The Last Boy (34 page)

The Yankees insisted that it had been his decision. Ten days later, they were back in first place and he was back in a groove. He celebrated his independence from the disabled list by going 6 for 10 with 5 home runs, 6 walks, and 7 RBI during a July Fourth series against the Kansas City A’s. He hit .340 for the month with twenty-five RBIs. On August 5, he had a slugging percentage of .635. “If Mantle doesn’t get the MVP award this year—and get it unceremoniously—there should be an investigation,” Bill Veeck, baseball’s beloved renegade declared.

He finished the year with 89 RBI and 30 home runs, in 123 games. He led the American League in on-base percentage (.486) and slugging percentage (.605) and won the only Gold Glove of his career despite playing twenty-three games in right field. He finished second in the league in batting with an average of .323, despite the help of Jim Ogle of the Newark
Star-Ledger
, who generously awarded him a base hit one day late in the season, when he was doubling as official scorer. Seeing his
benefactor in the locker room later, Mantle brandished a stack of World Series tickets and an impish grin. “How many do you want?”

Mantle’s sense of humor was severely tested during the Series against the Giants in which he hit .120 and drove in exactly one run. At one postgame news conference a reporter solicited his opinion on the quality of the baseballs in use. “Are the balls livelier?” The timing was odd, given his dead bat. “No, but the players are,” Mantle replied.

In the end, the Yankees prevailed because Ralph Terry won two games, exorcising the ghost of Bill Mazeroski, and because Bobby Richardson stepped in front of Willie McCovey’s line drive with the tying run at third base in the bottom of the ninth of game 7.

Mantle was at a banquet in Terry’s honor in Kansas when word came that he had won his third Most Valuable Player Award. He said Bobby Richardson deserved it more.

Mantle was a teammate for life in an era when teammates remained teammates long after their playing days ended. They were his most successful and most enduring relationships. When the memorabilia industry crystallized around him in the Eighties, Mantle brought his teammates along to autograph shows and hired them as counselors at his fantasy camp, where they congregated in old clubhouses, filling out newly issued pinstripes that fit more snugly than they might have liked. Tom Tresh was with him at a card show in Memphis, Tennessee, when his wife called to say that they had become grandparents. The boy Tresh had named after Mantle had named his new son, Tommy, for his dad. “I’ll get a bottle of champagne,” Mantle said. “We’ll give him a toast.”

“So he calls down and gets a bottle of Dom Perignon, about a hundred and a half at that time,” Tresh recalled. “I call my son and congratulate him. Mickey gets on the phone and congratulates him. After we hung up, Mickey took that bottle—it was a green bottle with a gold shield on it—and took a gold marker and wrote, ‘Happy Birthday, Tommy, we had one for you. Mickey Mantle.’ And we tied the cork on it.”

The cork stayed in the family. The outfielder’s glove Mantle gave Tresh in 1962 was sold. It brought enough for a down payment on a cottage in the country.

On the morning of May 22, New York City threw a ticker-tape parade for Gordon Cooper, the last of the Mercury Seven astronauts to fly into space. Four million New Yorkers jammed the Canyon of Heroes to welcome him home after twenty-two orbits of the earth. Bill Fischer, a pitcher for the visiting Kansas City A’s, was invited to the fiftieth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper to watch the parade for Cooper, another Oklahoma boy with the right stuff.

Fischer was having a very good year; his record was 6–0. Mantle was thriving. The Yankees had celebrated the Most Valuable Player Award with a $100,000 contract, making him only the fifth player in major league history to reach that financial pinnacle. The bosses were so proud of their largesse that they called a press conference to witness his signature. Red Smith wrote that Mantle looked “healthy and expensive.”

The night before he had smashed two home runs, driving in five of the Yankees’ seven runs, and smashed his bat in frustration at not doing more. His batting average was .303.

The A’s manager, Eddie Lopat, was an old Yankee—a junkballer about whom Stengel had once said, “He looks like he’s throwing wads of tissue paper.” He had a “phobia about Mantle beating him,” Fischer said. “He had a rule that he wasn’t going to let Mantle tie or win a game.”

There was a mandatory $200 fine for any pitcher who allowed him to do so.

As cleanup crews were contending with 2,900 tons of ticker tape on lower Broadway, Fischer was preparing for another evening in the bullpen, where he had spent most of his career. He was nearing the end; Tony LaRussa, an eighteen-year-old bonus baby, was preparing for another night on the bench. He appeared in only thirty-four games in 1963—and this wasn’t one of them—but rules governing the amateur draft meant that the A’s had to keep him on the major league roster. He watched as three A’s pitchers hewed to their manager’s admonition, and walked Mantle three times. “For some reason Eddie got it into his head he was going to bench jockey, agitating Mickey, and that it was going to work to our benefit,” LaRussa said. “The dugout was close to the plate. He yelled something like ‘This is not your day. You don’t have a chance.’

“Mantle just looked over and laughed.”

Why not? The Yankees were leading 7–0 in the top of the eighth inning. Bored spectators began to chant—“Let’s go, Mets!”—inspiring the historically feckless A’s to score six runs. Mantle was no longer amused by Lopat’s remarks.

You’re washed up. We got your number. You stink.

“You could tell, by the third at-bat, Mickey had enough,” LaRussa said. “Eddie crossed the line. It was personal.”

Fischer was summoned from the bullpen in the bottom of the eighth and retired the Yankees in order. New York was one out from victory when Ed Charles came to the plate in the top of the ninth inning. Charles was a poet of the infield; he coped with racism by writing verse during eight long years as a minor leaguer in the segregated South. Teammates called him “The Glider” because of his graceful footwork. Mantle called
him “Muffie,” baseball talk for a less-than-comely female. Muffie tied the game at 7–7 with his second home run of the year.

Fischer walked Mantle leading off in the bottom of the ninth. “I pitched around him,” he said. “They bunted him over.” But he didn’t score, and the game went into extra innings. Fischer stranded another runner in scoring position in the bottom of the tenth.

It was a school night, a Wednesday. There were 10,312 people in the Stadium when the game began and notably fewer than that when Mantle led off again in the bottom of the eleventh inning. The upper deck in right field was almost empty.

The A’s defense shifted toward right field, expecting Mantle to pull the ball. Center fielder Bobby Del Greco was stationed almost in front of the Yankee bullpen. Right fielder George Alusik was playing twenty to twenty-five feet in front of the outfield wall and about that far from the foul line. Fischer was not supposed to give Mantle anything to hit—to walk him intentionally if he had to. “I threw him four straight curve-balls,” he said. “He hit one of them a little, a weak grounder foul by inches. Haywood Sullivan, my catcher, called for another one. I shook him off. I figured he would know it was coming.”

The count was 2–2. Alusik assumed baseball’s age-old posture of patience: hands on knees, he awaited the pitch. From the visiting dugout, Lopat continued his verbal assault.

You got no bat speed. You can’t get it out of the outfield. You were up too late last night.

“Eddie’s really having a good time,” LaRussa said. “He thinks he’s doing something good. Mickey literally stepped out, gave him a look. You know that phrase, if looks could kill? That vein in the side of his neck when you get angry—that vein was
out
there and the adrenaline was pumping, he was so pissed off. When he cranked up to stride into that ball, he unleashed every bit of that anger and frustration. He made a perfect swing, everything working.”

The ball creased the night air, heading straight for the copper frieze atop the third deck in right field. It soared over Norm Siebern’s head at first base. “Ten, twelve, fifteen feet over my head,” he said. “I couldn’t leap up and get it—it was too high for that. So I just turned right around and watched. It just kept going up and up and up and up.”

No one had ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. Mantle had come closest in May 1956 against Pedro Ramos. The faithful had been waiting ever since for the next assault on the Stadium facade. “My God, that’s it!” Yogi Berra yelped, leading a charge up the dugout steps.

“As Mantle came around, he looks around to Eddie and he just looks in,” LaRussa said. “Eddie didn’t say a word. He just looked at him like ‘You know what, that one was for you. You should have kept your mouth shut.’”

The flight path took the ball directly over Alusik’s head in right field, maybe a smidge to his left. He never moved, except to straighten with the pitch. His reflexes were no match for the speed of the ball. He leaned back, glancing over his shoulder just as the ball met the frieze. “I knew where she was headed,” he said.

Joe Pepitone, who was at the bat rack in the Yankee dugout, swore, “It hit so hard, you could hear
boom
!”

Alusik didn’t linger in the outfield. He returned to the bench disgusted because he thought Fischer had “taken it upon himself to pitch to the guy.”

LaRussa said he also returned hard evidence of the force of the collision on his person. “He told us that it was hit so hard—it shook so much stuff—that he got showered with pigeon shit,” LaRussa said.”

In the locker room, Lopat loudly excoriated Fischer and the fates. “It was like he was screaming into the wind because everybody else was laughing,” Fischer said. “It was so funny. Every time Ed would look at a guy, the guy would bust out laughing.”

He fined Fischer $200 for allowing Mantle to beat them.

Mantle always said that it was the hardest ball he’d ever hit. “The one in Washington I had a 50-mile-per-hour tailwind,” he said. “The one off Ramos was coming down more.”

This was the only time the bat actually bent in his hands.

Sportswriters exhausted their arsenal of military clichés. It was unanimously ballistic—a rocket, a bullet, a blast, a shot.

Again, the fictive tape measures unwound. The
New York Times
said the ball hit the facade “374 feet away from the batter’s box and 108 ft and 1 inch above the playing field.”

The
New York Post
said it traveled “at least 475 feet,” sailing “over
the 367 marker, about 100 feet high, and was moving in a 45-degree trajectory.”

Newsday
said it soared “380 feet and was five feet from the top of the facade.”

James E. McDonald, a professor at the Institute of Aeronautical Research at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press the ball was traveling 230 miles per hour and would have gone 620 feet uninterrupted. Clete Boyer offered a more accessible calculus: “That’s a three-dollar cab ride up there.”

The speculation still excites a frenzied legion of baseball paleontologists: Was the ball still rising when it collided with the frieze? And if so, how far would it have traveled if uninterrupted by the Stadium’s infrastructure? Where would it have come to rest?

Interested parties on the field, in the dugouts, and in the bullpen testified with vehement unanimity. “It
wasn’t
coming down,” Fischer said. “It was going up, like a jet taking off.”

Only two of the next-day stories addressed what became of the beleagured ball. The
Daily News
said, “It dropped down into the upper deck.” The
Post
said, “It bounced against a seat and came back down on the field.” Pepitone said, “It bounced back about halfway between the right fielder and the second baseman. The trajectory coming back, it was like a line drive back to the field. It was, like, boom, boom.”

He saw second baseman Jerry Lumpe trot over to retrieve the ball and saw it when it was delivered to the dugout. “The ball was scraped,” Pepitone said. “Really scraped it bad. It looked like the stitching was up.”

Lumpe has no such recollection. “I know I saw it bounce back in. I don’t remember picking it up. To me it wasn’t that big of a deal. He hit a lot of ’em a long ways.”

He sighed. “Probably Alusik picked it up.”

For nearly four decades, Alusik remained largely silent on the matter, perhaps because his phone number was often unlisted. He was not happy, when found, to hear that Tony LaRussa, a future Hall of Fame manager, was telling people that George Alusik had come back to the dugout covered in bird shit. “I’m not calling him a liar,” Alusik said. “I never came in the clubhouse with any bird crap on me.”

But what about the ball? Did he see it? Was
it
covered in bird shit?
“The ball landed by my left side,” he said. “I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I probably have it someplace. I’ll have to look around.”

The next day he called back to apologize. His lady friend, a churchgoing woman, had told him it was wrong to trifle with history. “I just laid it on a little bit,” Alusik said. “Like these guys are layin’ their bird stuff on me.”

This is what really happened:

Alusik saw the ball smash into the frieze and heard a fluttering of wings. “There was a darkness underneath the stadium lights,” he said. They cast illumination onto the field, not downward into the copper filigree. The sheltering darkness was home to something—birds, bats, he wasn’t sure what. “I looked up and saw something fly out. He must have woke ’em all up.”

He counted five or six winged creatures “flying for their lives and probably wondering, ‘What the hell happened?’ They were probably bitchin’ about that one, the birds.”

He didn’t see the ball ricochet. He didn’t see it land, and he didn’t pick it up and put it in his pocket. “Matter of fact, nowhere on the field did I observe it,” he said.

He, too, assumed it had dropped into the stands.

Sometime after midnight, still smiling and still in his undershirt, Mantle posed at his locker with the well-traveled ball, pressed against the sweet spot of Dale Long’s borrowed bat.

A half century later, the Facade Home Run remains the subject of obsessive scientific inquiry for Mantleologists. Bruce Orser is among the most dogged of investigators. He sent detailed questionnaires to players on the field that night, most of whom did not reply. Hector Lopez told him he thought the ball hit the facade straight on. “But everyone else says it’s going up,” Orser said.

The inquiry taxes memory and patience. “The guy had all these questions: Did it do this? Did it do that?” said Lumpe. “I have no recollection of where it went or what happened to it. I wish I did. What does it matter if I picked the ball up or not?”

It matters, home run historians say, because if he picked it up—and if he could pinpoint exactly where he did so—they might be able to deduce its velocity off the bat and thus its hypothetical unimpeded distance.

In addition to measuring every major league homer, Greg “The Hit Tracker” Rybarczyk has also measured a handful of “historical home runs” for which there is sufficient data. According to his analysis, the ball struck the facade 102 feet above field level, 363 feet horizontally from home plate, reaching an apex of 108 feet. If, as he believes, the ball left Mantle’s bat at a 27-degree angle, traveling at a speed of 126 miles per hour, it would have gone 509 feet, landing on the roof of Ballpark Lanes, a bowling alley occupying the block between 157th and 158th Streets on River Avenue. (A simulation of the trajectory can be viewed at www.digitalcentrality.com/Yankee_Stadium/video.html under mantle_hr_63.) Rybarczyk does not believe the ball was rising when the copper frieze interrupted its flight.

The morning papers were full of astronomical allusions and puns. They called the home run a “space shot.” They called it “Gordo’s day and Mickey’s night.” The headline Fischer remembered said, “Mantle Sends Ball into Orbit.” When the A’s took off for Los Angeles two days later, Bobby Del Greco was sitting in the window seat beside him. “We were, like, at 30,000 feet, and I started pointing toward the window,” Del Greco said. “He said, ‘What’s the matter?’

“I said, ‘Mickey Mantle’s ball just went over the plane!’”

“Is Mantle off on another batting spree?” the
New York Times
wondered. “Every so often the Yankees mighty man of muscle, finding himself in one of those infrequent periods where he manages to keep himself in one piece, goes off on a hitting binge.”

The answer came two weeks later in Baltimore.

There was no room on the bench when Mantle emerged from the tunnel for the second game of the first “crucial series” of the season. The dugout was crowded with writers and players waiting out a rain delay and anticipating a cow-milking contest—Miss Udderly Fascinating lived up to her billing. “You’d think one of you writers would get up and let a $100,000 ballplayer sit down,” one Yankee said, noting the breach of dugout etiquette.

In the top of the sixth, Mantle doubled and scored when Roger Maris hit a home run to give the Yankees a 3–2 lead. When, in the bottom of the inning, Mantle set off after a high fly ball hit to deep center field by Brooks Robinson, he was trying to keep the Yankees ahead in the game and put them back in first place, wrested away by the Orioles the night before.