The Last Boy (37 page)

This is a notion that rendered even Bouton speechless. “We were as debauched in 1963 as we were in 1965,” Bouton said. “We weren’t as good at it in 1965. We didn’t have the energy for it. Guys were older. We didn’t really lose anything on the debauchery front.”

They just lost. In 1965, the Yankees lost more games than they won for the first time since 1925. “I shoulda quit right then,” Mantle told me.

But the Yankees needed him. “He was really the only ballplayer on the club that anybody cared anything about,” said Howard Berk, a team vice president from 1967 to 1973.

Berk and company invented reasons to come to the ballpark to see him, including the first Mickey Mantle Day, held on September 17, 1965, his 2,000th major league game. The Tigers’ starting pitcher, Joe Sparma, walked off the mound to shake his hand.

Mantle asked that all donations be made to the Mickey Mantle Hodgkin’s Disease Research Foundation at St. Vincent’s Hospital, which had been dedicated the year before. Still, he received enough loot to fill two mimeographed sheets—a car, a year’s supply of gasoline and bubble gum, two rifles, two quarter horses, a mink for Merlyn, and a six-foot-long, 100-pound salami in the shape of a bat. He told the sellout crowd that he hoped to play another fifteen years.

The 1966 season was even worse. When a reporter asked Mantle in spring training how the Yankees were going to do, he replied, “We’re going to surprise some people—we’re going to finish last.”

They did—twenty-six games out of first place. Days before the All-Star Game in St. Louis, he called American League manager Sam Mele and said his legs were killing him. “Hell, yeah, take three days off,” Mele replied, replacing him on the roster with Rookie of the Year Tommie Agee.

The response was vituperative. “You’re a nigger lover, picking Agee,” a caller to Mele’s hotel room snarled. “And by the way, when you go on the field I’m going to shoot you and Tony Oliva.”

Local police and the FBI provided security, Mele said, but no peace of mind. When he delivered the starting lineup, he ran to home plate, hid himself among the men in blue, and raced back to the dugout.

Mantle played in 661 games over the last five years of his career. If they all ran together in a blur of at-bats and road trips and getaway
days, it was partly the result of the repetitive motion of eighteen years in the major leagues and partly the result of increased consumption. The longtime trainer for the Detroit Tigers regaled pitcher Mickey Lolich with a tale about the time he tried to drink Mantle and Ford under the table. There was an afternoon game the next day, and he figured he’d take one for the team. When the bar closed at 2:30
A.M.,
he bought a bottle of vodka from the barkeep and suggested a nightcap back at the hotel. “When he left at 6:30
A.M.,
Mickey and Whitey were in no condition to play baseball,” Lolich said. “He had done his job as far as he was concerned. He said, the next day Whitey pitched nine innings of shutout ball and Mantle hit two home runs.”

If the morning after was rough, the trainers provided a pharmacological pick-me-up. Greenies, the players called them. Everybody took them. Mantle, too? “By the handful,” Linz said. “Then he’d go out and play.”

Mantle’s capacity was admired, envied, and imitated—to the detriment of some of the young Yankees, who were expected to become him. “You’re going to be a helluva player,” he told Joe Pepitone when he was living with Mantle in his hotel suite. “Don’t do what I do.”

Easier said than done. Steve Whitaker fell under Mantle’s spell his rookie year after Mantle extended an unexpected and much-coveted invitation to dinner. Pretty soon, Whitaker says, they were going out every night—and staying out. Mantle made New York City feel small. He knew every restaurant and every maître d’. He introduced Whitaker to “the life,” as Linz calls it, to joints like Dudes ’N Dolls, where Goldie Hawn danced and Joe Willie Namath partied. “I didn’t care if I slept at all in New York,” Whitaker said. “It’s open 24/7, and, trust me, I closed it.”

There was a quid pro quo, though it didn’t feel like one at the time. “I was kinda like his shill, the guy to make sure nobody was hawkin’ his table,” Whitaker said. If there were women present, they had to be with him, not The Mick. The price didn’t seem high until later, when he realized the opportunity he had squandered. “In fact,” he said, “it probably was the end of my career.”

By 1967, Mantle was the only reason to go to the Stadium. The weight of the listing franchise rested uneasily on his fragile pins. He became a first baseman and kept his promise to Merlyn to hit his 500th home run on Mother’s Day which the Yankees turned into another occasion to honor him and boost attendance. “The gimmick was, every five hundredth fan entering the ballpark got an autographed ball,” Berk said. “We asked him if he’d sign. He did it. Signed for hours and hours. I got a summons from the state of New York for violating the lottery law. A five-hundred-dollar fine.”

Mantle conceded that he would never catch or match Willie Mays statistically. That debate was over. But Madison Avenue saw a different future for The Mick. George Lois, the groundbreaking art director and adman, had a certain editorial genius—his conceptual covers for
Esquire
magazine were the subject of a 2008 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He also had a keen instinct for marrying pop-culture pitchmen to unlikely clients. He put Mantle (and Joe Louis) in TV commercials for a Wall Street brokerage house. “When I came up to the big leagues, I was a shufflin’, grinnin’, head-duckin’ country boy,” Mantle said to the camera. “But I know a man down at Edwards & Hanly. I’m learnin’. I’m learnin’.” It became one of Johnny Carson’s stock lines.

Lois also put Mantle to work on behalf of the baby cereal Maypo. “Mickey was visiting me on a set for some other commercial. I said, ‘Mickey, do me a favor.’”

He handed Mantle a bat and a Yankee jersey and explained how they were going to transform Maypo into “the oatmeal cereal that heroes cry for.” All he had to do was blubber—“I want my Maypo”—when the voice-over said, “Mickey Mantle?”

Mantle boo-hooed perfectly and on cue.

“I shot that in three or four seconds,” Lois said. “The sales tripled. I hardly had to work with him at all. I gave him the shtick once or twice, and he’d give it back better. He was a natural, fluid.”

Mantle was such a hit, agents for Wilt the Stilt, Dandy Don Meredith, and The Say Hey Kid called, wanting in on the action. Mantle called,
too: “Hey, George, go fuck yourself.” It seemed that wherever he went, he elicited a chorus of “I want my Maypo.”

“He was kidding,” Lois said. “He loved it. Probably got five hundred dollars and was happy to get it.”

Mantle’s last opening day was Marty Appel’s first as an assistant to PR chief Bob Fishel. Growing up in Rockland County, New York, Appel wore his Mickey Mantle T-shirt until his mother disposed of the shreds. On his first day of work, Fishel took him down to the clubhouse to meet Mantle, leaving him alone at his empty locker, where Appel discovered his hero’s trove of hard-core porn—“guys in black masks and socks.” All he could think was, “Oh, my God, I’m looking at Mickey Mantle’s porno!”

Every day that summer, he invented a reason to consult The Mick about his fan mail, picking three or four letters or invitations from the hundred or so that arrived daily for Mantle’s inspection. “He saw through the scam and would look at me with a little smile,” Appel said. “Then he’d crumple them up and toss them into the trash. Once he got an invite to serve as a judge for the Miss Nude America pageant. He didn’t crumple that.”

When he returned from road trips, Mantle brought the unpaid “vice president of fan mail” the gift certificates he received on out-of-town post-game shows, pulling rumpled vouchers from his pockets: Brew Burger, Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, Big Yank Slacks, Midas Muffler, Getty Gasoline, and Thom McAn shoes. Some Appel kept as souvenirs; others, like the one from Thom McAn, he used. He thought of The Mick with every step he took.

Appel visited him in the clubhouse while everyone else was on the field doing the daily chores that Mantle now eschewed—stretching, running, infield, and batting practice. “That whole season was surreal to him,” Appel thought. “He just felt lost. ‘Who are these guys? What am I doing batting .238 and being a teammate of Thad Tillotson?’”

Mantle’s 1968 farewell tour of America was a welcome distraction in a year of national anguish and upheaval. In the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK, the inner-city riots and Vietnam protests,
his familiar grin—and the possibility he still brought to the plate—brought out the love.

On road trips, he disguised himself in a pair of glasses and a derby hat, his collar pulled up around his ears. Sometimes he got off the Yankees’ bus and walked the last block to the team hotel. Sometimes Whitey Ford, the Yankees’ new pitching coach, rented a car and went back to the ballpark to collect him. In New York, he shared his suite at the St. Moritz with Mike Ferraro. In the evenings, they played cards and ordered in. Going out was too much of a hassle.

Most of the eyewitnesses to his best years were gone: Kubek and Linz left after 1965; Richardson and Maris after 1966; Elston Howard was traded midway through the 1967 season. The isolation in the locker room was compounded by his frustration on the field. “He’d strike out, and he would explode,” said Ross Moschitto, who arrived in 1965. “He would come in the dugout—it didn’t matter if he had gone 3 for 4 the day before. Next time he struck out, he’d come back, and
wham
, beat the locker.”

On May 30, 1968, the 100th celebration of Memorial Day, the day the Beatles began recording the
White Album
, Yankee Stadium offered a reprise of the good old days. Mantle had one of the best days of his career. Frank Howard was stationed at first base for the Washington Senators. The starting pitcher was Joe Coleman, who had struck out Mantle four times in a row the week before. “I went to the mound and said, ‘How are you going to pitch the Big Fella?’” Howard recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to blow that dead red in that blind spot.’”

Nine innings and six Washington pitchers later, Mantle had two home runs, a double, two singles, five RBI, and three runs scored. It was the third time in his career that he went 5 for 5. He raised his average from .221 to .254.

First inning: two-run home run.

Third inning: singled and scored.

Fifth inning: home run.

Sixth inning: RBI double. “I’m holding the runner on first base,” Howard said. “He hits a line drive between me and the bag that’s no further than it is across this table. I go to stab it. If it had been hit right at me, it would have taken me to the 296-foot marker.”

Eighth inning: RBI single. “I’ve never seen five balls scalded like that in a ball game before,” Howard said. “He laid out two thousand feet of line drives.”

The scoreboard flashed the news: “Mantle’s finest game since his Triple Crown season of 1956.”

Privately, he was wistful—the performance served to remind him of what he could no longer do. One night, he asked Ferraro, “Did you ever see me run? When I could
run
?’ ”

Clark Griffith was then vice president of the Minnesota Twins, and he and Mantle had become drinking buddies. “Near the end of his career, I had a marvelous evening with him,” Griffith said. “He was hurting and in decline. He said, ‘Man, it really hurts. I just can’t do it anymore.’

“We got into a long discussion about how the game had changed. He started talking about pitchers he had to hit against in the Fifties and early Sixties, Chuck Stobbs, Spec Shea, Connie Marrero, short, round guys who didn’t throw hard—and who he has to hit against now, guys who are six foot five and throw hard. His skills had not been able to keep up with the evolution of the game. The size had gotten to him. It had literally outgrown him.”

In July, Mantle was named captain of the American League All-Star team, but he stayed in Anaheim only long enough for a quick how-do-ya-do. “All-Star Games were like a cocktail party to me and Whitey,” he told the writer Tom Callahan years later. “I got there late, missed the team picture, hurried to get dressed. They pinch-hit me in the first inning. I got dressed, got back on the helicopter, flew back to Dallas, changed clothes to play golf. I went to Preston Trail, and the game was still on the TV. Tony Perez hit a home run in the fifteenth inning. I’m damned ashamed.”

As the Yankees headed into a series at home against Cleveland on the weekend of July 19, Bill Kane, the team statistician, walked into the PR department and told Appel, “Mick’s lifetime average is going to drop under .300 this weekend unless he goes 3 for 10 or better, and he’s not gonna do that.”

He went 2 for 8. His average was .299545 at the end of play on July 21. A week later, on July 27, Mantle ceded the title of lifetime .300 hitter for good. He went 0 for 12 in his next three games, striking out four
times on July 29. As he passed pitcher Stan Bahnsen on his way back to the dugout, Mantle muttered, “This is my last year. I missed about five pitches I should have hit.”

On August 4, the Yankees held yet another day in his honor, Mickey Mantle Banner Day. The contestants with the three best entries won season tickets. All Mantle had to do was shake the winner’s hand. “The elderly star,” the
Times
called him. He sat on the dugout steps as two thousand fans paraded past him carrying signs proclaiming
I WANT TO BE JUST LIKE THE MICK
!

Five days later, he was thrown out of the game for cursing the home-plate umpire, only the seventh time he’d been ejected in eighteen years. Soon after that, Appel watched him try on a new pair of spikes in the clubhouse, tossing the old ones away with a perfect peg to the trash can. “This will be my last pair of shoes,” Mantle said. Fishel assured his concerned young assistant that Mantle had said the same thing the year before.

Six weeks passed between his 529th home run on June 29th and his 530th and 531st, against the Twins on August 10. He tied Jimmie Foxx for third place on the all-time home-run list with 534 home runs twelve days later.