have PhDs in physics and industrial engineering; applied engineering, applied math, applied psychology, applied biomedical engineering; kines-thesiology and a new area of inquiry called biological cybernetics. They don’t talk baseball; they discuss the “relationship amongst the sweet spot, COP, and vibration nodes in baseball bats,” the topic of a treatise published in
Proceedings of the 5th Conference of Engineering of Sport.

Mantle had no answer to the question “What makes Mantle Mantle?” There was good reason for that. It has to do with the biology of memory, the subject that earned Eric R. Kandel the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “I think your question is not dramatically different than asking ‘What makes Mozart Mozart?’” Kandel said.

The answer requires an understanding of how a body remembers.

Kandel is the director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University. Athletics are not prominently featured on his résumé. In gyms and locker rooms “muscle memory” is a catchphrase for the ability to recall and replicate a perfected motion, such as a baseball swing, in the freedom of infinite space. In Kandel’s “New Science of Mind,” muscle memory is an idea, specifically “an idea of exactly what groups of muscles to move in response to a particular stimulus”—a fastball, for example—and the ability to recruit “the family of muscles that have to be moved to accomplish a particular task.”

Kandel, a physician trained in psychiatry and neurobiology, explained: “There are two kinds of memories. They’re called implicit and explicit. Explicit memory is a memory of people, places, and objects. If you think of the last time you sat in a baseball stadium and remember who you were with, you’re doing explicit memory storage.

“Implicit memory storage is hitting a tennis ball, hitting a baseball, doing anything that involves sensory motor skills.”

With sufficient reiteration, an explicit memory can become implicit, literally moving from one storage center in the brain to another. Once a task is mastered, it can become automatic, almost reflexive. “When you first learn how to drive a car, you’re just paying attention all the time,” Kandel said. “You’re terrified. You’re saying, ‘Now I shift, now I don’t.’ After you learn, you don’t tell yourself when to shift. You do it automatically.”

Muscle memory is a form of implicit memory that is recalled through performance, Kandel said, “without conscious effort or even the awareness that we are drawing on memory.”

Which is why Mantle could not explain what he did or how he did it. It’s also why the greatest athletes usually make the lousiest coaches.

When Rob Gray tests baseball players in his Perception and Action Lab at Arizona State University, forcing them to articulate what they do and how they do it, their performance deteriorates. Compelled to surrender what he calls “expertise-induced amnesia”—in short, to make an implicit memory explicit again—”they start thinking about what they’re doing and mess everything up,” he said.

Until recently scientists believed that the brain was fixed in its anatomy: you would lose brain cells with age but you couldn’t alter the architecture. Turns out they were wrong, Kandel said. The brain can bulk up, too.
Repeated experience can form new synaptic connections, especially if you start building up those implicit memories before puberty. The right genes nurtured the right way—meaning early enough and often enough—creates the potential for a particular kind of genius. “You and I would call it implicit intelligence,” Kandel said. “That’s what you’re looking at. That’s beautiful.”

Mantle was an Einstein of implicit intelligence. If he played today, technology would be able to explain to him what he could not explain to or about himself. Doctors would measure the firing pattern of his muscles. Coaches would gauge the speed of the barrel of his Louisville Slugger with Doppler radar and attach infrared markers to the tip of his bat. They would be able to answer Harvey Kuenn’s cry to the heavens: “How can a man hit a ball that hard?”

Greg Rybarczyk, a mechanical engineer who studies and measures every major league home run hit every year on his Web site Hit Tracker (www.hittrackeronline.com), has grappled with that question for three decades. “Mantle represents a unique synthesis of strength, artistry, and an almost magical priming of his body,” he said. “Just as painters prime a surface and farmers prime a pump, Mantle primed his body to function with ballistic efficiency. A blasting cap is also known as a primer, a small explosive device that sets off a larger charge, an entirely apt reference to Mantle in that at the moment he begins to bring the bat forward, it’s as if a blasting cap is going off that detonates the rest of his swing.

“He’s magical because so many men over so many years have tried to hit a baseball with the grace and power of Mantle and so few have been able to do it. Artistic, because the end result of Mantle’s swing is so much more than you might expect from a man who stood only five feet, eleven inches tall and because no scientific examination of his swing has ever really pinned down exactly how he produced such amazing power. And it was much more than just strength, it was great strength plus technique of the absolute highest order.”

In an effort to pin down how Mantle generated such power, I asked Preston Peavy, a techno-savvy hitting coach, to analyze Mantle’s form, using the visual motion-analysis system he created for his students at Peavy Baseball in Atlanta. He converted film and video clips of Mantle
into a set of kinematics, moving digital stick figures that show the path of each part of the body as it moves through space. For an analysis and comparison of Mantle’s left-handed and right-handed swings, see appendix 2, on page 411. (To view the kinematics, go to www.peavynet.com or www .jlace.com.)

A 90-mile-per-hour fastball doesn’t leave much time for thought. Traveling at a rate of 132 feet per second, it makes the sixty-foot, six-inch journey from pitcher to batter in four-tenths of a second. The ball is a quarter of the way to home plate by the time a hitter becomes fully aware of it. Because there is a 100-millisecond delay between the time the image of the ball hits the batter’s retina and when he becomes conscious of it, it is physiologically impossible to track the ball from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove. David Whitney, the director of the Vision and Action Lab at the University of California, Davis, explains, “A 100-millisecond delay doesn’t seem very signifigant. But if a baseball is traveling at 90 mph, that translates to around fifteen feet. If we perceive the ball fifteen feet behind where it’s actually located, the batter has to start his swing very early on in the baseball’s trajectory.”

Neurologically speaking, every batter is a guess-hitter. That’s where implicit memory comes in. The ability to infer the type of pitch and where it’s headed with accuracy and speed is inextricably linked with stored experience—the hitter has seen that pitch before, even if he can’t see it all the way. Add the reflexes to respond to that memory and a visual motor system that allows the batter to react on the fly to a change in the trajectory of a flying object, the right DNA, and Mutt and Grandpa Charlie out by the shed throwing tennis balls, and you have Mickey Mantle.

Every at-bat is a dance of double pendulums. The pitcher leads, using his body as a kinetic chain to deliver energy from his legs through his trunk into his shoulder, arm, and, finally, the ball. The batter follows, reacting in kind. The converging and opposing forces may or may not be equal, but the goal is the same—to turn potential energy into kinetic energy as efficiently as human physiology allows.

The pitcher has the inherent advantage of foreknowledge—he knows what he’s going to throw—and he has the downward slope of the mound to generate momentum. With only flat ground and muscle power at his disposal, the hitter creates force by twisting his upper and lower body in opposite directions like a rubber band. When that human rubber band is stretched taut and is ready to snap, it uncoils, propelling the bat through the strike zone.

This deceptively simple act is an intricate biomechanical task requiring the coordinated mobilization of virtually every muscle in the body in less than a second. “Everything but the chewing muscles,” said Dr. Benjamin Shaffer, a specialist in orthopedic sports medicine and head physician for the Washington Capitals. “Unless you grit your teeth.”

Nobody gritted more than Mantle. Lefty or righty, he swung with felonious intent.

Yogi Berra once called him “naturally amphibious.” In fact, he wasn’t. His right-handed swing was unstudied. His left-handed swing was learned behavior, constructed with thousands of backyard swings. “I don’t think he had any weakness that you could exploit,” the Indians’ ace right-hander “Rapid Robert” Feller attested. “If he did have, they’da done it.”

(Mantle batted .500 against him.)

Ultimately, Mantle’s injured right knee gave righties a vulnerability to exploit. Everybody knew the book on him. “From the right side, he had no holes in his swing,” Clete Boyer said. “Left-handed, he had a little blind spot up high because of his knees.”

“I threw him titty pitches,” said Jim “Mudcat” Grant. “Up around the chest, around the nipples, a little bit off the plate, inside. Of course, we knew he had bad legs, and there were times we went for the legs in terms of pitching inside. We didn’t throw to hit him. We wanted to move him a little bit, cause some discomfort.”

Frank Lary of the Tigers was widely reputed to throw at Mantle’s knees, a reputation the “Yankee Killer” denies. “Nah, that was Jim Bunning,” he said.

Normally a model of on-field decorum, Mantle had to be restrained one day after Bunning hit him in the leg with a pitch.

Claude Osteen, the estimable lefty and longtime pitching coach, remembers
the turning point of his career, the defining at-bat when Mantle convinced him he’d become a pitcher. It occurred in 1964, when he was with the Senators. “The report was, you had to jam him,” said Osteen, then in the eighth of his eighteen years in the majors. “If you’ve got a guy like Mantle who’s standing miles away from the plate, where there is so much daylight between the inside corner and his hands, it’s frightening. It’s right down the middle of the plate for a guy like that.”

Visions of a tape measure home run or worse—a line drive hit back up the middle—tormented pitchers in their sleep the night before they faced the Yankees. But Osteen knew that pitching inside was what he had to do to get Mantle out. “I went in there. It was a fastball, right on the black,” he said. “Right away he went straight into the ball and closed that daylight up.”