The Last Boy (27 page)

Overwrought as that might have been, Mantle was hard put to please either man. Like Mutt, Stengel saw in him the player he would never become. And, like Mutt, Stengel regarded his success as a monument to his own ambition and desire. The relationships with his father and his second father were predicated on demand and expectation: you
will be
somebody. Which is a whole lot different than saying: you
are
somebody.

David Mantle likes to tell a favorite family story about Mutt receiving congratulations on his son’s stellar performance for the Whiz Kids one night in 1948. “Mutt said, ‘He coulda done better,’” David recalled. This on a night when, local lore has it, Mantle had hit two home runs into the Spring River.

“Just think how great he’d have been if he’d had confidence,” said Mantle’s teammate, Tom Tresh. “Knees and confidence.”

On the morning of September 16, the Yankees awoke in a first-place tie with the upstart Orioles atop the American League. The defending
American League champion White Sox were lurking just two games behind. The Yankees won that night and the next fourteen straight games to claim Stengel’s tenth pennant—equaling McGraw’s record. Mantle led the league in runs and home runs. Maris led the league in slugging percentage and RBI and was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player. Mantle was first on more ballots, but three writers left him off completely. He finished second in the voting, two points behind Maris. Now Stengel was lavish with praise, noting how hard Mantle had worked and how much he had hustled—impressive, Stengel said, considering he was a cripple playing on one leg.

The World Series opened in Pittsburgh on October 5, the day the G-man assigned to investigate the July death threat informed his superiors that he had “failed to develop a suspect in the matter.”

Yankee pitchers, particularly Whitey Ford, had long chafed at Stengel’s idiosyncratic pitching decisions, none more fateful than choosing to start Ditmar instead of Ford in game 1 of the Series. True, Ditmar had had his best season. Yes, he threw a lot of ground-ball outs. But he was Art Ditmar and Whitey Ford was the Chairman of the Board, the pitcher who would break Babe Ruth’s record for consecutive scoreless World Series innings.

“Casey talked to me about it,” Ditmar said. “He said, ‘Lookit, I’m not going to start Whitey because I want Whitey to start in the Stadium because of the short right field and to nullify left-handed hitters in the Stadium.’

“And he says, ‘You’ve pitched great for me the last two years, so I think you deserve the opportunity.’

“And he says, ‘Whitey has had some arm problems. We don’t figure he can pitch three games.’”

In game 1, Ditmar failed to make it out of the first inning. Mantle went hitless. Batting left-handed had been a struggle since Red Schoen-dienst had gotten tangled up with his shoulder in the 1957 World Series. Watching film from his rookie year in a darkened clubhouse one day in 1959, he saw the problem—he wasn’t holding his bat high enough. “I can’t because of my shoulder,” he told the Yankee coaches. “It hurts.”

Although there was almost no change in his left-handed power numbers throughout his career, his batting average dropped 19 points after 1956.
He battled left-handed 65.9 percent of the time and hit 69.4 percent of his home runs from that side; but he also struck out twice as often left-handed. After being caught looking twice in game 1, he told reporters, “Up there lefty, I just can’t pull the trigger.” The Pirates won 6–4.

Batting right-handed the next day, he hit a home run that Pirates’ shortstop Dick Groat swore tore seven seats out of the right field stands. Then he hit another. It soared just to the left of the iron gate in right center field, fifty feet over center fielder Bill Virdon’s head, by his reckoning, and disappeared into the trees, a precinct previously reached only by left-handed batters. A city cop on patrol behind the fence estimated the distance at 478 feet. Virdon respectfully disagreed with the law. After the 16–3 Yankee deluge, in which Mantle accounted for half the Yankees’ runs, Virdon found Groat soaking his broken wrist in the whirlpool: “Roomie, you missed the granddaddy of all time. Without a doubt, nobody ever hit a ball further or harder.”

“It had to go six hundred feet,” Virdon told me, “and that’s when balls weren’t very live.”

The Series relocated to New York, where Toots Shor, the bon vivant saloonkeeper, temporarily without a saloon, erected a beachhead in a tent on the site of his new joint on East 52nd Street. He invited some pals to help break ground on the off day between games 2 and 3—Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Mantle, Berra, and Ford. “Everybody have a booze!” Toots cried. The drinks in the tent were on the house.

The Yankee onslaught—and Mantle’s slugging—continued unabated in game 3, a 10–0 shutout. But the Pirates laughed off the two laughers and stunned the lordly Yankees by winning the next two games at the Stadium. In game 4, again Mantle was held hit-less left-handed. In game 5, Ditmar improved on his game 1 performance—he lasted 11/3 innings. In game 6, in Pittsburgh, Ford threw another shutout, setting the stage for what Yankee partisans regarded as a foregone conclusion.

Vern Law, the 1960 Cy Young Award winner, held them scoreless through the first four innings. By the bottom of the second inning, the Yanks were trailing 4–0. Stengel summoned relief pitcher Bobby Shantz to save the season. Shantz stood five feet six and weighed 139 pounds. “Soaking wet,” he said. “I didn’t throw hard at all. I threw a lot of
changeups and curveballs. I changed up on my fastball and changed up on my curve.”

He held off the Pirates for five innings while the Yankees scored seven runs. They led 7–4 with two innings left in the season. Then came the fateful eighth. “First guy up, Gino Cimoli, blooped one into right field,” Shantz said. “Then Bill Virdon hit a nice double-play ball right to Kubek and that damn thing hit a rock or something, bounced up and hit him in the throat. Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it.”

Kubek went to the ground, choking on his own blood. Everyone else was safe.

Stengel summoned Jim Coates from the bullpen to face the redoubtable Roberto Clemente, who hit the inning’s second fateful grounder. First baseman Moose Skowron fielded the ball. But when he looked for someone to throw it to, no one was there. The lapse still provoked Mantle’s drunken ire a quarter of a century later. “Fuckin’ Jim Coates didn’t cover first!”

Shantz sighed at Mantle’s resilient memory—no lapse there. “Hal Smith come up and hit a three-run homer, and then they went ahead of us. That’s the thing—we should have been out of the inning. They shouldn’t have scored even more than one run. We’d have still been ahead if he covers first base.”

Instead, the Pirates scored five runs—three charged to Shantz—and took a 9–7 lead to the top of the ninth inning. Kubek was taken to Pittsburgh’s Eye and Ear Hospital, with a suspected fracture of the larynx.

The Yankees did not choke. Mantle wouldn’t allow it. He drove in the Yankees’ eighth run in the top of the ninth with a single that sent the tying run to third. There was still just one out. Berra slashed a serrated grounder to Rocky Nelson at first base, who snared it on one hop, stepped on the bag, and straightened to throw to second base to complete the double play. But Mantle wasn’t where he was expected to be. He stood his ground on the infield dirt, waiting for Nelson to make his move. They faced each other paces apart, like Hollywood gunslingers. It was high noon for the Yankees. Mantle drew first, diving back into the bag, and eluding Nelson’s frantic, perplexed tag.

Without Mantle’s reflexively balletic maneuver, Gil McDougald would not have scored the tying run. The Series would have been lost.
There would have been no bottom of the ninth. There would have been no goddamned Bill Mazeroski. No kicker in Red Smith’s column in the morning
Tribune
: “Mazeroski is up first for Pittsburgh.”

Ralph Terry had relieved Coates in the eighth. His second pitch to Mazeroski sailed over Berra’s head, over the ivy-draped left field wall, and into civic bedlam. For the second year in a row the Yankees were left looking up.

The clubhouse door was still locked when batboy Frank Prudenti finished his chores and went downstairs to change. The Yankees needed time to compose themselves before receiving the gentlemen of the press. “It was the quietest locker room I can ever remember,” Prudenti said. “Everybody was just shocked, devastated. I looked over by Mickey’s locker, and he had a towel over his head. I didn’t want to look too hard and make it obvious I was looking. I didn’t go over; I didn’t wanna see it. But it wasn’t only Mickey. A lotta players had tears in their eyes.”

Clete Boyer thought: “Shit, maybe I should cry, too.”

When the writers were finally admitted, those who dared go to Mantle’s locker saw tears running down his cheeks. “This was the first time that we lost a Series when I know we should have won,” he said.

As Berra put it, “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

Terry was in Stengel’s office, trying to apologize and explain. Stengel was taking off his Yankee uniform for what would be the last time, his pants down around his shoes, his shirt unbuttoned. Terry had warmed up five times before entering the game, pitching off a steep bullpen mound that bore little relationship to the one on the field. His footing was off, making the fateful pitch rise instead of breaking low and away as he and the scouting report intended.

“Forget it, kid,” the manager said. “Come back and have a good year next year.”

Mantle was still at his locker, shrouded in a towel, when Terry emerged from Stengel’s office. He had batted .400 (10 for 25), scored 8 runs, driven in 11, hit 3 home runs (for a slugging percentage of .800), and walked 8 times, finishing what was perhaps his best World Series with an astonishing On Base + Slugging percentage of 1.345.

It wasn’t his fault that Stengel had let Shantz bat for himself with two on in the eighth inning. Or that, in a sacrifice situation, he chose
Coates—known to his teammates as “Rock” for his less-than-sure hands—to replace a pitcher who had won seven gold gloves. Or that he had started Ditmar instead of Ford.

“How’s Tony?” Mantle asked.

Kubek was under doctor’s orders not to talk—especially not to the enterprising reporters who showed up at his bedside hoping for a quote, but he took Mantle’s call.

That evening, as the Mantles flew home to Dallas, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon wrangled over the defense of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu off the coast of China in the third of the great presidential debates. Somewhere high above America’s midsection, Mantle was still crying. “Mickey, it’s only a game,” Merlyn said.

But it wasn’t. In a week he would be twenty-nine, and he felt he had let them all down—Mutt, Casey, himself.

The Stengel era ended five days later, just past high noon, when he arrived at Le Salon Bleu of New York’s Savoy Hilton Hotel for a formal execution orchestrated by the front office. The Yankee bosses declined to use the distasteful word “fired” but pointed out that Stengel was the highest-paid manager in baseball. “Quit, fired, write whatever you want,” Stengel told his writers. “I’ll never make the mistake of being seventy again.”

Thirteen years later, Stengel admitted to an interviewer that he was wrong to start Art Ditmar. Ditmar sued Anheuser-Busch for libel when a 1985 World Series commercial recycled Chuck Thomson’s erroneous call of the bottom of the ninth, attributing Terry’s gopher ball to him. The suit alleged that Ditmar had been held up to “undeserved ridicule, humiliation and contempt” and went all the way to the United States Supreme Court before being dismissed in 1988 as ridiculous.

Atlantic City, April 1983

B
y 11
P.M
., the candle at Mickey’s table in the Bamboo Lounge was guttering, and so was he. It was the end of a long, liquid day: cocktails in the limo, followed by cocktails before dinner, followed by toasts with dinner
—“To the greatest center fielder of all time, behind Joe DiMaggio,”
one of his playing partners had said
.

The affair was hosted by the sportscaster Dick Schaap. The menu was elegant—”Boston Bibb lettuce with Hearts of Palm, Coquille St. Jacques, Filet Mignon Béarnaise, Coupe Baccarat”—none of which Mickey ate. Now his fist was wrapped around a snifter of Grand Marnier. I ordered a Perrier. Mickey cackled. Some sportswriter
.

Bill Brubaker of the New York
Daily News
was keeping him company in the second-floor lounge, a cozy little watering hole done up in ersatz Raj decor with fan-shaped rattan chairs and fake potted palms. I joined the conversation with trepidation and annoyance. Mickey was “my account,” sports
department shorthand for proprietary ownership of a story. He was
mine.
Except that everything in my notebook was also in everyone else’s. Everyone else had had a “one-on-one.” Mickey had done a series of stand-ups with local TV guys and a long sit-down with Bob Lipsyte for
CBS Sunday Morning.
I was bringing up the reportorial rear
.

I had scribbled the questions I wanted—and dreaded—to ask on the inside cover of a reporter’s pad and consulted the list reflexively throughout the day, a nervous tic that worsened as the prospects for my scheduled interview dimmed. But there was no forgetting what I needed to ask him. Over the phone, he had told me that his son Billy had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Mutt’s disease. The treatments were expensive, and he needed the house money to pay the medical bills. He knew that Bowie Kuhn would banish him for taking the job. He didn’t know that the commissioner acted with full knowledge of the reason he signed on with the casino—a decision Kuhn later told me he neither regretted nor second-guessed
.

This was a good story, a scoop even—“Aging Slugger Banned, Needs $ for Dying Son.” But now that it was finally my turn to get a shot at The Mick, he was tanked up and talked out. The drunker he got, the closer his chair got to mine, until his famously gelatinous right knee was touching mine
.

I wanted Brubaker to get lost before Mickey became thoroughly insensible almost as much as I wanted him to stay. The fact is, I was scared to be alone with my hero. When, a round of drinks later, Bill closed his notebook, I pleaded softly, “Don’t go.”

On the table before Mickey was a stack of oversized baseball cards commissioned by the hotel. On the front was a painting of the slugger in his pinstriped youth. His face was rendered in a deep metallic hue that made him look as if he’d already been bronzed. In the foreground were three action-figure Micks, only one of which resembled him at all. “Get rid of them three li’l sumbitches and give me a place to sign muh name,” he told the new PR guy when the print run ran out
.

On the back there was a brief bio and his career stats, major and minor league. “You know what they left offa here?”

I could guess. But it was a different social disease from the one he had bragged on that morning. “‘Bout leadin’ the league in the clap six straight years. A major league record. It’ll never be broken.”

Four Alabama boys stopped by the table for an autograph. The biggest and
blondest of them looked a bit like The Mick of memory. “I’m a thirty-year-old man,” he said, holding out a pen. “Would you mind? It’s the price of fame.”

Mickey shrugged. Like this yahoo knew the price of fame. “I get paid to do this.”

“I’m a lot nicer than I was, ”he confided when the southern boys departed. “I care more about what people think than I used to. When I was playing ball, I didn’t give a damn. Now I try to make people like me. Maybe more ’n I should.”

“Why?”

“’Cause in public relations it matters more. It didn’t matter before. When I’m around a golf course or out with my wife, I never jump on anybody’s ass.”

Mickey paused. “Y’know, even though it’s my job to be nice, it isn’t hard.” He sounded almost surprised. “I run into guys who say I pushed them aside. Guys who say, ‘Hey, I was at Yankee Stadium in 1958. You shoved me out of your way.’

“Hell, if I strike out four straight times, I’m not going to sign any damn autographs. I don’t feel bad. I didn’t shove him out of the way because I hated him. I wanted to get to the ballpark. It was mostly the same kids every day, been there for twenty years. If I saw a little kid with crutches, I did stop. If I thought it was the same one who got one yesterday, I wouldn’t.”

He turned to Brubaker, who was gathering his belongings. “You wanna autograph?”

“No, but my wife would probably like one.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Freddi. F-r-e-d-d-i.”

“To Freddie,” he wrote. “Mickey Mantle.”

“Thanks, but you misspelled my wife’s name.”

Mickey ripped the offending card in half and took another from the stack. “Well, how do you spell it?
”

“F-r-e-d-d-i.”

Again, Mickey misspelled her name; again, Bill corrected him. “Here,” Mickey said, submitting a new inscription for Brubaker’s approval. “To Freddi, you have a hard name to spell, asshole.”

“Mickey, I can’t give this to my wife.”

“Gimme that.”

He snatched the card, crossed out “asshole,” and scribbled “sweetheart”
above the offending appellation. “To Freddi, you have a hard name to spell, asshole sweetheart.”

When Bill stood up to say good night, I thought about going with him. “Stay,” Mickey said, reaching for my arm
.

It was two in the morning. Finally, I had The Mick to myself. He suggested we’d be more comfortable in one of the modular love seats on the other side of the room. I put my notebook on the glass table and set my tape recorder to spinning. My intentions were clear. So were his
.

“C’mon,” he said, brushing the notebook aside. “Lesss do thisss at breff-fasss.”

Just as I was about to ask about his son Billy, I felt his hand on my knee, then on the inside of my thigh. A knee is open to interpretation; a thigh means business
.

His hand was thick, sure, and entitled, casually asserting its prerogative the way it would over a coffee mug. And that hand was moving inexorably upward when Mickey listed to his left and passed out dead drunk in my lap
.

I closed my eyes; the room was spinning like lemons on a one-armed bandit, but probably that was just my weight shifting beneath the heft of number 7. I was pinned in a modular love seat beneath two hundred pounds of Grade A American Hero
.

In Casino World it is always night but never dark. Just below, in the Hi-Ho Casino, bells clanged and sirens blared—someone was getting lucky. Briefly, I considered the man facedown in my lap, the thinning hair no longer bleached by the outfield sun. A road map of tiny broken blood vessels spread down the slope of his nose and over the ridge of his cheek, small breaks etched by age and hard living
.

I considered my options. Moving wasn’t one of them. That would have required a crane. He was deadweight, and he was out cold. I lacked the fortitude to dump Mickey Mantle on the smoke-stale carpet amid shards of half-eaten pretzels and twisted swizzle sticks. I told myself to look on the bright side: at least he’d passed out before he hit the jackpot
.

So I waited, assuming someone would notice. Evidence of life throbbed through the floorboards and walls. But the lounge was empty. The TV above the bar was on mute
.

The cocktail waitress—a weary AARP candidate with a lacquered beehive
that paid homage to the hotel’s tumescent tower—had last been seen disappearing through a swinging door off the kitchen. When she finally reappeared, she was intent on inflating a gigantic orb of bubble gum. Then she peered at the odd configuration on the love seat. “Oh, fuck, not again,” she said, popping a humongous bubble
.

Sighing, she pulled Mickey off me and got him upright. Together we helped him to the elevator. Mickey steadied himself against the gilt-edged mirror surrounding the elevator bank. Forehead and lips pressed to the glass, he was out on his feet
.

“He’s dead,” I thought, a surreal and fleeting moment of insight interrupted by his labored breathing
.

“Okay, so he isn’t dead.” I just wished he was
.

Each time he exhaled, the mirror fogged over, his features dissolving in a warm breathy mist. The whole day had been like that: moments of intense clarity followed by hours of reflexive obfuscation
.

When the elevator door finally opened, I pushed Mickey into the car. Bracing himself against the polished brass rail, he flashed that famous, toothsome smile
.

“You comin’ upstairs with me tonight, Jane?”

“Not tonight, Mick.”

He seemed neither surprised nor disappointed, as if the rebuff was as expected as the offer. “Oh, well,”he said, cheerfully, “y’ know what they call me, dontcha?”

“No, Mick, I don’t.”

“Well,” he drawled, “they call me Mighty Mouse. ’Cause I’m hung like him.”

He was still vertical when the door slid shut on his grin
.

I went up to my room and cried
.

Outside the window the moon rolled in on the tide. Shafts of indirect light filtered through panes of salty glass and splayed across the carpet where I’d kicked off my clothes—Loehmann’s bargain suede and a 100 percent Virgin Orlon Acrylic sweater
.

What I had seen of Mickey wasn’t what I had expected or hoped. But he had promised to meet me for breakfast—again. I wondered which guy would show up—if he showed up. One thing I knew for sure: to see Mickey clearly I needed to see him in direct light
.