Same as it ever was?

 

Something that El Duque wrote in his excellent post about the Yanks' sending down The Martian reminded me that your New York Yankees did exactly that with Mickey Mantle during his rookie season of 1951.

On July 13th, almost precisely halfway through the season, they sent The Mick down to their Triple-A, Kansas City Blues farm team. Here he is, seen with manager George "Twinkletoes" Selkirk, an outfield star with the Bombers in the 1930s and '40s.

Today, of course, it would be illegal for players under the age of 21 to be managed by anyone called "Twinkletoes." Mick was still just 19, the all-American phenom out of Commerce, Oklahoma, who had torn up the Cactus League that spring. 

The Yankees of that time, not being run by geniuses such as Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner, decided that they had no choice but to keep him with the club when they went north. But by July, they decided that he needed more seasoning.

Why? 

On July 13th, Mick's batting line was .260/.341/.423/.763—not too shabby for a 19-year-old, pressed into the starting lineup on the biggest stage in sports. He was also leading the team in RBI, with 45. Nor was the team going badly. The Yanks were 46-30, .605 ball, just 1 1/2 games out of first place, behind both shades of Sox. 

So what was the problem?

Well, strikeouts, mostly. The Mick had 52—as opposed to 30 walks—in the 69 games he had played.

Today, that would make him a contact hitter extraordinaire, but at the time it was unacceptable. 

Also, his demotion seems as though it was done in a bit of pique. On that fateful Friday the 13th in July, the Yanks had blown a 6-0 lead to major rival Cleveland, losing 11-8. 

To the untrained eye, this would seem to have been mostly a failure of, oh, I dunno, the pitching? But Mickey struck out three times (against future HOFer Bob Lemon) and he became the fall guy.

Maybe it was an attempt to shake up the club. Maybe it was a decision to try out some of the other remarkable young talent the Yankees had (more on that later), but in any case, Mantle was sent packing to Kansas City. 

Which...shattered him. 

If the New York Yankees of the Great Dynasty were considerably better than the team today at identifying and signing talent, they could be—at times—just as foolish and callous in developing it. An incompetent trainer was allowed to actually burn the feet of The Mick's predecessor in center, no less than Joe DiMaggio. 

And once they had brought Mantle north with the town, they left the hick kid to his own devices, staying in a hotel up in the Bronx. There he was generally lonely and miserable—and predictably fleeced by a con man and his hired floozy. Like Willie Mays, the other new phenom in town, he wiled away the hours playing stickball in the street with the local kids.

(The Giants, by contrast—a team run by a hopeless drunk and casual bigot—nonetheless saw to it that Willie was ensconced in a Harlem boardinghouse run by a mothering older woman, and accompanied everywhere by a retired, local boxer. The Yanks? Not so much.)

Mantle arrived in KC—his second new city in the space of three months—in a deep funk. So much so that his father, Mutt Mantle—dying from his years in the zinc mines—had to be summoned to help. 

He arrived to find a distraught Mickey wanting to quit, to just walk off the team. Mutt braced him up, rather ruthlessly, but at least reminded him of what his alternatives were.

"I thought I raised a man," Mutt told him, starting to pack his son's suitcase. "I see I raised a coward instead. You can come back and work the mines with me."

Mickey got it together, and hit .361 with Kansas City. The Yanks brought him back up on August 24th.

They had not been exactly in a death spiral without him, going 29-16, or .644, while he was away.

For much of that time, DiMaggio was also out with an injury, but the Yanks—with their truly astonishing depth—got by rotating Gene Woodling, Hank Bauer, Jackie Jensen, Bob Cerv, and converted first baseman Joe Collins around the outfield. 

Still, the team was two games out of first on The Mick's return. Mantle seemed to give them an added thrust, as they went 23-10 (.697) the rest of the way, winning their third straight pennant and World Series. (Where Mantle permanently hurt himself stepping into an open sprinkler hole. Hey, what were players? They were interchangeable and infinitely replaceable. Right?)

That fall, Mutt Mantle (real name Elvin Charles Mantle) back in town for the World Series, got to help his son up the hospital steps. He collapsed—and was hospitalized alongside Mick. He was dead of Hodgkins Disease by the next May.

So who will help brace up Jasson Dominguez, if he wants to crawl into a hole when he gets back to Scranton? Is there an El Chucho Dominguez who can fly up and box his son's ears? Of course, The Martian's alternatives—thank God—are no doubt more appealing, starting with the $5.1 million he got as a signing bonus, and the $1.5 million he's made in the game so far. 

But all that means is that Dominguez will be less desperate to make it out of this silly, dysfunctional Yankees organization of today. For that matter, while the Yanks' front office of 1951 could be as cruel and indifferent as it is today, the organization was at least threaded with some of the best instructors, managers and coaches, in all of baseball. 

Not so much now. 

Is The Martian another Mickey Mantle? I doubt it—but then, who is? And Trent Grisham is sure as hell not Joe DiMaggio. Or Gene Woodling. Or Hank Bauer, who once held a record for the consecutive-game hitting streak in the World Series. Or Jackie Jensen, a future MVP. Or Bob Cerv, a lifetime .276 hitter who once belted 38 homers and hit .305 in a season. 

It sez here that the Yanks don't have the depth to drop The Martian—OR Spencer Jones—back in Scranton. That Food Stamps Hal ought to finally swallow the money remaining on Tennis Elbows Stanton, and send Randal Woodchuck back to Punxsutawney or wherever he's from, and let the two prospects battle for a spot. 

But hey, who are we to question Hal & Pal?