The Last Boy (35 page)

“Mantle turned and raced back for it, running at full speed in his choppy, high-stepping sprinter’s stride,” Robert Creamer wrote in
Sports Illustrated
. “He looked up over his right shoulder as he ran, and as he neared the ball he lifted his glove to catch it. But the point of juxtaposition of glove and ball that Mantle had anticipated was theoretical—it lay a few feet beyond the seven-foot-high wire fence bounding the outfield…as the ball went over for a home run Mantle ran into the fence. His left foot hit on the downward stroke of its stride, and his spikes caught in the wire mesh. The front part of his foot was bent violently up and back.”

The Orioles knew all too well the perils of the unmoored chain-link, which was exacerbated by the absence of a cinder warning track. They understood immediately what had happened. “The bottom of it caved in,” said first baseman Boog Powell. “His leg went under and sprung back.”

Mantle was surrounded by Yankees before Robinson rounded second base. “It’s broke,” he said. “I know it’s broke.”

This time he couldn’t refuse a stretcher. He was carried off the field looking like a “warrior on his shield,” one reporter wrote, and taken by ambulance to the hospital, where an X-ray detected an undisplaced, slightly oblique fracture of the third metatarsal neck, which means he broke one of the long bones in the foot that attach to the toes. His leg was placed in a cast up to his knee, and he was back at Memorial Stadium in time to hear the crowd cheer when the public address announcer confirmed the fracture.

“Isn’t there some way they can strap this thing up so I can play?” he asked when trainer Joe Soares predicted, accurately, that he would miss at least six weeks.

Dan Topping dispatched his twin-engine Grumman Mallard from Southampton, where he had been fishing the waters off Long Island. Reporters met Mantle on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport,
and watched as he was helped off the plane. A photograph taken as he hobbled toward a waiting limousine was converted into an annotated medical chart with dates and arrows fixed to every part of his body except the grimace on his face: knees, tonsils, shoulders, rib cage; abscessed hip, fractured finger, fractured foot; pulled, sprained, and torn muscles; surgery, surgery, and more surgery.

In the limo, Milton Gross tried and failed to get Mantle to say he was unlucky, which furthered the apotheosis of The Mick. By the time the morning papers rolled off the presses, the “Man of Mishaps” had been transmogrified into “a tragic figure,” “the champion hard-luck guy,” and “the most fabulous invalid in the long history of sport.”

Team physician Sidney Gaynor removed the cast on June 24 and happily predicted a return by the All-Star Game on July 9. But on July 26, the cartilage in his left knee, torn in May 1962 and torn some more in the altercation with the cyclone fence, gave way. “It’s my fault,” Mantle said. “My foot hurts, so I have to run on the side of it. I think that’s what makes my knee bad.”

He had reached a breaking point: the cumulative injuries and mishaps, the residue of (unacknowledged) bad luck and primitive sports medicine, rendered him a part-time, one-dimensional player. He would play only sixty-five regular-season games in 1963. Of those, five would become intrinsic to the mythology of The Mick. He soared, he crashed, he persevered, he indulged, and he looked bad.

Mantle was in the trainer’s room when Al Downing arrived early Sunday morning, August 4, for the usual day-after ministrations on his pitching arm. He had won his seventh game the day before, having joined the starting rotation in Mantle’s absence. Though it had been two years since his major league debut, Downing felt, “I had no credibility. Until you showed what you could do, nobody’s gonna be around every day asking you how you feel.”

Mantle called the kid over. “He said, ‘You’ve been doing a great job. Keep it up.’ This was the first time he had a chance to say something to
me. And that meant a lot, because all the guys had been telling me all along, but of course,
he
hadn’t been there.”

Mantle was feeling chipper. On the field before the first game of the Sunday doubleheader with Baltimore, Ralph Houk asked if he thought he could hit. Mantle said yes. Houk said he might use him if Mantle promised not to run.

The Yankees were trailing by a run in the bottom of the seventh inning of the second game when Mantle emerged from the dugout to pinch-hit. The ovation began at the bat rack and reached a crescendo when Bob Sheppard announced his name. The roar “shook the windows of the Bronx County Courthouse,” one paper said. Equally shaken, Mantle dug his spikes into the dirt on the right side of the plate and told himself, “Don’t just stand there and take three pitches—
swing.”

The Orioles were well aware that it was his first at-bat since the injury in Baltimore. “Big George Brunet was on the mound,” Brooks Robinson said. “He just reared back and threw on every pitch.”

Brunet threw one pitch, which Mantle took for a called strike, and then another. “Mantle swung his bat in anger for the first time in 61 games,” the
Times
reported, redirecting the ball into the left field stands. “The most amazing thing is, it was not a pitch that most right-handed hitters are ever gonna get airborne,” Downing said. “And not only was it airborne, it was airborne about twenty feet off the ground and just hit those seats and ricocheted like a rocket!”

Mantle wasn’t sure he had pulled the ball enough. When the umpire signaled home run, he thought, “Gee, I’m a lucky stiff.” He broke into a cold sweat and something that resembled a trot. Later, he said he wasn’t sure how he made it around the bases and, in fact, didn’t remember doing so. The roar of adulation eclipsed the two-minute standing ovation that had greeted him when he hobbled to the plate. It got louder and louder as he headed toward home. The Orioles applauded silently. “Gives you chills standing over there at first base,” Powell said. “Just being in the ballpark gave you chills.”

As Mantle rounded third base, Brooks Robinson thought “That’s why he’s Mickey Mantle.”

By the time he reached home plate, “there was tears runnin’ all over
his face,” Yankee pitcher Stan Williams said. He noticed because it was one of the rare occasions when Mantle allowed the outside world to see “how much it meant to him, how much the fans meant to him, how much the moment meant to him.”

After All These Years, New York Discovers Mickey Mantle
—
New York Herald Tribune

In the days that followed, Houk made it clear that Mantle would be limited to pinch-hitting duties for the foreseeable future. He batted only seven times in August and started only eleven regular-season games in September. One night after the Yankees clinched the pennant, Bill Guilfoile, the assistant director of public relations, was leaving the Stadium with
Post
reporter Maury Allen. “We saw this figure walking up the stairs ahead of us, taking each step with both feet, like a small child,” Guilfoile said. “It was Mantle. We stayed behind. We didn’t want to embarrass him. He finally made it to the exit and departed in a waiting taxicab.”

Players around the league knew “The Brute’s” reputation for playing hurt, so Mike McCormick, the Orioles’ starting pitcher, was surprised that Mantle wasn’t in the starting lineup when the Yankees returned to Baltimore on September 1. And he wondered why Mantle wasn’t in the dugout when the game began. “Apparently he was in the training room on the table,” McCormick said. “I guess they were tryin’ to sober him up.”

On the day Mantle and Ford were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1974, they fessed up to Dick Young of the
Daily News
—“Some Tales They Dare Tell.”

“Ralph told you you didn’t have to play the next day, so we visited those friends of yours,” Whitey said.

“That was the Cressens, good friends of mine from Dallas, who had this farm near Baltimore. So when Ralph said I wasn’t playing the next day, we went out to see them.”

“I had pitched the night before,” said Ford, “so I knew Houk didn’t need me.”

“We stayed up most of the night,” said Mickey. “I slept a couple of hours on a hammock.

“We decided to go straight to the ballpark, about 8 o’clock in the morning, and we stretched out on the tables in the trainer’s room ’til about 10. Then we suited up and were the first ones on the field.”

Their old running mate Hank Bauer was coaching third base for the Orioles. He took one look at Ford’s eyes and said, “Has Ralph seen you?”

Once a comrade, always a comrade. “I sent the clubhouse boy out to get mouthwash,” Bauer said. “Whitey really smelled bad. Whitey said, ‘It’s July, but number seven is lying on the table singing “Jingle Bells.”’”

Actually, it was September, and the Yankees were losing 4–1 in the eighth inning when Houk went in search of a pinch hitter. Mantle was asleep on Ford’s shoulder at the far end of the dugout. Boyer, who was on first base, thought, “He shouldn’t have come out of the clubhouse.”

Anyway, Bauer said, “Whitey hit Mickey in the ribs, you know, woke him up. ‘Here comes Ralph.’

“He asks Mickey, ‘Can you hit?’

“Mickey says, ‘Yeah! But I’m on the disabled list.’

“He says, ‘No, you’re not. You came off today.’”

In fact, he wasn’t on the disabled list, so he couldn’t have come off it. Like all the best baseball stories, this one has aged very well. “So, meantime, Mickey gets up and goes to the bat rack and gets all his stuff and I go to manager Billy Hitchcock,” Bauer continued. “I told him, ‘He’s not feelin’ very good.’

“I said, ‘Billy, if Mickey’s going to hit, tell McCormick, “Don’t throw that ball upstairs to him, it might end it.”’

It was McCormick’s first year in the American League. “Billy came running out to the mound and wanted to know had I ever pitched to Mantle,” McCormick said. “And I said I had pitched to him a couple of times in All-Star play. He said, ‘How do you pitch to him?’

“I said, ‘I try to waste my fastball and get him out with an off-speed pitch.’”

A screwball, preferably.

“Billy said, ‘Okay, don’t let him hit a fastball.’

“I said, ‘I won’t.’”

Hitchcock didn’t tell him that Mantle was feeling under the weather; none of the Oriole players knew. Hitchcock couldn’t have taken more than one step down into the Orioles’ dugout when McCormick tried to waste a fastball up high. “Mantle hit the most god-awful tomahawk-swing line drive into the left field bleachers,” McCormick said.

“Over the hedges,” Bauer said.

“Honest to God, I didn’t think he’d make it around the bases,” Boyer said.

“He kinda sobered his way around,” McCormick said.

He would hear about it for the rest of his career: “Even the drunks can hit home runs off of you.”

Safely back in the dugout, Mantle said, “Those people have no idea how hard that really was.”

Boyer marveled fifty years later, “Jesus Christ, he could play with a hangover.”

Mantle returned to the starting lineup on September 14, the day after the Yankees clinched the pennant. He had two goals: get into shape for the World Series and finish what he started in May against Bill Fischer. The still shell-shocked A’s returned to New York a week later, this time with Mantle’s old friend Tom Sturdivant, who had been traded to Kansas City in July. Mantle told him there was only one right-handed pitcher in the league with good enough control to help him hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium. “He had been hitting the top of the Stadium,” Sturdivant said. “He wanted to be the first one to hit it completely out of the Stadium.”

The Snake agreed to help. Saturday, September 22, was a cold day in New York, almost football weather. The Yankees were ahead 4–3 when Sturdivant entered the game in the seventh inning. Bobby Richardson was on first base. Bob Sheppard invoked the familiar words: “Now batting for the Yankees…”

The sparse crowd was treated to an unfamiliar sight: Mantle batted right-handed against the right-hander, a transgression his father had abhorred. The departure in form was duly noted upstairs in the press box.
Queried about it later, Mantle said he wanted to see if he could hit behind the runner batting from the right side.

Sturdivant had promised to throw it right down the middle. But manager Eddie Lopat had ordered him to throw a curve, and there was a big fine for violating one of Lopat’s rules. So, Sturdivant said, “I threw a crossfire, sidearm curve. He didn’t swing at it.”

Opportunity rode in with the next pitch. “I let Mickey know I’m going to throw it real quick and it’s going to be a fastball,” Sturdivant said. “Doc Edwards, my catcher, told him, ‘You better get ready.’

“The second pitch was the fastball, just a hair over letter high and inside. He hit a line drive into the monuments, and Bobby Del Greco caught it. We just had three then. It was between Miller Huggins and Babe Ruth. I told him, ‘You can’t hit me.’

“I got my butt chewed pretty bad. I said, ‘Eddie, what difference does it make?’

“We played baseball for fun.”

The first World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees convened in the Bronx on October 2 before 69,000 witnesses. Teachers throughout the metropolitan area suspended class. Black-and-white TVs were wheeled into thousands of school gymnasiums for NBC’s broadcast with Vin Scully and Mel Allen. Five hundred forty radio stations across the country carried the voices of Joe Garagiola and Ernie Harwell. The Vegas line made the Yankees 8-to-5 favorites to win the Series and 6-to-5 favorites to win the opener. Bookmakers posted 25-to-1 odds against a Dodger sweep.

No one expected the hitting-challenged Dodgers to break up the Yankees. Not even after Sandy Koufax struck out the first three batters on twelve pitches—the first of fifteen strikeouts, a new World Series record.

By the time Mantle led off in the bottom of the second, the Dodgers were ahead 4–0, thanks in large measure to John Roseboro’s schnapps-fortified home run. This at-bat would set the tone for all the innings to
come. It was one thing for Koufax to have his way with Kubek, Richardson, and Tresh, but this was The Mick.

Swing and a miss. Strike one.