October 1964 (2 page)

There were already tangible signs that the Yankees were in the early stages of their decline. They had beaten the Giants by the narrowest of margins in a great seven-game World Series in 1962, a series decided only on the last out. Then, in 1963, the Los Angeles Dodgers (powered primarily by two great pitchers) had swept the Yankees in four games. Though the Yankees appeared to have a number of talented young pitchers just beginning to come into their own, they had not yet come up with a single sure big-game winner to replace Whitey Ford, who was, by the spring of 1964, already thirty-five years old and increasingly dependent upon his shrewdness and courage. In his first thirteen World Series decisions Ford had been 9-4; in his last four he was 1-3. Some of the Yankee players were aware that time was catching up with their once virtually unbeatable team.

The previous October, the Yankees had lost their first two World Series games to the Dodgers in New York, and on the day off, as the Series shifted to Los Angeles, Ralph Terry, one of the best Yankee pitchers, had gone to the racetrack with Hal Reniff, a Yankee relief pitcher. Reniff was a true aficionado of the horse races, a man who loved to figure the odds at the track and other sporting events, and in honor of his talents his teammates had obligingly nicknamed him “Clocker Dan.” On this day, as he was going over the odds with Terry, Reniff asked Terry what he thought the odds were that the Dodgers would sweep the Yankees in four games. It was a long shot, answered Terry. A sweep of an ordinary team in a World Series was one thing, but a sweep of the
Yankees
was another. But Reniff continued to muse. It wasn’t really
that
long a shot, if you thought about it, Reniff said. In fact it was a real possibility. Look at the quality of the Dodger pitching, with Koufax and Drysdale both set to pitch in Los Angeles. As for the Yankees themselves, they
seemed
to be dominating on paper, but a lot of the top Yankee players were either hurt or coming off subpar seasons. Maris had been hurt and missed much of the season (he would come up only five times in the Series) and Mantle was clearly wearing down—he had come to bat only 172 times in the 1963 season and was not swinging well. The Yankees, Reniff said with the cool eye of a racetrack tout, were not really in very good shape. Terry listened carefully, hearing something he had not yet been willing to admit to himself. The odds on a sweep of the mighty Yankees had to be at least 50-1 and maybe 100-1, Reniff said. If Terry and Reniff were really smart and unscrupulous, they would each very quietly put down five hundred dollars on it. “You know,” Reniff finally said, “the Dodgers could really sweep our asses.” That, of course, was exactly what happened: Drysdale and Koufax, who were having astonishing years, with 557 strikeouts between them, both won in Los Angeles. Still, most of the Yankee players went home feeling that they had had the better team, but the edge had gone to the Dodgers because of their magnificent pitching.

In the spring of 1964 there were other signs that the team was wearing down. Jerry Coleman, the former Yankee second baseman, by then a broadcaster, was struck as he watched spring training that this was somehow not as tough and as disciplined a team as he had witnessed in the past. It was hard to tell about the talent level because some of the players were young, but Coleman was sure something was missing, perhaps some depth. Just after his retirement five years earlier, Coleman had worked in the farm system, and as the economics of baseball had changed, he had been charged with the melancholy task of getting rid of both a Double A and a Triple A farm team. That was a sign that the Yankee high command was cutting back in a major way, and it meant that the Yankees would employ half the number of players that they once did in the de facto staging area for the major-league club. There was a ripple effect in this: if there were fewer clubs at the top level in the farm system, there would soon be fewer signings as well. In the brief time that Coleman was working in the player personnel department, he had been sent out to Kearney, Nebraska, to check out how much talent the Yankees had on their rookie team there. Roy Hamey, briefly the team’s general manager, called Coleman in upon his return and asked what he had seen. “We have one pitcher who might make Triple A,” Coleman said. That irritated Hamey, who immediately sent Coleman’s superior, Bill Skiff, out to Kearney. Soon Skiff returned. “Well, Bill, how much have we got out there?” Hamey asked. “Jerry’s right,” he answered. “Almost nothing.” Now, some five years later, the Yankees still had young talent, but not as much as in the past.

As Coleman watched spring practice in 1964, he thought a different kind of player was beginning to come up. In the past, the Yankees had always signed the toughest kids, often for less money than they were offered elsewhere. For many of them, and Coleman had felt this way himself, being a Yankee was almost a religion. Now, Coleman thought, the younger players were not so singularly focused on baseball as those of his generation had been. Going out for dinner with his broadcasting partner, Red Barber, Coleman said, “You know, Red, I don’t think the Yankees are going to win it this year.” And Barber answered, “I think you’re right.”

The center of attention at the Yankee camp was the new manager, who was in fact the old catcher, Yogi Berra. The Yankee front office was in a state of flux. In 1960, general manager George Weiss, the efficient if not entirely lovable architect of much of the previous decade’s Yankee success, had been told by his employers that his services were no longer needed. Roy Hamey had come over from Milwaukee and briefly replaced Weiss (a fleeting moment when there was a good deal more interest in signing black players), but Hamey soon wanted out, and Ralph Houk was promoted to general manager after the 1963 season. Houk had managed the Yankees for the previous three seasons and had won the pennant all three times. Houk was known as a player’s manager, which meant that he could not have been more different in his approach than Casey Stengel, whom he had replaced. Not only did Stengel show little personal interest in his players, except insofar as what they might do for him on the field, he seemed loath even to learn their names. Born in 1890, Stengel came from an era in American life when very little emphasis was placed on being nice or kind to employees, and he was, in fact, rarely kind or nice to his players. He was often caustic, frequently making fun of them and putting them down to his beloved sportswriters. Stengel might be standing near the batting cage when a young player such as Jerry Lumpe was taking his swings and hitting the ball sharply to all fields. If a writer mentioned the lovely quality of Lumpe’s swing to Stengel, the old man would say, “Yes, he looks like the greatest hitter in the world until you play him.”

Stengel had his eye not merely on winning pennants, which he certainly wanted to do, but on history as well, and as far as his players were concerned, he seemed to be interested chiefly in courting writers. As far as Stengel was concerned, the writers were the critical link to history, and in return, they glorified his professional skills. The writers had always been important to him, and he always basked in their attention; many seemed as interested in him as they were in the game itself, and their interest was seductive. On one of the rare occasions that his Yankees did not win the pennant—in 1954 when Cleveland beat them—Stengel was stunned to find the New York writers abandoning him and his team to follow the Indians as they moved on to the World Series. “Jesus,” he told one reporter, “I’m losing my writers.”

Many of the writers remembered him from his leaner years of bad teams and second-division finishes, nine seasons of managing, and only one team that finished above .500; when he became the greatest manager in the game of baseball, the legitimate heir to the great John McGraw, it was all the sweeter. After all, he represented not just the present in baseball but the past as well, and the writers were interested in the past, as the players were not. Once when Mantle was young and the Yankees were going to play the Dodgers in the World Series, Stengel took Mantle out on the field in Ebbetts Field and tried to explain to him how he had played this particularly treacherous right-field wall. “You mean you actually played here?” asked the astonished Mantle. Later, Stengel gathered his writers around him, told the story, and shook his head. “He thinks when I was born I was already sixty years old and had a wooden leg and came here to manage,” Stengel said.

Later in his career with the Yankees, Stengel became even more drawn to the writers and, if anything, more protective of them. Aware that some of his players were less than hospitable to certain of the more irreverent journalists, Stengel often went out of his way to make sure that the shunned writers were taken care of. After more than a decade of Casey Stengel, the writers worshiped him, but the players had come to look upon him as a rather cold-blooded albeit wealthy grandfather who still controlled the family will and who turned on his very considerable charm only for outsiders. Ralph Houk changed that overnight. His loyalty was to the players. They were not just his players, they were his pals, or, in the vernacular he used, his “pardners.” He was an extremely political man, and he had a shrewd sense of the mood in the clubhouse and the resentments that had festered under Stengel despite all those years of winning. Houk was very much aware that Mantle had come to resent Stengel’s treatment of him and Stengel’s thinly veiled criticism (which tended to show up in the stories of various New York writers). Stengel always seemed to imply that no matter how much Mantle did and how well he played, he might somehow achieve even more and play at an even higher level, that he somehow never quite lived up to his potential, and, worse, that he was not a particularly smart baseball player. There was even a standing joke in the Yankee locker room among the players: Mickey, a player would ask Mantle, when are you going to live up to your potential?

The relationship between Mantle and Stengel had evolved over the years. Stengel had been a mediocre ballplayer himself, and for much of his career he had managed ballplayers even more mediocre than himself; when he finally got the Yankee job late in his career, he had been uneasy with Joe DiMaggio, who was at the end of his career, and who was an icon beyond the reach of a rookie manager. But Mantle had come to him as a boy, the greatest player Stengel had ever seen—all that power, all that speed; “My God,” said Stengel the first time he saw Mantle play, “the boy runs faster than Cobb!” Stengel had eagerly anticipated the chance to mold Mantle, to add to that magnificent body a mind filled with all the baseball knowledge and lore he had accumulated over four decades. “Mantle,” as the sportswriter Milton Gross wrote at the time, “was to be the monument the old gent wanted to leave behind. Casey wanted his own name written in the record books as manager, but he also wanted a creation that was completely his own on the field every day, doing things that no other ballplayer ever did, rewriting all the records.” But Mantle frustrated him; he remained pure Mantle, not a hybrid of Mantle/Stengel. It was then that Stengel tried to reach him by criticism, often meted out through the sportswriters. Again and again the player rejected Stengel’s advice. He would play hard, drive himself relentlessly in his own way and on his own terms, but he would not be Stengel’s creation.

There was already enough pressure on Mantle as it was—the, pressure of playing in New York, the pressure of replacing the great DiMaggio, and, above all, the pressure of living up to his father’s, Mutt Mantle’s, high expectations for him. He needed no additional pressure, no more lessons; what he needed was a means of escaping the pressure. It took everything he had to get through each day, and the last thing he wanted was a father figure as boss. If his and Stengel’s was to be a father-son relationship, it was, as the writer Robert Creamer noted, “that of an angry father and a stubborn son.” Over the years the relationship continued to deteriorate. “Telling Mantle something is like telling him nothing,” Stengel once told reporters, summing up his attitude toward his greatest player. To Stengel, Mantle was someone who had fallen short of his own true greatness, and to Mantle, his manager was more and more just a querulous old man who was never satisfied. It seemed even to the other players that Stengel saw not so much what Mantle did as what he did not do. To some degree Stengel’s attitude colored the attitude not only of the New York writers but of the New York fans as well. The glory that should so readily have been Mantle’s, the acclamation by the New York fans of his greatness and of his ability to carry the team year after year, came only after a decade of play and only when Roger Maris challenged him in the 1961 home-run derby. Then the fans somehow decided that it was Mantle’s prerogative to challenge Ruth, not Maris’s. Only then did they begin to cheer Mantle, as they jeered
Maris.
Hearing them boo Maris, Mantle noted with some degree of amusement, “Roger has stolen my fans.”

Ralph Houk knew that this was Mantle’s team, and the first thing he did as manager was to go to the center fielder and tell him what he knew: that Mantle was the leader of the team and therefore now the captain of it. That moment symbolized a significant change: Houk would cater almost exclusively to the players, often at the expense of the writers, whom he did not so much shun as treat as a necessary evil. In place of the brilliant press-conference soliloquies by Stengel, which some reporters thought worthy of Mark Twain, Houk gave the press a measure of bromides, reflecting both his eternal optimism and a shrewd awareness that his players would read his praise of them in the next day’s newspapers. With Houk the writers sensed a bunker mentality, a them-against-us attitude. If Stengel had his eye always fixed on history as recorded by the sportswriters, Houk was content merely to win pennants and world championships.

No one appreciated that more than Mantle. The Houk years were largely happy ones for the players, and frequently less happy for the writers. The younger players, who often played with considerable anxiety and insecurity, found Houk reassuring, a sort of surrogate father. He had been an average ballplayer himself, a backup catcher during the Berra years. During World War II he distinguished himself in the Battle of the Bulge, and ended the war as a major. Some of the older writers still called him “Major” (which irritated the younger, more iconoclastic writers to no small degree). He possessed an intuitive sense of how to get the most out of his players, whether they were stars or journeymen, and he was very good at walking the delicate line between being their pal and knowing exactly when to draw the line. He gave the players a perfect example of that in the 1963 season when the Yankees went into Boston for a two-admission day-night doubleheader. As the Yankees arrived, one of the Boston papers printed an interview with Mantle in which the star discussed how much he loved to play for Houk and how if Houk asked him to go through a brick wall, he would ask only where the wall was. On the day of the doubleheader, the two teams were barely able to finish the first game, for it began to rain heavily during the late innings. As they waited for the rain to stop and the second game to start, the players became restless and bored, anxious to get on with it one way or another—either to go back to the hotel or to play. In the dugout, Mantle was passing the time by telling country-boy stories, including one about carnal relations with farm animals. When Houk walked by, Mantle asked, “Hey, Ralph, you ever done it with a sheep?” The atmosphere suddenly became tense and the other players realized that Mantle had crossed a line; Houk, good guy, abiding friend and pardner of the players, was not to be asked ribald questions, not by anyone, not even a star. His authority as manager was suddenly at stake. Houk called Mantle over, and then, as if he were speaking privately to him, but at the same time in a voice that everyone could hear, he thanked Mantle for the generous things he had said about him in the Boston paper. “Those are really kind words, Mickey, and I want to tell you they mean a lot to a manager.” “That’s okay Ralph, I meant every word,” Mantle answered. Then Houk continued, “Mickey, can you play in the second game if I need you?” Mantle shrugged and asked Houk to look at the field, where the rain was still pouring down. “Yeah, I know, Mickey, but with the field in that crappy condition I figure I may need you, because I’m thinking I don’t want to take a chance on getting any of my regulars hurt.” It was a masterful response, thought the players: Houk had held on to his authority and defused the situation, had even turned it to his advantage by using Mantle as his straight man, and yet in no way had he wounded the ego of the team’s best and most beloved player.