Pinstripe Empire (60 page)

As spring training opened in Fort Lauderdale, Mantle made it official at a packed press conference. Despite all the injuries, he left with the most games and most at-bats of any Yankee, and ranked third all-time among everyone in home runs with 536, trailing only Ruth and Willie Mays. He was the greatest switch-hitter in history and the most popular player of his time.

A second Mickey Mantle Day was held on June 8, 1969, beautifully choreographed by Fishel. Important figures in Mickey’s life were present, including George Weiss, Harry Craft, and Tom Greenwade. Mick’s mother, Lovell, was there, but not Stengel, who was still boycotting the Yankees since his firing. Maris’s name was booed when emcee Frank Messer mentioned it.

There was a sustained ovation of ten minutes for Mick, followed by a humble speech delivered without notes. “Today I think I know how Lou Gehrig felt,” he said, recalling the “luckiest man” speech. After, he was driven around the running track in a golf cart by groundskeeper Danny Colletti. A crowd of 60,096 helped make the season attendance 1,067,996, a drop of 118,000 from his last year as a player.

The day was emotional for another reason as well. Mel Allen was invited to introduce Mantle from the dugout. He had been on the field for the Gehrig, Ruth, and DiMaggio days, and now this. (Mel, along with Berra, Weiss, Topping, and Webb, had all been back for Old-Timers’ Day in 1967, a sweet year for reunion.)

BOUTON KEPT A notebook on his season in Seattle, and in collaboration with Leonard Shechter wrote
Ball Four
, a breakthrough book that spent seventeen weeks on the
Times
bestseller list, helped by a dressing-down from Commissioner Kuhn for telling tales out of school.

Bouton’s book was considered scandalous for its violation of the so-called code of clubhouse silence, and it was the first time that fans learned that Mickey Mantle was not always the all-American boy. The book made Bouton persona non grata in the Yankee family and throughout all of baseball. But as controversial as the book was, it heralded a new wave of open
sportswriting that forever changed how people saw the game. And while Bouton would remain on the outside looking in, many people, including the next generation of sportswriters, claimed to have fallen in love with baseball because of his revelations about the “inner game” going on, the struggle of journeymen to survive, the nightmares over imagined injuries, the appreciation for everything “big league.” (Bouton, a clever entrepreneur, would later copyright the term “Big League” and would use it to market bubble gum and trading cards.)

Ball Four
was an appropriate coda for the sixties, when the nation’s core beliefs were in upheaval, along with the Yankees’ place in the standings.

TO THOSE WHOSE MOOD CHANGED with every Yankee victory and defeat, the years 1965 to 1975 were painful. There is a tendency to lump them together as the “lost years,” a bad memory, an abomination. But there were also millions of fans, born in the early sixties, who got their first exposure to Yankee baseball in this period, and it wasn’t all bad. Unaccustomed to winning every year, these people enjoyed baseball for what it was really intended to be: the national pastime, a team to root for, a recreational diversion from daily life that was a big part of American culture. Each game was a new adventure. There were come-from-behind wins, heartbreaking losses, misplays and great plays. There was the hope behind a fresh rookie or the arrival of a familiar veteran who has a little more left to contribute.

There was still the classic uniform, the inspiring stadium, the great days at the ballgame, or the fun of listening to the playful Phil Rizzuto, the wise Bill White, and the smooth pro Frank Messer broadcast the games.

White, hired in 1971 on the recommendation of Howard Cosell to Burke, was a wonderful foil to Rizzuto, reining him in if he was going too far, chiding him for “thinking like an American Leaguer,” or acknowledging a point well made.

White didn’t care much for the attention on his being the first African-American to broadcast for a team (Jackie Robinson had done network commentary). But Burke convinced him that with the stadium so close to Harlem, he would be a role model for so many kids growing up there, knowing that when they grew up they could do what he was doing. So he accepted it.

And, of course, for fans in Minnesota, Boston, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland, there was the joy of celebrating a championship while the Yankees were down, a chance that had rarely come along before. The four-team 1967 pennant race, barely noticed in New York, provided among the most thrilling finishes to a season in the league’s history.

THERE WAS ALSO a growing awareness in baseball that the “industry” could be better marketed. To those ends, Kuhn formed the Major League Baseball Promotion Corporation and, working with the Licensing Corporation of America, got into the licensing business in 1968. Burke was named president of the Promotion Corporation, while keeping his day job. At that point, the twenty teams saw team merchandise as not much of a business, but knew they were being “ripped off by a handful of nobodies,” according to Joe Grant of LCA, who said Burke was “paramount to the success of the operation.” And so the teams agreed to share equally under a managed program of granting licenses to legitimate businesses to produce quality merchandise.

Sharing equally seemed fine for the 1968 Yankees, but eventually their merchandise far outsold everyone else’s. Still, they always participated on an equal basis.

In 1969, professional baseball celebrated its centennial and fans voted on their all-time local teams as well as overall all-time teams. For the Yankees, this was the first such measurement since 1950. It came out with an infield of Gehrig at first, Lazzeri at second, Rizzuto at short, and Rolfe at third; an outfield of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mantle; Dickey catching; and Ruffing and Ford as the righty and lefty pitchers. On the all-time major league team, Gehrig, Ruth, and DiMaggio earned first-team honors, while DiMaggio, Dickey, and Stengel were among the “greatest living.” Babe Ruth was named the greatest player ever, and DiMaggio the greatest living player, an honor he loved and requested whenever he was introduced.

The ’69 Yankees hoped to spring two new heroes on the fans, both homegrown prospects who had been off on military duty and were now ready to take regular positions in the lineup. One, Jerry Kenney, didn’t work out as hoped. The other, Bobby Murcer, would become the most popular Yankee of his time, and a hero to that generation born around the time Maris was breaking the home run record.

Murcer had been scouted and signed by Tom Greenwade, just as Mantle had. He came from Oklahoma, just like Mantle. He was an infielder who was moved to the outfield, just like Mantle. So the Yankees gave him Mantle’s locker and Bobby Richardson’s uniform number 1, and built him up to be the successor to Ruth-Gehrig-DiMaggio-Mantle.

Bobby wasn’t going to be a Hall of Famer and wouldn’t live up to that sort of buildup, but such pressure never bothered him. He was a quality player who lost two years to the service that could have been spent sharpening his tools. Still just twenty-three after rejoining the team (he’d been with them briefly in both ’65 and ’66, time enough to be a teammate to Mantle and Maris), he hit 49 homers in 1969–70. He became an immediate fan favorite to a fan base desperate to have someone to cheer. And the fans were good with him: They didn’t boo him for not being Mantle, whereas Mantle was booed for not being DiMaggio.

1969 would see the departures of Tresh, Pepitone, and Downing, leaving only Stottlemyre and reliever Steve Hamilton from the pennant-winning era that ended in ’64. Hamilton, the team’s and the league’s player rep and a very effective left-hander, developed a crowd-pleasing blooper pitch called the Folly Floater, which he threw perhaps a dozen times with generally good results. Tresh stayed in the lineup despite a four-year slump after beginning with such promise. Loose cartilage in his knee, suffered during a ’67 exhibition game, turned the Gold Glover into an “old man” quickly. Pepitone returned to first base after Mantle’s retirement, and, after he rebounded to 27 homers in ’69 (from a combined 28 in ’67–’68), the Yankees seized on a chance to get something of value for him. For all his troubles, he was lovable and popular and famous for being the first Yankee to require an outlet in his locker for a hair dryer. Unfortunately, MacPhail miscalculated and got ex-Yankee farmhand Curt Blefary from Houston, who added little to the team and complained about Houk. Tresh went to Detroit for outfielder Ron Woods, whose career would be brief, and Downing was part of a deal with Oakland that brought Danny Cater to play first base.

Cater, it was said, could calculate his batting average to the fourth decimal point while running to first, which said a great deal about both his speed and his focus.

But if you were a baseball fan in New York in 1969, there was really only one story, and it was happening ten miles away at Shea Stadium. The Mets, a thorn in the side of the Yankees since the moment they hired Stengel in
’61, won the National League East in the first season of division play, the National League pennant, and then the World Series. All three clinchers came at home, bringing delirium to their fans and amazement to just about everyone. Gil Hodges had led the Miracle Mets from ninth place in ’68 to the top of the baseball universe in ’69.

A telegram went to M. Donald Grant, the chairman of the Mets, after the pennant was clinched: CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING NUMBER ONE—AM ROOTING FOR YOU TO HANG IN THERE AND TAKE ALL THE MARBLES. AS A NEW YORKER I AM ECSTATIC, AS A BASEBALL PERSON I AM IMMENSELY PLEASED AND AS A YANKEE I CONSIDER SUICIDE THE EASY OPTION. MICHAEL BURKE, NEW YORK YANKEES, INC.

THE KEY NEW face of 1970 was catcher Thurman Munson, twenty-three, who took command of the position after just 99 minor league games. An All-American at Kent State near his native Canton, Ohio, Munson was signed by scout Gene Woodling.

Thurman would enjoy an unusual relationship with Yankee fans. Grumpy and contentious with the press, he was no media darling. But the fans saw beyond that. They loved his commanding presence on the field and his aggressive play. He would get cheered no matter what the papers wrote. He even got cheered once when he gave the fans the finger.

Munson overcame a 1-for-30 start and wound up hitting .302 and impressing everyone with his defense and pitch-calling. He was the first AL catcher to win the Rookie of the Year Award. Although Stottlemyre, White, and Murcer were established big leaguers, Munson was the first building block on the road back to the World Series. It was still six years away and would require much more, but the feeling of having an All-Star catcher in place, indeed a likely successor to the Dickey-Berra-Howard tradition, made the front office breathe easier. This was a number-one draft pick that was right on the money.

With Cater hitting .301, White .296, Murcer belting homers in four consecutive at-bats, a 20-win season from Fritz Peterson, and 29 saves from veteran Lindy McDaniel, the Yankees won 93 games in 1970, good for second place, although fifteen games behind the Orioles. It had been so long since the team had anything to celebrate that they uncharacteristically doused each other with champagne after clinching second, an event that surely would have invited a stern look from Joe McCarthy.

Stengel? Well, he was back in good graces and might have been okay with it. Casey had broken his decade-long exile from the Yankees by agreeing to attend the team’s Old-Timers’ Day—at which his uniform number 37 would be retired—and he put on the Yankee uniform and trotted out at age eighty to the roar of the crowd. (Since all guests received small gifts, I was personally thrilled to get a postcard from Casey when he returned to California, saying, “Mrs. Stengel and I had a marvelous time and thank you for my prize.”)

THE YANKEES LURED Mickey Mantle back as a coach for the final month of the season. Mick had been broadcasting for NBC’s Game of the Week, wasn’t enjoying it, and thought it would be fun to suit up again and travel with the guys. His assignment was to coach first base in the three middle innings, relieving Howard of his duties each day for that interlude.

It bothered Mickey that the arrangement was a little embarrassing for Elston, and he realized that he didn’t really have much of a role. The experiment lasted to the end of that season, but we decided to reshoot the team photo so that he was included.

Of course, there were his annual Old-Timers’ Day appearances, which continued uninterrupted until Bowie Kuhn banned him from the game for representing an Atlantic City casino in 1983. Kuhn had done the same with Mays, seeking to distance baseball from gambling. The ban didn’t extend to Old-Timers’ Days, only to employment with the team, but Mick chose to make a statement by not returning for the ceremonies during the time of his ban. (Commissioner Peter Ueberroth lifted the ban in 1985, and Mick immediately became a broadcaster for the Yanks for four seasons and once again an Old-Timers’ Day fixture.)

Meanwhile, a controversy of sorts arose over the order of introduction at Old-Timers’ Days. Joe DiMaggio had been introduced last since his first one in 1952.

In the first years after Mantle retired, his popularity was so high and his fans so much more youthful, that the cheers for him were louder than those for DiMaggio. So Fishel (with me in agreement), decided to reverse the order so that DiMaggio’s “greatest living” introduction was heard clearly.

Bad call. DiMaggio, always easy to offend, considered it a slight and threatened never to return again. Assured that he would be introduced last, he returned again and again.

Mantle couldn’t have cared less. The gatherings were just fun for him, like the time I encouraged him to play center field one last time, or the time he forgot to bring his number 7 uniform with him (and we put a piece of tape over the 1 in Gene Michael’s 17), or the time he emerged from the clubhouse with a dangling earring, poking fun at Barry Bonds’s fashion statement and at his own wholesome image.

THERE WERE NO major additions to the team in 1971, but the Yankees sadly parted with Bill Robinson. He never found his groove with the Yankees, and for his four years in pinstripes batted only .206 with 16 homers. As the Yankees believed, he would go on to play another twelve years and would shine for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and earn a World Series ring in 1979. It would forever be a mystery as to what went wrong with Bill Robinson in New York and why that promise wasn’t fulfilled.