October 1964 (13 page)

Greenwade was immensely impressed by Robinson. He had great speed, exceptional power for an infielder, and the rarest kind of competitive fire. He was mature, a college man, but still, at twenty-six, young enough to be coming into his prime, unlike most of the better known Negro league players who were now considered a little old. The one weakness was his arm. He was playing shortstop for the Monarchs because their regular shortstop, Jesse Williams, had hurt his arm. To make the throw from short, Robinson had to take a step and a half. He would make the major leagues, but he would play as a second baseman or a first baseman, Greenwade reported, not as a shortstop.

The Mantle legend, which began with his signing, grew during a special rookie camp the Yankees had held at Casey Stengel’s behest in 1950. There, some of the old-timers in the organization got a sense that they were seeing something rare, a true diamond in the rough. Mantle’s potential, his raw ability, his speed, his power from both sides of the plate, were almost eerie. If his talent were honed properly, they thought they were quite possibly looking at someone who might become the greatest player in the history of the game. There were some fast players in that camp, and one day someone decided that all the faster players should get together and have a race. Mantle, whose true speed had not yet been comprehended, simply ran away from the others. What had made some of the stories coming out of the camp so extraordinary was the messenger himself, Bill Dickey—the former Yankee catcher, a Hall of Fame player, and a tough, unsentimental old-timer who had played much of his career with Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Henrich. He was not lightly given to hyperbole. Dickey started talking about Mantle to Jerry Coleman, the veteran second baseman, with superlatives that were unknown for him: “Jerry, he can hit with power righty, he can hit with power lefty, and he can outrun everyone here.” “What position does he play?” Coleman asked. “Shortstop,” Dickey answered, which made Coleman nervous, because that meant they were both infielders. “He’s going to be the greatest player I’ve ever seen,” Dickey added. A few days later Dickey grabbed his old teammate Tommy Henrich. “Tom, you should see this kid Mantle that played at Joplin. I’ve never seen power like that. He hits the ball and it stays hit. He’s really going to be something.” Even the sound of his home runs, Dickey said, were different, mirroring something Ted Williams would say years later: the crack of the bat against the ball when Mantle connected was like an explosion. Henrich simply shook his head—it was one thing to hear about a coming star from an excited journalist, but quite another to hear it from someone like Bill Dickey.

So that had piqued everyone’s interest, but the myth of Mantle as the superplayer really began the following spring, in 1951, when the Yankees brought him up to train with the big club. That spring the Yankees, as a favor to Del Webb, who had a contracting business in the Southwest, exchanged camps with the Giants, and trained in Arizona. Years later, Mantle believed that this change of venue helped him considerably, and added to the excitement he generated. For when he began to hit his home runs there, he was doing it where the air was lighter, so the ball carried farther, and the visibility was greater—all of which seemed to make each home run not only longer but more memorable. Rarely had a rookie been showcased as Mantle was that spring. The Yankees were a big draw on the West Coast as they might not have been on the East Coast. DiMaggio was near retirement (it was in fact his last season), so everyone was eager to see this new rookie about whom so many stories were already beginning to be told.

That spring Mantle had been awesome. No one on the team or in the league was stronger. His body was deceptive: he was not that tall. He was listed at five feet eleven inches, or indeed at five eleven and a half, but others thought he was closer to five nine. It was the width of the body that stunned such veteran baseball men as Henrich, who now were scrutinizing him carefully. Henrich, who had been assigned to work with Mantle on his defensive play in the outfield and on his throwing, believed he had never seen the kind of strength that Mantle possessed in the body of a baseball player. Normally, to be that strong, to hit a ball that hard, a man had to be bigger than normal; one envisioned an immense man—lean, wide shoulders, muscular, and perhaps six feet six inches tall for that kind of power. But in baseball, as a man’s height increased, he was also made vulnerable, for the size of his strike zone expanded as well, giving pitchers too big a target. (The first time Whitey Ford looked at Frank Howard, the six-feet-seven-inch Dodger outfielder, all he could think of was what a wonderful strike zone Howard presented.) In baseball it was too easy for a smart pitcher to come inside and tie that kind of hitter up, and keep him from extending his arms. But with Mantle, Henrich thought, it was as if God had taken the ideal body necessary for a great hitter, and then simply made it wider and stronger, extending the power package, but not the strike zone. Mantle was stronger than everyone else, but just as compact. It was almost, Henrich thought, unfair. Mantle was powerful, but he was not a prisoner of his power; he was surprisingly lithe, with a quick bat and a good eye.

When Mantle hit a ball that spring, Henrich thought, it was often like he was hitting a golf ball. His home runs seemed longer and more majestic each day. And so as the Yankees moved north and west through California, Mantle began to hit as no rookie had ever hit before, home run after home run, drives that were soon to be known as tape-measure drives. Bolstered by the news reports from the camp, the crowds grew ever larger, and it was said that when the tour was over, the Yankees had played in spring training before more than 500,000 people, an astonishing figure. It was all about Mantle, about people wanting to see this amazing rookie hit one of his awesome drives. Even the players gathered when he took batting practice every day, and they were as awed as the people in the seats.

Wherever they played that spring, someone would point to a place where some player had hit the longest home run ever, and Mantle would proceed to hit one even longer. The consensus was that the longest one he hit came during a game with the University of Southern California, at the USC field. It was the longest home run that Tom Henrich had ever seen. Mantle hit it to right field, and it seemed to jump off the bat, and because the fence was made of wire, the fans were able to see where it landed. It was, thought Henrich, the length of
two
complete home runs—at least six hundred feet. Jerry Coleman thought it made the rest of the hits in the game look like those of Little Leaguers. Henrich, who had grown up on the mythic deeds of Gehrig, Ruth, and Foxx, thought mythic deeds always belonged to those who had gone before; now, right in front of him, this kid who was almost young enough to have been his son was entering not just the book of baseball records but the world of baseball myth.

It had all been too much for Mantle. He was “the Phenom.” It was Stengel who gave him the nickname that spring. My Phenom, he called Mantle to reporters, a name that Mantle hated. He did not like all the attention, particularly when he had yet to play in a big-league game, and yet to earn those raves. That pressure to be the greatest ever was far more than any young player wanted or needed. He came to the big city carrying his meager belongings in a straw suitcase (actually, he said, it was not even a straw suitcase, it was just a sack). “What a hayseed,” Whitey Ford remembered thinking the first time he saw Mantle. Even when he went out and got better clothes, he was still awkward. Taken out to dinner by his teammates on one of his first days in New York, he had watched them order shrimp cocktail and then admitted that he had never seen a shrimp before. In an early interview with Joe Trimble of the
Daily News,
Mantle was scared to death and apparently irritated Trimble with the limited nature of his answers. Trimble later wrote that Mantle was “a hillbilly in a velvet suit.” To Dan Daniel he was a kid “in a bad haircut whose sports coat barely covered his wrists.” The image of a hick stayed with him for quite a while and, his friends thought, caused him a fair amount of pain when he was young. Later on, he was good at making fun of the clothes he wore back then—the loud sports jackets, the cowboy boots and blue jeans, which were not then in fashion—and he liked to tell of how Hank Bauer, one of his first roommates, had taken him out to buy several suits at a local store favored by Yankee players.

It was, he said years later, a difficult orientation. He had been painfully shy at first, essentially still a high school kid who, in his own words, was afraid to smoke in front of his father. There was one memorable game in which he struck out again and again against Walt Masterson, a shrewd pitcher then with Boston who had given Ted Williams fits when he was with Washington. Masterson started Mantle high, just around the letters, and then threw him ever higher pitches, which Mantle kept chasing until finally the pitches were far out of the strike zone and almost unreachable. That first season the Yankees realized they had not done him any favors with that huge buildup, and Stengel soon called him in and told him they were going to send him back to the minors so that he could regain his eye. Both Stengel and Mantle were in tears. “Don’t get down on yourself,” Stengel said. “We want you to get your confidence and your timing back.” They sent him to Kansas City, which was still their Triple A farm club, and, at first, still feeling the pressure there, he did badly—one hit in twenty-two at bats for the Blues. He called his father in tears, and Mutt Mantle drove up to see him. Mickey, desperate now, told his father everything was going wrong, but Mutt Mantle had little sympathy. He had worked all his life in the lead and zinc mines, like his father before him, and his baseball experience was restricted to a semipro league called the Lead and Zinc League, where, as his son would later say, they played for a keg of beer afterward. Mutt Mantle started throwing his son’s belongings into a suitcase. “What are you doing?” the boy asked. “I’m taking you home,” Mutt Mantle said. “I thought I raised a man, but you’re nothing but a coward.” So Mickey stopped feeling sorry for himself, got his eye back, and hit .361 for Kansas City before being recalled to New York in August.

A few weeks later, he found himself playing in his first World Series game. There was noise and pressure everywhere, and countless strangers, who seemed to know him, would come up to him and tell him what they expected from him in the coming days. It was all too much for him. In desperation he knocked on the door of Tom Greenwade’s hotel room. Though Greenwade was out, Mrs. Greenwade was there, and Mantle asked if he might come in and just sit quietly for a while.

A
S THE ST. LOUIS
Cardinals prepared to leave their camp in Florida, Barney Schultz, in the spring of what was to be his twentieth season in professional baseball, was told that he was going to be assigned to the Cardinal Triple A farm club in Jacksonville. For most men this would have been a terrible blow, for it seemed to mark, once and for all, the end of his major-league career. He had been optimistic about sticking with the big-league club, because he felt he had pitched well after being traded to them in mid-season in 1963. But any disappointment he felt was buffered by the rest of the offer—the Cardinals said that they hoped he would stay with the organization and eventually become a pitching coach either in St. Louis or with one of the farm clubs. In the meantime, he would begin the season as both a relief pitcher and a pitching coach for Jacksonville. The Cardinals, Schultz thought, were being eminently fair—his salary would remain the same. The more he thought about the prospect, the more it pleased him, because it meant that he could continue a career in professional baseball, which was the one thing he loved, and the only thing he knew. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had been in baseball ever since he had graduated from high school in 1944 at the age of seventeen. He was best described as a journeyman: of his previous nineteen seasons, some part of five had been spent in the big leagues. He had a total of 32 big-league decisions to his credit—17 wins and 15 defeats. He was literally king of the road, for among other cities and towns, he had played in Hagerstown, Maryland, Rock Hill, South Carolina, Terre Haute, Indiana, Macon, Georgia, Schenectady, New York, Urica, New York, Denver, Colorado, Omaha, Nebraska, and Charleston, West Virginia. He loved it all, and he was filled not with disappointment that his career had not been more brilliant, but rather with wonder that an ordinary man like himself, with something of a lame arm, had salvaged enough ability for a full career doing what he loved. He was grateful to have been able to share in the friendship and camaraderie that was at the heart of a baseball season. It was, he thought, a life to be proud of: “Barney,” a friend once told him, “millions and millions of American boys grow up with one dream—playing in the big leagues, and you’re one of the handful who actually did it—the handful out of millions.”

By 1964, he was aware that he was different from many of the young players now coming into the game, whose expectations both of what they were going to accomplish and of how much money they were going to make were so much greater than his; for much of his career he had made three thousand or four thousand dollars a season. The truth was that his own career had been virtually over before it started. In 1945, in his second year in professional baseball, he was still a hard-throwing young right-hander with Wilmington in the Phillies’ organization. Some fifty years later, he remembered with stunning clarity the fateful night when Wilmington played Lancaster. It was hot and muggy and he was more than a little tired. In the seventh inning he faced Nellie Fox, soon to have an exceptional career as a major-leaguer. Worn down by the heat, Schultz did what many young pitchers do when they are tired—he reached back and tried to throw too hard, and something happened to his arm. The next day he could not even tie his shoelaces and a roommate had to do it for him. Medical treatment in those days, especially in the minor leagues, was primitive. If an injured player was lucky, he might get a rubdown. What he had probably done, Schultz decided years later, was tear the rotator cuff in his pitching arm, which was perhaps the worst thing that could happen to a pitcher until the miracles of modern surgery began to help in the seventies. It was usually a career-ending injury. He was told by the Phillies’ organization to rest his arm in the off-season, and he did, but the following season he could barely get the ball to home plate. Gradually his arm loosened up during spring training, but it was obvious to Schultz that he would never again be a power pitcher. If he was to have a career, it would have to be one of throwing junk, particularly a knuckleball that had been taught to him by a neighbor. That kind of career could exist in an era when there were lots of minor leagues and the money paid to minor-league ballplayers was minimal. It was a life of finding temporary housing in new cities from which he would soon be gone, of figuring out how to live and save some money on a tiny salary, and of riding beat-up buses over long distances to the next town to play under lights that never would have been approved by any association of optometrists.