The Last Boy (38 page)

On September 17, the Tigers clinched the American League pennant by beating the Yankees in Detroit—a rainout the next night enabled them to recover their senses in time to play an afternoon game on September 19. When Mantle came to bat in the eighth inning, Denny McLain walked off the mound to allow him to bask in the standing ovation offered by the meager crowd. Mantle was his hero, the reason he had become a switch-hitter in high school. McLain had already won his thirtieth game of the year, becoming the first pitcher since Dizzy Dean to do so. He could afford to be magnanimous.

None of the Tigers knew what he was thinking when he called his catcher Jim Price out to the mound. “Listen, he only needs one home run,” McLain said. “Let’s give him a shot at it. You just go behind home plate, put your glove up, and let me see if I can hit it.”

Price nodded and squatted behind the plate. Like McLain, Price idolized The Mick—“he still had that look, that Mickey Mantle look, but all he had was the look.”

As Price got down in his crouch, he gave Mantle a look. McLain gave him a batting-practice fastball.

“So the first pitch it was, like, fifty miles per hour and almost on an arc,” McLain said. “And dummy takes it for strike one. Mantle looks down at Price and said, ‘What the fuck was that?’

“And Price says, ‘I dunno.’

“So Mantle says, ‘Is he gonna do it again?’

“And Price says, ‘I dunno.’

“So Price starts trotting out to the mound. He gets about halfway, and I said—so loud the whole park can hear it, and there weren’t a lotta people in the park—‘Just tell him to be ready.’

“Mickey could certainly hear it. The dugout could hear the whole thing. So Price turns around and goes behind home plate and I throw the next pitch almost the same way but the pitch slid a little bit and he fouled it off. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, Jesus, now I got him oh and two.’

“I gotta tell you, the worst thought that went through my head is ‘I’m through fucking around with this. I’m just gonna strike him out.’”

Exasperated, McLain yelled out, “Where the hell do you want it?”

Mantle pointed to where he wanted it.

“I throw one more pitch, and he hit a line drive into the right field seats,” McLain said. “I think we all had tears in our eyes because Mickey Mantle represented the game of the 1960s right up to the day he retired. So he goes by first base, Norm Cash hits him on the ass with the glove. He goes by second base and short. ‘Nice going.’ ‘Congratulations.’ Now he gets between second and third, and he starts screaming at me, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ I’m thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m gonna get a letter from the commissioner.’

“So he hits third base, going down the third base line, and he’s still saying, ‘Thank you, thank you. I owe ya, I owe ya.’

“I says, ‘Mick, that’s enough.’

“So now he steps on home plate. The crowd is going crazy, and there’s a standing ovation.”

The entire Tigers team stood on the top step of the dugout applauding. “And he comes back out of the dugout, and don’t you know he starts coming toward the mound? I almost pooped in my pants. I just did not want him to get to the mound.”

Among the 9,063 spectators, there was some initial confusion about what had transpired. But Yankee announcers Phil Rizzuto and Frank Messer had no doubt about what they had seen. “Aw, you gotta give that McLain some credit, I wanna tell ya,” Rizzuto said.

Pepitone waited at home plate to shake Mantle’s hand. It was a tough act to follow. In the batter’s box, he motioned to McLain where he’d like to have the pitch. “He threw a ball ninety miles an hour at my head,” Pepitone said. “I went down. I get up. I look at the dugout. Mickey’s got his hand over his mouth, laughin’ his ass off.”

Not everyone was amused. McLain was cross-examined by righteous scribes defending the purity of the game and questioning Mantles right to third place on the all-time him run list. “They charged down to our clubhouse,” said Dick Tracewski. “McLain denied it, of course. What else could he do?”

A letter from baseball commissioner William Eckert arrived soon after. “Word had come to him that I was attacking the integrity of the game of baseball,” McLain said, paraphrasing the letter. “Mickey Mantle didn’t need any help with home runs, and they would start an investigation and da-da-da-da.”

Red Smith offered much-needed perspective in his column, “Sportif,” in
Women’s Wear Daily
, his flagship paper after the demise of the
Herald Tribune
: “When a guy has bought 534 drinks in the same saloon, he’s entitled to one on the house.”

After the game, Mantle autographed the ball for McLain: “Denny, thanks for one of the great moments in my entire career, Mickey.” It (and the commissioner’s letter of opprobrium) was destroyed in a house fire in 1978. Mantle sent another ball. “Until the day he died, he kept thanking me and thanking me and thanking me,” McLain said. “I said, ‘You could have popped it up. You coulda hit it on the ground. You coulda fouled it off again. You could have missed it.’

“And he says, ‘Nah, I wasn’t gonna miss the last one.’”

There was palpable relief when Mantle hit his 536th and last major league home run the next evening at Yankee Stadium with no help whatsoever from Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg. He played his last home game five days later on September 25. Mantle: 1 BB, 2 SO, 1H. The single off the Indians’ Luis Tiant was the Yankees’ only hit of the night. Later, in the
locker room, Mantle made no declaration of intent. He stuck resolutely to the facts—“I just can’t hit anymore, it seems”—and packed a bag for the last road trip of the season.

There are two kinds of baseball fans: those who bellow invective at the opposition no matter what and those who stand for a worthy adversary. On September 28, 1968, 25,534 Fenway Park congregants stood up for Mickey Mantle. Gail Mazur evoked the heterogeneous homogeneity peculiar to Red Sox fans in her gorgeous 1978 poem “Baseball”: “the four inevitable woman-hating / drunkards, yelling, hugging / each other and moving up and down / continuously for more beer / and the young wife trying to understand / what a full count could be / to please her husband happy in / his old dreams, or the little boy / in the Yankees cap already nodding / off to sleep against his father /…and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine, / screaming at the Yankee slugger / with wounded knees to break his leg.”

The old woman wasn’t at Fenway Park when Mantle walked to the plate in the top of the first inning. Ralph Houk, who had returned to the dugout in 1967, told Mantle to expect one, maybe two, at-bats in Boston. Mantle had been taking Butazolidin (phenylbutazone alka), the anti-inflammatory drug that caused the disqualification of Kentucky Derby winner Dancer’s Image that spring. By 1968, doctors knew that bute was potentially lethal to human tissue—the Dodgers’ team doctor joked it worked great, except when it killed the patient. “Ralph told him he wasn’t going to play, so he took himself off the stuff,” Gene Michael recalled.

The Yankees were accustomed to seeing him struggle up the dugout steps. If there was a railing, he made use of it. Otherwise, Andy Kosco said, “he put his bat down, used it as a cane.”

Houk wrote Mantle’s name third on the lineup card, as usual. With one out in the top of the first, he walked to the plate to face Jim Lonborg. Like Mantle, Lonborg wasn’t the player he had been. That winter, after pitching the Sox pennant-clinching game and winning the 1967 American
League Cy Young Award, he had torn up his knee while skiing. He was too worried about his future to consider Mantle’s past. “There was a sense we might not ever see him again, but I was so wrapped up in myself, you didn’t care,” Lonborg said. “I had no sense of history.”

Going over the lineup before the game with his catcher, Haywood Sullivan, Lonborg resolved to “run hard stuff in on him,” and not leave it out over the plate, as he had eight days earlier in New York. “We knew he couldn’t get around on the ball,” Lonborg said.

Indeed, he couldn’t, and he cracked his bat trying. The tepid pop-up to shortstop Rico Petrocelli was routine, an easy out. Lonborg’s friend sitting in a field box between third and home snapped a picture at that last moment of contact and gave it to him as a memento of an occasion whose significance he did not yet fully appreciate.

Baseball has rituals for everything, and its choreography of farewell has been long established. So, after the third out in the top of the first inning, Mantle went out to first base, firing the ball around the horn and accepting the practice throws sent his way. On the mound, Mel Stottlemyre threw his last warm-up pitch. The batter was announced. Then there was a pause as a defensive substitution for the Yankees was announced. Kosco trotted onto the field; Mantle limped off it. “Thank you,” Kosco said. “Thank you for everything, Mick.”

“He just smiled,” Kosco said.

He turned to watch as Mantle crossed the baseline accompanied by a standing ovation from all of Fenway Park. It was then that Lonborg realized the import of the moment. “We had to wait a minute for the crowd to acknowledge him,” he said. “Red Sox fans don’t always acquit themselves well in those circumstances. That’s when it dawned on a lot of us that this might be the last of Mickey.”

On Monday morning, Yankee batboy Elliot Ashby presented Marty Appel with a cracked, 31-ounce, model S2 Louisville Slugger, making good on an early-season promise to deliver an ash souvenir. Neither of them realized that it was Mantle’s last game-used bat or what it might be worth until Appel sold it in 1997. He tried and failed to locate Ashby to share in his good fortune. The bat paid for three semesters of his son’s college tuition.

In February 1969, Mantle made his annual pilgrimage to spring training, having delayed the inevitable in deference to the Yankees’ desire to use his name for season ticket sales and in deference to the leadership of the Major League Baseball Players Association, which wanted to use his name in negotiations with the owners. “We asked him not to tell anyone he was going to retire,” said Marvin Miller, former director of the MLBPA.

Miller wasn’t optimistic, given what he had heard about the anti-labor sentiments Mantle had absorbed as a boy in the Tri-State Mining District. “But he agreed with alacrity,” Miller said. “He said if it would help other players, absolutely. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Mickey and Merlyn checked into the Yankee Clipper in Fort Lauderdale on Friday afternoon, February 28. Sitting by the pool, she told clubhouse man Mickey Rendine, “My husband knows he can’t play.”

Houk tried to persuade him otherwise. The Yankees needed him. The Major would take care of him. Bob Fishel related the conversation later to Howard Berk. “He said, ‘I can’t do it anymore,’” Berk said. “ ‘My body doesn’t respond.’ Ralph said, ‘You know I’ll never let you embarrass yourself. I’ll handle it.’

“He thought about it and said no.”

On Saturday, March 1, the Yankees called a press conference. Mantle’s expression was as somber as his plaid sports coat was loud. “I don’t hit the ball when I need to. I can’t score from second when I need to. I can’t steal when I need to.”

His uniform was hanging in his locker when he went to the clubhouse to gather his things. He gave the ribbons of unused Conco tape to Pete Previte to give to trainer Joe Soares. He took his last pair of spikes for Mickey, Jr., who had gone out for the baseball team at the military academy he was attending in Hollywood, Florida.

In the days that followed, the press box filed its many encomiums. Perhaps Jimmy Cannon said it best: “It is as though someone stole fifty floors out of the Empire State Building.”

But it took a poet to capture the import of the moment for Mantle.

“The game of baseball is not a metaphor / and I know it’s not really
life,” Gail Mazur wrote. “…and / the order of the ball game, / the firm structure with the mystery / of accidents always contained” is “not the wild field we wander in.”

For eighteen years, that firm structure had contained Mantle’s demons, structured his dread, and ordered his days. Now, at age thirty-seven, he was free—too free—to wander in wild fields.

Atlantic City, April 1983

B
efore he passed out in my lap, Mickey promised to meet me for breakfast at 8
A.M.
I wasn’t sure he’d show and I wasn’t sure what I’d do if he did. I had a story I couldn’t write and questions I hadn’t asked. I went to bed with a headache and woke up with an empty notebook.

He was waiting for me in a booth in the coffee shop above the Hi-Ho Casino. He looked up from a greasy, laminated menu, peering through a pair of dime-store reading glasses, half spectacles that magnified the broken capillaries in the once-hawkish batting eye. “I wake up most every day at 5:30 or 6:00
A.M
.,” he said. “All those dreams.”

A medley of recurring nightmares that make the long nights longer.
Missed trains, missed planes, missed curfews—missed opportunities.
“The hard part is just getting through it,” he said.

Buses don’t stop. Fly balls don’t fly. Doors no longer open for The Mick.
“I always felt I should have played longer.”

He hovers above a chiseled tombstone—
HERE LIES MICKEY CHARLES MANTLE: BANNED FROM BASEBALL
. He’s banished from heaven, too. Saint Peter meets him at the Pearly Gates and delivers the bad news. “Well, Mick, because of the way you acted on earth, you can’t come in here. But before you go, could you autograph these six dozen baseballs?’”

That one started in the hospital.

Diamond dreams: can’t buy a hit, can’t get to first base. And if he does get in, say in the late innings—can you hit, Mick?—all he sees are fast-balls. Fastballs he can’t turn on. Fastballs he can’t duck. Fastballs aimed at his head. There’s one where he gets his bat on the ball, skies it to the right fielder, and gets thrown out at first base.

The team bus leaves without him.

In the night, he rides the pines. Sweet dreams are few. There is one.

He’s in the Astrodome, where he hit the world’s first indoor home run, when the big blue 7 was still jumping off his back. He can still hit ’em where they ain’t, where baseballs have never gone before. He circles the bases—and keeps circling them—thinking, “This is the way it should be.”

“Then there’s that one where I’m trying to get to the ballpark.”

He’s in a cab racing toward the Stadium—late but in uniform. He hears Bob Sheppard calling his name. “Number seven, Mickey Mantle! Center field, number seven.” The attendant at the players’ entrance doesn’t recognize him. He’s turned away at every gate. Billy and Whitey and Casey are waiting for him on the other side of the fence. He tries to crawl under but he’s too fat to squeeze through. Halfway in, halfway out, he gets stuck between past and present.

“I don’t need anyone to analyze that,” he said, glancing at me from beneath the half specs perched on a well-cured nose. “I got one where my golf ball is up against a wall or a fence and I can’t get a back swing. And another I’m going pole vaulting…”

He’s gliding down the runway with the pole in his hands, and he’s running as fast as he ever could. He plants the pole and thrusts himself high into the air, soaring above the bar.

“When I get to the top it’s like fifty stories high, and you look down and there ain’t nothin’. And you think you’re gonna die.”

He’s in free fall, plummeting, down, down, down. He sees the people
looking up at him. But there isn’t anything anyone can do except watch him fall out of the sky.

“Then I wake up,” he told me, “sit straight up, sweating.”

Home in Dallas, in the dark middle of the night, he takes refuge in the trophy room that Merlyn did up with pinstriped flannel on the walls, one whole wall plastered floor to ceiling with Mickey Mantle magazine covers. The shelves bulge with the jewels of accomplishment, the Triple Crown, the Gold Glove, the Hickok Belt, three Most Valuable Player trophies, a golf ball that traveled to the moon with Alan Shepard, and scrapbooks assembled with glue and ardor by fans who have outgrown them. He’s amazed they care enough to send them.
I was just a fuckin’ ballplayer.
He doesn’t recognize himself in their avid eyes or see his likeness in the remnants of the frayed, yellow newsprint they collected.

“It’s like I’m reading about somebody else,” he said.

Mickey pulled his head out of the past when a man approached the table. “Hey, Mickey Mantle! I saw you strike out five times in 1950 against Mel Parnell!”

Mickey nodded and smiled, and gave the guy an autograph. “There’s an example of being nice,” he said. “I wasn’t even there in 1950, and it wasn’t Mel Parnell. It was 1951, and it was Walt Masterson.”

He wasn’t always patient with such intrusions. Like the time in Minneapolis when the mother of little boy with a broken arm stopped him en route to the team bus and asked him to sign her son’s cast. “Let me know when he breaks the other one,” Mickey told her.

He was in a hurry then. “I wasn’t a real nice guy, probably,” he said.

I told him I was at the Stadium that raw May night in 1962 when he collapsed in the baseline like roadkill and about the Faustian agreement I had made with my mother in order to attend the game. My grandfather, a manic-depressive immigrant tailor, had fashioned two wool plaid skirts for me, one in sepia tones of beige, brown, and gold; the other in Christmas-tree red and green, perfect for Hanukkah. They were reversible and indestructible. They went with everything and nothing. Their oscillating hems attested to his ups and downs. My mother exacted an ugly price: wear one of these atrocities or forget the sleepover at my grandmother’s after the game. I chose the more muted tones and an overly generous straw-colored Irish cable-knit sweater worn over a white turtleneck. I looked like a prepubescent haystack. But I did it for The Mick.

He squirmed the way he always did when people told him he was their hero. And squirmed more when I told him about another time when I waited by the players’ gate, clinging to a blue police sawhorse, hoping for an autograph. He didn’t stop. He farted in my face. He was a regular MVP of flatulence
—
a ventriloquist, even. He could cut ’em on cue.

“What were you thinking?” I demanded. “What kind of an adult acts like this?”

If I’d been a guy he’d probably have told me to go fuck myself. Instead, a look of wounded incredulity passed over his face. “Well, hell, I’ll give you an autograph now.”

Signing his name had become a default mode of apology. Out came the signing pen and an eight-by-ten glossy, a headshot of the aging slugger resplendent in a fuchsia golf shirt: Mickey Mantle in the pink. “To Jane, Sorry I farted. Your friend, Mick.”

He said he had a headache and ordered a beer. I gave him two aspirin. He didn’t want to answer any more questions. A limo was coming to get him at 11
A.M.
He said we could talk in the car on the way to the airport in Philadelphia. I decided to wait to deliver the high, hard one.

“So who’s better? Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays?”

“Fuckin’ Willie,” he replied.

“That’s what my father said.”

“If you didn’t know either one of us and you wanted to know who’s better, Willie or Mickey, and you opened the record book, what would it say? I guess Willie. Ya have to go by the bottom line. I don’t alibi. I played in a lot more World Series games. I feel when I was good I was better. Willie was probably about the best overall player I ever saw in my era. Him and Hank Aaron, neither one ever got hurt. He was a lot better fielder than I was. When I was healthy and going good, I was a better offensive player. And I played in a terrible ballpark for me. If I played in Atlanta County Fulton Stadium there’s no telling, I might have hit eight hundred home runs. Baseball was easy for him. Willie loved it. You could see it in him. I did too, when I felt good.”

What about the injuries? The knees, the hamstrings, the shoulder, the spike caught in the drain, the what-ifs?

“That was overplayed. A lot of times I felt great. I wasn’t always a one-legged guy who looked like a mummy. I never had any problem from the waist

up. I didn’t hurt as bad as everybody thought I did. I still ran down to first base faster than anyone. I played twenty-four hundred games. That’s three hundred more than anyone ever played for the Yankees. Out of eighteen years, probably fourteen was good. Just not the last four. Well, I don’t know if I was ever a hundred percent. I was eighty percent.

“It does bug me that I’m not up in the record books more. Every time I’m introduced and someone days, ‘Lifetime .298 hitter,’ I think, ‘You cocksucker, quit saying that!’”

He began to hum. “Have you ever heard that song ‘Willie, Mickey, and The Duke’? That guy made some money.”

The refrain was all he knew of Terry Cashman’s 1981 anthem to Fifties baseball. Say, hey. Say, hey. Say, hey. “I know all the words to ‘I Love Mickey.’ Teresa Brewer wrote it.”

They recorded it together
—
in counterpoint
—
in 1956.

“I love Mickey.”

“Mickey who?”

“You know who, the fella with the celebrated swing.”

It reached number 51 on the charts.

“Betcha don’t know what’s on the B side? ‘Keep Your Cotton Pickin’ Paddies offa My Heart.’ ”

It was the year he won the Triple Crown. He was on the way up. Life was a dream.