The Last Boy (25 page)

In 1957, Mantle won his second consecutive Most Valuable Player
Award and became only the fourth player in major league history to get on base more than half the time over the course of a season. In June, he batted over .400. On July 26, he hit his 200th career home run. He was three years younger than Babe Ruth when he reached the same landmark. He was hitting .369, with 34 home runs and 91 RBIs, when he landed in the hospital on September 6 with what the Yankees called “shin splints.” He had injured himself playing golf with Sturdivant on a day off, which, unlike imbibing, was against Stengel’s rules. Hurling his putter in frustration, he had broken a tree limb and sliced his leg down to the shinbone. He missed five games, his first of the season.

While he was recuperating at Lenox Hill Hospital, America was reading about the hijinks in Hank Bauer’s apartment above the Stage Deli in 1951 in the September issue of
Confidential
magazine: “There was no umpire around when…These Yankees Had a Ball!”

Mantle, Martin, and Bauer appeared arm in arm, grin to grin beneath the cover line. The story was a follow-up to Holly Brooke’s spring exposé and Dorothy Kilgallen’s May column in the
Journal-American
. It detailed the fun and games that had taken place in the apartment above the famous deli during Mantle’s rookie season.

“While waiting to go to bat, the Mick knocked off a few more highballs, then suddenly got up, started to turn white and staggered to the bathroom,”
Confidential
said. “Now games have been called on account of rain, cold weather or wet ground, but this is the first time one was called because it was drunk out. When Mickey collapsed, they had to call off the game in the bedroom so Mickey could be put to bed.”

His girl went home alone when “he dozed off.”

None of New York’s family newspapers pursued the story. The sporting press confined itself to musing about who would be the American League’s Most Valuable Player—Mantle or Ted Williams—and the World Series matchup between the Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves.

Yet Billy Martin’s birthday party was a watershed event, and not just because it gave Weiss the occasion to trade him. It was the day sportswriting began to grow up. The era of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil could not withstand TV’s increasingly intrusive cathode glare or the skepticism of an irreverent cohort of young sportswriters for whom questioning authority was a generational prerogative.

Weiss saw the printer’s ink on the wall and he was plenty worried. “People have been looking for incidents since the Copa affair,” he lamented in a 1960 interview with
The Saturday Evening Post
. “A national TV network was considering the Yankees for the same sort of inspirational show that is built around institutions like West Point and Annapolis. This might have steered some good prospects to us, and the players could have made some extra money appearing on the program, but the project was shelved after the Copa affair.”

The Russians launched the first Sputnik satellite on opening day of the 1957 World Series. Mantle crash-landed in game 3. Trapped off second base on a pick-off play in the top of the first inning, he slid back in beneath Red Schoendienst’s legs as the ball sailed into center field. Gazing in supplication at the ump, Mantle waited for adjudication, Schoendienst draped over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, until he saw where the ball had landed. “The ball was thrown high and away,” Schoendienst recalled. “I went up for it. I landed on Mickey. I stayed on top of him.”

Mantle shook him off like a bedbug, went to third, and scored the Yankees’ first run; later he singled and hit a home run. But he was badly injured on the play. No one realized how badly his shoulder hurt until Stengel removed him in the top of the tenth inning the next day. The
New York Times
headline reported:

Bombers Face Prospect of Losing Mantle for Fifth Series Contest; Shoulder Injury Handicap to Star; Mantle’s Inability to Throw with Usual Strength Leads to Removal in Tenth.

Mantle sat out game 5, the ninth World Series game he had missed due to injury, and the Yankees lost 1–0. They won game 6 without him but lost game 7—and the World Series—despite his return to the lineup. His throwing arm would never be the same.

The winter of 1957 would be his last in Commerce. Mickey Charles and his hometown had grown apart. “Off-ish to the community,” is how
local Frank Wood described him. Half the folks in town wanted no part of him and the other half thought he didn’t give back enough. What had become of the boy who never drank, never smoked, never talked back, the all-American face in the magazine ad for the Breakfast of Champions?
BillyMartinandWhiteyFord
, that’s what many of the townfolks said, expectorating their names like a foul stream of chaw.

Harold Youngman, Mantle’s patron, did everything he could to entice him to stay. He gave him a house in Joplin, Missouri, and a 25 percent ownership stake in a new Holiday Inn he was building there—Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn, the only Holiday Inn in the U.S. of A. named after an actual person, Mantle bragged. The bar was called the Dugout.

Later, Youngman outfitted a heated fishing cabin built over a pond on his ranch for Mantle and his pals. It had a hole in the floor and an electrified winch that raised the lid so they could fish in winter without getting cold, wet, or dirty. The foreman, Charles Brinkley, stocked the refrigerator and the pond.

Youngman pleaded with Mantle not to quit his roots. He talked up the benefits of being a big fish in that small pond. But Mantle was gaited to the rhythm of big city life. Moving to Dallas made it easier to fly off to all those banquets, photo shoots, and beauty contests he was asked to judge. Merlyn went shopping for Texas real estate. Mantle leased a bowling alley, where he would put his brothers to work and show everyone he could manage affairs on his own.

After the Yankees avenged themselves against the Braves in the 1958 World Series, Mantle went to Dallas to see the new $59,500 home Merlyn had selected, the one important decision in their marriage he allowed her to make. The “Mantle manor,”
The Sporting News
called it. Furnished in the French Provincial style, it was located in the neighborhood where George W. Bush would settle after he left the White House.

The move distanced Mantle from Youngman’s well-intentioned but paternalistic control and deprived him of much-needed advice. In cutting ties with the place where he made most sense to himself, he became a celebrity nomad, a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. Mantle later said leaving Commerce was the biggest mistake of his life. “Guided differently, he could have done better for himself as a human being,” Jerry Coleman said. “He would have liked himself more.”

In the bottom of the sixth inning of his 1,352nd major league game—the second game of a Sunday doubleheader against the Washington Senators—Mantle bounced a ball down the third base line. The score was 1–1. Hector Lopez was on first base. The Stadium was half full.

They witnessed the unthinkable: the fastest man in the major leagues, who ran harder than anyone else no matter how much it hurt to do so, did not run. He jogged down the line. And he didn’t arrive in time. The Senators turned a potential rally into an easy, inning-ending double play. Upstairs in the press box, reporters sighed.
Mantle’s hurt again
.

But he wasn’t. Casey Stengel yanked him from the lineup and dressed him down with an unprecedented dugout rebuke. “Quitter!” shouted a man in the stands. Mantle kicked the water cooler en route to the clubhouse. The indignity of losing a doubleheader to the woeful Nats was compounded by the fact that the second loss dropped the Yankees into third place, where they had finished the year before. Worse, Roger Maris
had been injured sliding into second base in an attempt to break up a double play on the previous play. A knee to the ribs had sent him to the hospital for X-rays. The contrast between Maris’s fierce take-out slide and Mantle’s nonchalant sally was glaring.

When a very long day of baseball finally ended at 10:29
P.M.,
reporters found Stengel in his office, naked and fuming.
Who does he think he is? Superman? Well, he’s not
. Cooling his managerial prerogatives in the shower, he hollered over the spray that there would be consequences. A fine, perhaps. Maybe a suspension. “It’s up to me,” he declared, seizing the opportunity to remind everyone he was still in charge even if he was sixty-nine years old.

Mantle answered questions with monosyllables and shrugs. “ ‘Why did you leave the game?’”
Daily News
columnist Dick Young asked. “ ‘Was it your idea or his?’” “ ‘It must have been his,’” Mick said with a smile. “ ‘It sure wasn’t mine.’”

Whitey Ford took up for him, explaining that the error had been one of inattention, not lack of effort, a clubhouse mortal sin. Mantle thought there were two outs, he said. But anonymous gripes made their way into print for the first time. “If he’s hurt, that’s one thing, but I don’t think he’s hurt,” one veteran told the
New York Post
. “He certainly would have beaten that ball out if he’d run. When you’re making $60,000, you just can’t do that in front of a crowd like that.”

“Maybe it’ll wake him up,” another teammate said.

Ryne Duren, who arrived in the trade that sent Martin into exile in Kansas City, found Mantle at his locker, pouting and mad as hell—at himself. “I’ve never seen him angry at anybody
other
than himself,” Lopez said.

It was one of the traits the Yankees appreciated most. He never showed anyone up, never called anyone out, never blamed anyone but himself. “When you’re that intense, sometimes you’re too hard on yourself,” Eli Grba said. “You beat yourself to death. And he did.”

Duren backed his car up to the police barricade as always in order to minimize the gauntlet Mantle had to run from the players’ gate. He sprinted to the car. Duren gunned the engine. They often stopped for a pop or two on the way home. Duren was accustomed to hearing Mantle’s muttered imprecations aimed at the manager: “Old gimpy-legged bastard,
sonofabitch.” This time, Duren said, “Mickey didn’t say a word except ‘Turn here’ and ‘Turn there.’”

He directed Duren to a tavern on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, one of the few Duren didn’t know. Duren had tried and failed to get sober the year before. He wasn’t ready to take the twelve steps required by Alcoholics Anonymous. “He ordered a double shot,” Duren recalled. “I think it was bourbon. He slugged that down and said, ‘Give me a double.’ And the guy poured him at least two more jiggers in that one, and he threw that one down. He wanted that anesthetic feeling up there in the prefrontal lobe.”

Duren counted four double shots in the half hour or so they stayed at the bar. Mantle wasn’t falling-down drunk when Duren dropped him off at home. “But he got the fix he needed,” Duren said.

Talking about it was not an option. Talking wasn’t the Mantle family way. Merlyn had long observed her husband’s inability to show his feelings and his increasingly quick reflex to numb them with alcohol. She never could get accustomed to the familial reserve. “Mick’s family was cold,” she told me. “They didn’t visit.
He
didn’t visit.”

And when they did pay a call, they didn’t show up emotionally. “Nobody would talk. It was weird. Nobody would say anything,” Merlyn told me. “And the only way they could really talk was when everybody got bombed. Everybody had to have the beer. They could not relax and visit with each other unless they were having beers.”

“All they said was hello and goodbye,” Danny Mantle said.

That Sunday was a low point and a turning point for Mantle. Loafing was out of character. He had vowed that 1960 would be different from the year before, when, he admitted, he had “a lousy season.” The Yankees’ third-place finish, fifteen games behind the White Sox—only four games over .500—was a team effort. But in the sports pages and the front office, Mantle was deemed the chief culprit. After batting .285 with 31 home runs and 75 RBI, he wondered if the Yankees would or should trade him. The phenom had become a disappointment.

“Mantle: A Problem Child,” Leonard Schecter’s five-part preseason series in the
New York Post
, analyzed the lack of maturity that had become a favorite subject of columnists. In the absence of sports psychologists, not yet a de rigueur retainer for major league clubs, Schecter devoted part one of the series to the Freudian musings of an anonymous baseball man who diagnosed Mantle as a self-destructive masochist, a big kid with no judgment and no self-awareness. Schecter offered as proof of his adolescent proclivities the way he badgered batboys, bullpen catchers, and unsuspecting rookies to catch the knuckleball he pleaded to throw in a game, defying the front office and common sense. “You know how he ruined his arm?” Jerry Lumpe said. “Throwing knuckleballs.”

Even before the Bombers stunk up the joint in 1959, Stengel had begun referring to Mantle as his greatest disappointment. When he signed what would be his last two-year contract to manage the Yankees in 1958, he seized the opportunity to name the greatest players of his tenure. DiMaggio was number one on Casey’s list. He mentioned virtually every Yankee who had ever made an All-Star team—except Mantle. “The trouble with Mantle is Mantle,” Stengel explained.

His teammates were mystified by the managerial snub. “What about Mantle?” Bauer demanded after Stengel named him, Berra, and Rizzuto as his three best players. “You gave 110 percent every time you were in the lineup,” Stengel replied.

With his age and his ability to enforce discipline being questioned, Stengel could no longer afford to wink at bad-boy behavior. His own drinking had gotten heavier as well. “Casey was drunk every night, but what he was concerned about was what the writers thought of him and the team and entertaining them and being a clown with them,” Duren said. “So you look at his behavior and wonder if he was out of
his
adolescence.”

Writers scrambling for copy during the disconsolate off-season wondered whether Stengel had the moral authority to curtail his party boys. No, Weiss replied, Stengel wasn’t the problem. The 1959 Yankees weren’t hungry enough, made money too easily, thought they deserved automatic raises just for putting on uniforms, had too many outside interests, and weren’t living and breathing the game twenty-four hours a day as they had when they were rookies.

“Oh, they wanted to win and they hustled, but they had an air of complacency,” Weiss told Stanley Frank, the author of the “Boss of the Yankees” in
The Saturday Evening Post
. “All the key men are independently wealthy from the high salaries and the World Series shares they’ve been getting for a long time.”

This would have been news to the average major leaguer, who earned an estimated $12,340 in the Fifties, according to a study, “The Economic History of Major League Baseball,” by Michael J. Haupert, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. (The Major League Baseball Players Association did not begin keeping salary figures until the mid-1960s). Duren spoke for a generation of budget-conscious Yankees when he said: “I don’t want you to think that George Weiss never did anything for me. He taught me how to live without money.”

The problem with Mantle was less clear cut in Weiss’s mind. “He’s an enigma,” Weiss told Frank. “We’ve never had a player who was the subject of as much discussion and analysis. Our entire organization has tried to discover why Mantle hasn’t capitalized on his enormous potential, and we obviously haven’t found the answer.

“Physically, Mantle has the attributes of a superstar, a blend of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. He is much faster than DiMaggio was and he has more power, with the added advantage of being a switch-hitter and getting the benefit of the short right field fence in the Stadium. DiMaggio was a better fielder, but Mantle compensates for that with a stronger arm than Joe had after he hurt his shoulder. Add up Mantle’s assets, and he’s superior to DiMaggio but he hasn’t come close to proving it yet.”

Frank asked, “Would it be correct to say the Yankees believe it’s entirely up to Mantle himself whether he ever reaches the top rung?”

“Weiss nodded gravely. ‘We’ve done everything possible to help him.’”

In January 1960, Weiss sent Mantle a contract calling for a $17,000 pay cut from his $72,000 salary, $1,000 less than the maximum decrease allowed by agreement between the players and the owners. Mantle figured it was a misprint and sent it back unsigned. When he was photographed lounging in the Dugout bar in his Joplin, Missouri, Holiday Inn—the caption read, “Who needs the dugout at Yankee Stadium?”—the brass claimed he was holding out to generate publicity for the motel and his Dallas bowling alley. When he failed to report
to camp on time, he was vilified. Joe Trimble of the
Daily News
called him an ingrate and “a hillbilly in a velvet suit.” The “scared high school Okie” had become “a sullen holdout,” Trimble wrote, “guilty of a disgraceful exhibition of ill conduct. He isn’t grateful or even gracious. The Yankees made him what he is today.”

Mantle laughed off the insult—“How can he call me a hillbilly when he’s the sloppiest guy around here?” And later, passing the customarily disheveled Trimble in the clubhouse, murmured, “How is Oleg Cassini today?”

The witty bravado obscured the truth. “He was really, really hurt by that,” Tony Kubek said.

Daily News
columnist Dick Young damned him more gently: “He is emotionally immature. He’s not too bright, and he’s not too friendly, but he’s a pretty nice guy, all things considered.”

And they wondered why he wasn’t a great interview.

Mantle was used to people questioning his mental acuity. “Never did claim to be smart,” he’d say. “Doesn’t bother me anymore.” In high school, he was the sports editor of the school newspaper. When he and the editor in chief were chosen to represent the school at a state writing contest, he assumed the teacher was making fun of him. Mantle was stung when Schecter quoted him all too accurately, not standard operating procedure on the sports page. “You wrote a bad story about me,” Mantle objected. “You had me using those double negatives.”

“Don’t you?” Schecter replied.

Sportswriters had long improved locker room oratory, making players sound better spoken and better mannered than they, and often their interrogators, really were. Red Smith crowed with pleasure at rhetorical verisimilitude: “I know the man that that’s the house of’s daughter.” But the selective application of the principle of real speech was cruel and reinforced the perception of Mantle’s dimness. Jackie Robinson put the IQ question in perspective before a World Series game in the early Fifties: “We got plenty of guys that stupid. But we don’t have anyone that good.”

Mantle had a good head for numbers—pals back home said nobody counted cards better or faster. He knew the percentages were against him in 1960 contract negotiations with Weiss. The wily, obdurate general manager won out by waiting him out. Mantle capitulated on March 14,
settling for $7,000 less than he had made in 1959. Still smarting from the salary cut, he reported to St. Petersburg to find a changed Yankees team: Bauer and Larsen were gone, traded to Kansas City for Roger Maris. The newly stern skipper vowed, “This time we’re going to stick to sweat and toil, and maybe there’ll even be a little bleeding.”

Mantle missed ten days of spring training. Six days after he reported, he got hurt.

Mantle, Eager to Make Up Lost Time, Hurts Knee by Running Too Hard

The Yankees had not played well since July 1958 and continued their swoon into the regular season. Mantle was batting .286—with only one home run—on May 12 when Stengel moved him up to second in the batting order. By the end of the seventeen-game experiment, his batting average had dropped forty points. He was in an 0-for-20 drought when he hit his second home run of the year on May 28, the same day Stengel called in sick. The Ol’ Perfessor had been experiencing chest pains since spring training. After ten days in the hospital a virus was diagnosed.

On May 30 Mantle jogged in from center field with the final out of a 3–2 win safely tucked in his glove. Spectators were still allowed to exit the Stadium through the center field gates and he was accustomed to braving a current of attentive fans. This crowd wasn’t friendly. In the punching, shoving, grabbing melee that followed, Mantle’s cap was stolen and his jaw pummeled. Scared he’d be poked in the eye, he bulldozed and elbowed his way to the dugout. In the clubhouse, he pressed an ice pack to his jaw before leaving for the hospital for X-rays. Nothing was broken, but the bond between Mantle and the Bronx partisans was fraying. “Mantle Is Mauled,” the
New York Post
exclaimed, calling him the “victim of one of the worst mob scenes in Yankee Stadium history” and describing the attackers as a “mob of young toughs.”