The View From Olympus: The Second Immortal.

 

A little something for an off-day. I apologize for the delay—and the length on this one. But you know, when it comes to your first love, you get carried away.

2. Mickey Mantle

 

This would have been a surprise when we were young. Almost undoubtedly, we would have considered Joe, Joe DiMaggio the Second Yankee Immortal, or just maybe Lou Gehrig. 

 

But whether we’re talking statistics, nostalgia, or just plain aura, The Mick is the second greatest Yankee who ever played the game.

 

We think of him as tragic now. The young god, reduced to hobbling around first base at the end. Wasting all those years in barrooms and on golf courses, shilling for this casino, that bank. Shaking all the hands, chasing all the tail there was to chase.  The prematurely old man, turning to the camera with a face weary as a ghost’s, warning us, “Don’t be like me.”  

 

Don’t be like me. Like what? A god? As if we could ever be anything like him.

This all-American rube, arriving for his first spring training in rolled-up blue jeans, white sweat socks, rubber-soled shoes, “a tweed sports coat and a tie that was about twelve inches wide and had a peacock painted on it.” Hands on his thighs, his cap rolled, blowing bubble gum bubbles in the middle of the game. 

 

He came out of nowhere—literally nowhere today, the corner of Oklahoma where he grew up the most toxic site on the Superfund list for over a generation.  A Chernobyl landscape, full of gargantuan, rusting mine machinery and acid-spiked water, the ground still crumbling away. 

Not much better when he was there, the slick alkali flats too poisoned for grass to grow, amidst “sludge ponds so toxically opaque that no shadows were cast upon them,” according to biographer Jane Leavy. The boys would play until the wind kicked up too much of the contaminated dust, running home with their eyes red. 

 

“End of game. We’d cough all the way home,” remembered Mickey. 

 

A hinterland full of children with learning disabilities, and mysterious illnesses such as osteomyelitis, which Mickey also overcame. Hell, what didn’t he overcome? (Besides himself.) A strangely cold mother, a female relative who molested him, a father who sat him up on the bar for his first drink.

 

“Wasn’t no such thing as underaged,” his cousin Max smirked.

 

Up in his first major-league camp at 18, he was clocked going to first in 3.1 seconds, the fastest ever. To this day. That speed was seriously diminished when he stepped into a sprinkler hole some idiot had left uncovered in the 1951 World Series, and tore the ACL and the medial meniscus in his right knee. 

Still, he would steal 153 bases in just 191 attempts, over the course of his career. Still, he would ground into an average of just 8 double-plays a season, just 2 in both 1953 and 1961. Still he would beat out “twenty to thirty” bunts a year in his prime, still got to everything in the o.g. Yankee Stadium’s endless expanse of a centerfield. 

 

Oh, and the torn ACL? Basically, nothing was done about it for the next two seasons, during which Mantle established himself as one of the best players in the game. After that, they did this or that, cleaned out the dead cartilage, etc.. But it wasn’t like today. They didn’t really have a way to repair a ruined ACL.

 

That’s right. Mickey Mantle played 17 of his 18 seasons with an improperly repaired ACL.

What didn’t he overcome? There were all sorts of other injuries. When Red Schoedienst plopped down on his throwing arm to keep him from advancing another base in the 1957 World Series, and permanently injured it. The freak injury that same year, when he tossed his putter into the air, and brought down a tree limb that cut his shin to the bone. 

 

There was the time he broke his left foot, and sustained serious ligament and cartilage damage in his left (good) knee, in 1963, getting tangled up in a chain link fence some idiot had erected in Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. (The Mick would prove especially susceptible to the feckless way most of major-league baseball maintained its ballparks back in the day.) The mysterious shot for some mysterious ailment, from a Manhattan Dr. Feelgood, that took him out of the great home run race with Roger Maris.

 

By his last years, he was enduring a continual welter of pulled muscles and damaged ligaments. The right knee floating so free of cartilage that Mantle would amuse—and sometimes nauseate—teammates, friends, and family by pushing it up and twisting it about like a jar top.

 

One Yankees trainer, Joe Soares, claimed that “Mantle had a severe congenital condition,” that left his overdeveloped muscles constantly tearing apart his weaker joints and ligaments. A later observer, a specialist in athletic injuries, would call The Mick a “‘neuromuscular genius,’ one of a select few who are so well wired that they are able to compensate for severe injuries like this and still perform at the highest levels…”

 

What was he? A physical genius? Flawed superman? Maybe both? Who knows what one could pick up out in the diseased, rag-end of the heartland?

 

Nonetheless, even in those last two years at first, Mantle led the Yankees in games played. He also remained in the AL top ten in almost every significant hitting category, even in the top half of fielding first basemen when it came to chances and assists.

 

What else did he overcome? 

 

The Yankees, for one, who left him to live on his own as a green kid up in the Bronx, soon at the mercy of some local floozy and her “manager.” They sent him down though he was leading the team in RBI (!). Joe DiMaggio, for another, who ignored him as much as possible, and was partly responsible for The Mick falling in that gopher hole in the 1951 World Series. 

 

Us fans, for another, who actually booed him until we switched our mindless animosity to Maris in 1961. Booed him because his endless injuries kept him out of the army, booed him because we thought he struck out too much, booed him because he wasn’t everything the newspapers told us he could be. 

 

Shame on us.

 

I prefer to think of how he used to live at the St. Moritz and would routinely walk up to the Stadium for games. Must have been something: a big blond hill god rambling through the underbrush, larger than life. For we have seen the days.

Greatest moment: Hard to say. For such a star, Mantle had relatively few big, memorable moments—maybe because he played on such great teams. His own selection was hitting the two-run, walk-off homer off Barney Schultz that won Game 3 of the 1964 World Series. It also broke The Babe’s World Series home-run record. But Barney Schultz? 

 

In that same Series, Mantle homered off Bob Gibson, just a year after he had homered off Sandy Koufax in the World Series. But the Yankees lost both games and both Series. He hit 3 homers, drove in 11 runs, hit .400, and made a heads-up running play in the 1960 Series—but the Yanks lost that one, too.

 

His running catch to save Don Larsen’s perfect game was more difficult than it looked. The ball would have been in the seats in Ebbets Field. His home run was also the first run of the game. But it was Larsen’s afternoon.

 

Regular season, there were all the tape-measure jobs (more on that later), and the famous, first at-bat after missing 60 games in 1963, pinch-hit home run to tie the Orioles, in a game the Yanks would win, 11-10 in 10 innings. But the Bombers were already up 7 1/2 games on the league, which wasn’t going to catch them.

 

Maybe, as with so much to do with Mick, his greatest moment came shockingly early. Game 7, 1952 World Series, at Ebbets Field. A close, gritty game in a close, gritty Series. Mantle still just 20. He breaks a 2-2 tie with a 6^th inning homer off Joe Black (a righty), singles in an insurance run in the 7^th against Preacher Roe, a lefty. 

Products: “I want my Maypo!” And who could forget the temp agency, “Mantle Men, Namath Women”?

 

MVP Awards: 1956, 1957, 1962. 

 

Deserved MVP Awards: 9. Don’t take it from me. Bill James says he should have won it in 1952, 1955-1958, 1960-1962, 1964.

 

Triple Crown: 1956. Only one other Yankee—a fellow Immortal—has ever done it. Only three men (including one juicer) have done it since.

 

Rings on his fingers: 12 pennants, 1951-1953, 1955-1958, 1960-1964; 7 world championships, 1951-1953, 1956, 1958, 1961-1962.

 

Deserved World Series MVP Awards: This only came into existence in 1956. Maybe 1952, when Mick hit .345/1.061, with 2 homers and 3 RBI, including that Series-winning hit. But Johnny Mize hit .400/1.567 with 3 homers and 6 RBI that same Series, Allie Reynolds went 2-1, 1 save, 1.77; Vic Raschi, 2-0, 1.59. So maybe not.

 

He had a grand slam in the 1953 Series, but hit only .208. If they were going to give it to Bobby Richardson, which they did, in 1960, it should have gone to Mantle. But…Bill Mazeroski, anyone?

 

All in all, The Mick missed 12 of 77 World Series games, and only pinch-ran or pinch-hit in several more. A healthy Mantle would almost surely have won the Yanks the 1955 and 1957 World Series. 

 

Gold Glove: 1962. Another award that did not exist for much of Mantle’s career, and at first went only to the best fielder in both leagues. Hard to beat out Willie Mays.

 

Media: 3 movies (Safe at Home! with Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Ralph Houk, and William Frawley; That Touch of Mink, with Cary Grant, Doris Day, Yogi Berra, and Maris; 61*, the Billy Crystal ode to 1961, in which he was portrayed by Thomas Jane, with Barry Pepper as Maris. Also a mention in Damn Yankees! “On deck, Mickey Mantle!”). 

2 songs: “I Love Mickey,” by Teresa Brewster, with Mickey chiming in; “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey, and the Duke),” by Terry Cashman.

 

So? Willie, Mickey, or the Duke? Which was better?: Mays, over the course of his career; Mantle, at his peak (sorry, Edwin).

John Thorn: “Mantle is superior to Mays—with a bat in his hands. If one is to judge them as all-around players Mays is superior because he was so much better in center field.  For pure offense, Mantle is it.”

 

Bill James ranks Mantle as the all-time, third greatest centerfielder, behind only Mays and Ty Cobb: “Mickey Mantle was, at his peak in 1956-57 and again in 1961-62 clearly a greater player than Willie Mays—and it is not a close or difficult decision.”

 

Cyril Morong’s “win shares per at-bat” ranks Mantle second only to Ruth, all-time.

 

Stickball: The great Allen Barra reports that The Mick, like Willie, played stickball on the streets of New York with local kids. The Yankees just didn’t bother to report it. Hey, mighta given the kid ideas, come contract time, if he got too popular.

 

Tape Measure: Mickey Mantle invented the term. Or rather, Arthur “Red” Patterson, the Yanks’ p.r. director did, following rumors that Mantle had hit a baseball 700 feet during a Yankees spring training exhibition at USC, in 1951. When Mantle hit a ball out of Griffith Stadium in Washington, on April 17, 1953, Patterson tracked it down, bought the ball off a local youngster, and claimed it had traveled a record, 565 feet. (Jane Leavy, investigating it carefully, thought that included some of the roll.)

 

Again and again, Mantle hit stunningly long shots, twice nearly becoming the only man to hit a ball out of the original Yankees Stadium in 1956—including the first game Billy Crystal ever saw—and again on a legendary May night, in 1963. Speculation abounded that that ball might have traveled 620 feet, had it not struck the Stadium filigree.

 

“I was pitching batting practice when [Mantle] took his first swings. The kid hit the first six balls nearly five hundred feet over the lights and out of sight. He hit them over the right-field fence batting right-handed and over the left-field fence batting lefthanded. And remember, Mantle was only 18 at the time. I played with Gehrig and with Ruth, and I’ve seen fellows like Jimmie Foxx and they hit prodigious home runs in their day but I have to say Mantle hit more tape-measure home runs consistently than any of those players.  Mantle outdrove them all.” (Bill Dickey)

 

Quotes from others: “His aura had an aura.” (Eli Grba) “He filled out that uniform like you wish you could have filled it out.” (Rollie Sheldon).

 

“I hate it when people say how much he wasted.  Christ, how much better could he have been?” (Clete Boyer). 

“My God, who is that?  Just the physical body, I’d never seen anything like that. There was something about his presence that was just absolutely stunning.” (Arlene Howard, wife of Elston).

“When I massage his arms and shoulders, they transmit some sort of extra something which I never experienced before in over thirty years of handling athletes.” (longtime Yankees trainer Gus Mauch.)  

 

Quotes from The Mick about The Mick: “I could have ended up buried in a hole in the ground, and I ended up being Mickey Mantle. I guess you could say I’m what this country is all about.”

“Fine place to be for America’s hero,”after another liquid, November evening at the Pierre Hotel, long after his retirement, when he tipped a hatcheck lady $100, pawed her chest, apologized, scribbled a note and autograph for her eight-year-old son, then staggered outside to end up face down in the curbside slush of Fifth Avenue.  

 

Nicknames: “The Commerce Comet,” from the sportswriters. “Ignatz” and “Whiskey Slick,” from Casey Stengel. “The Brute,” from his fellow players.