The Last Boy (5 page)

Compounding Stengel’s befuddlement was the disconnect between Mantle’s power and his actual size. At only five feet eleven and maybe 185 pounds, he wasn’t big at all. Yankee pitcher Eddie Lopat was first to observe, “That kid gets bigger the more clothes he takes off.”

Potential is the most elastic of human qualities. By the time the Yankees boarded the train for California, the dispatches being wired back east were inflated with wonder and speculation: How much more might he grow? And if he filled out, what place in baseball history might he occupy?

Stan Isaacs, writing for the
Daily Compass
, was the lone voice of reason, but he had the advantage of being in New York:

Since the start of spring training, the typewriter keys out of the training camps have been pounding out one name to the people back home. No matter what paper you read, or what day, you’ll get Mickey Mantle, more Mickey Mantle and still more Mickey Mantle.

Never in the history of baseball has the game known the wonder to equal this Yankee rookie. Every day there’s some other glorious phrase as the baseball writers outdo themselves in attempts to describe the antics of this wonder: “He’s faster than Cobb…he hits with power from both sides of the plate the way Frankie Frisch used to…he takes all the publicity in stride, an unspoiled kid…sure to go down as one of the real greats of baseball.”

Mantle wasn’t in the starting lineup when the Yankees arrived in Los Angeles on Friday, March 16, to play the Hollywood Stars. The game was a sellout; across town the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox played in front of 235 fans, including their unhappy owners. (The Yankees would draw nearly 140,000 during their ten days in California, acccording to the
Los Angeles Times.
)

The next morning, Nick Ferguson arrived bright and early to take his pal out to breakfast at a greasy spoon on Wilshire Boulevard. As Mantle inhaled box after tiny box of cornflakes, Ferguson thought back to the mornings he had spent at the Mantles’ home watching Mickey and his twin brothers eat big soup bowls full of cereal. That was one reason the family moved out of Commerce to Dr. Wormington’s farm east of town, where they could have some cows and enough milk for all those cornflakes. Mickey milked all nineteen of them before heading off to school.

After breakfast, Mantle and Ferguson drove to Wrigley Field, the minor league park where Gary Cooper had once stood at home plate to deliver Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech in
The Pride of the Yankees.
Mantle hit a mammoth home run—“cannonading the pellet over the center field bleacher fence 412 feet from home plate and another wall beyond,” according to
The Arizona Republic.

Gil McDougald, destined to become 1951’s Rookie of the Year, saw a scene often repeated by unwary center fielders. “Mickey hit a two-iron shot, and this guy come runnin’ over in center field thinkin’ he was gonna
catch it. He leaps up, and that ball took off like an airplane over the fence. The center fielder was in a state of shock.”

The next day, at Gilmore Stadium, Mantle went from first to third with such blinding speed it drew a collective gasp from the crowd of 13,000. After seeing Mantle in Los Angeles, Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, wrote Dan Topping, “I hereby agree to pay any price (fill in the blank) for the purchase of Mickey Mantle.
And please be reasonable.”
Topping’s facetious reply: Ralph Kiner and a half mill. Frank Lane, the White Sox general manager, fumed at the Yankees’ dumb luck: “They got him for nothing. Nothing—do you hear? Why, for a prospect like that I’d bury him in thousand-dollar bills.”

New York
Daily News
, March 19: “Mantle very well could be the key to the pennant.”

New York Daily Mirror
, March 20: “Now the Mickey Mantle madness has spread to the players. Yankees, old and young, openly debate the ability of Mantle, whose speed and power in six exhibition games forced the reporters to all but star him as a daily feature.”

“Who is this Mickey Mantle who knocked my Yogi off the front page?” wondered Carmen Berra.

The Bay Area was home to Jerry Coleman, Billy Martin, Jackie Jensen, Frank Crosetti, Charlie Silvera, and Gil McDougald. But it belonged to DiMaggio. At Seals Stadium, where the wind blew in from right field and the fog rolled in nightly off the bay, Mantle hit a 400-foot home run that cleared the right field wall. “You had nineteen or twenty homers in twenty years hit over the right field fence,” McDougald said. “Bounced up in the park across the street not far from where I lived,” Silvera said.

On Saturday night, March 24, DiMaggio hosted a party at the family restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf for teammates and writers. One impertinent diner inquired whether Joltin’ Joe would consider moving to left field to make room for Mantle in center. “There’s nobody taking center from me until
I
give it up,” DiMaggio replied.

On March 26, the Yankees were back in Los Angeles to play the Trojans at USC—their last West Coast game. USC’s new coach, Rod Dedeaux, had played two games for Stengel when he managed the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dedeaux got a bigger bonus in 1935 than Mantle got from the Yankees. Three of Dedeaux’s former players—Hank Workman,
Jim Brideweser, and Wally Hood—were Yankee rookies. He would continue to send talent to the majors for another thirty years: Tom Seaver, Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Fred Lynn, Dave Kingman, Bill Lee, and Ron Fairly, among others.

The Yankees arrived on campus in time for an 11:30
A.M.
luncheon at the University Commons, where, according to pitcher Dave Rankin, “sorority girls played bridge all day and hoped for the best.” By then snug Bovard Field was SRO. “Additional stands had been erected and the outfield roped off to accommodate any spillage of customers,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported—the crowd was later estimated at 3,000. Those unable to find seats could listen to a special broadcast on radio station KWKW.

Cozy, palm-draped Bovard Field (318 feet down the right field line, 307 feet down the line in left) was tucked into a corner of the campus near the Physical Education building, which sat along the third base line. Beyond the right field fence lay a practice field where USC footballers were running spring drills. The impressionable Mantle importuned USC’s senior team manager to point out the gridiron stars. Wise guy Phil Rizzuto sent the Trojans’ eight-year-old batboy, Dedeaux’s son, Justin, to keep Mantle company on the bench—“Hey, rook, I got somebody here your age.”

The temperature at game time was only 59 degrees, with a wind from the southeast at 6 miles per hour. Conditions were Southern California dry—it hadn’t rained in twenty days. The National Weather Service noted “some haze.” Smog had not yet entered the vocabulary. Tom Lovrich, the Trojans’ ace, had already beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Hollywood Stars that spring. A sidearming right-hander who threw a heavy, sinking fastball, he would go on to a respectable career in Triple A ball. When Mantle came to bat in the first inning, Lovrich didn’t even know that he was a switch-hitter. Dedeaux told him, “When in doubt, keep the ball low.”

The count, in Lovrich’s memory, went to two balls and two strikes. His intention was to throw the next pitch low and away, trying to entice Mantle to chase something off the plate, which he did. The pitch couldn’t have been more than eight inches off the ground. “Our catcher, John Burkhead, kind of dove or fell to his side to block a wild pitch,” Lovrich
said. “Mantle actually stepped out of the box and reached across the plate. How he reached it, we never knew. You knew the ball was hit. It had
that
sound. A pitcher’s unfavorite sound.”

Dedeaux stood, mouth agape. “You heard the swish before you heard the sound of the bat as the ball disappeared into the day.”

In a 1986 letter to baseball researcher Paul E. Susman, thanking him for his “unrelenting interest” in the matter, the Trojans’ center fielder Tom Riach described the play this way: “Riach ran just to the right of the 439 foot sign at the fence. I jumped up on the fence (approximately 8 feet) and watched the ball cross the practice football field and short-hop the fence on the north side of the football field.”

Among the football players preparing for the coming season on the adjacent field was Frank Gifford, who was also recruited by Dedeaux as a catcher. He watched the ball bisect the sky. “It went over the fence and into the middle of the football field where we were playing, which was probably another forty-five, fifty yards,” he said. “The ball came banging into the huddle. It bounced and hit my foot. I said, ‘Who the hell hit that?’ Somebody said, ‘Some kid named Mickey.’ We didn’t like baseball players. We thought they were gay. It was like, ‘Who are these freaks who would enter our domain?’”

Gifford was the last man on the field to see the ball. “It was never retrieved,” Rod Dedeaux said. “We never saw it again.”

Mantle was greeted in the dugout with hooting and hollering unseemly for an exhibition game against a collegiate team. “They pounded him,” Justin Dedeaux said. “They knew they had seen something.”

The batboy regarded Mantle’s discarded bludgeon with wonder: “What’s in this bat?”

Another towering home run in the sixth landed on the porch of a house beyond the left field fence. In the seventh, a bases-clearing triple flew to the deepest part of center field. In the ninth inning he beat out an infield single on a common ground ball, well played by the shortstop, who, pitcher Dave Cesca said, “would have thrown out any normal human being.”

“The greatest show in history,” Rod Dedeaux called it later.

Ed Hookstratten, a relief pitcher not then on USC’s roster, recalls leading a search party out to the football field, looking for the spot where
Mantle’s shot fell to the earth. “We walked it off,” Hookstratten said. “A shoe is a foot. We got over the fence in the football field and paced it from there. I bet the whole team went out. We were all curious. Six hundred, six-fifty, going toward seven hundred feet, absolutely.”

Despite Gifford’s eyewitness testimony, reports circulated around campus that the ball had landed in a Methodist church behind the practice football field. Or over it. Or in a dentist’s office.

Six decades later, Bovard Field remains sacred ground in Mantleology. Though the field is long gone, grown men equipped with 1951 Sanborn Insurance maps, Google Earth satellite imagery, and lots of free time still try to calculate the precise distance the ball flew when Mickey Mantle announced himself to the world. Estimates range from 551 to 660 feet, depending on whose diagrams, digital readouts, and trajectories you consult. Mantle himself claimed not to remember. Ralph Houk, the Yankees’ backup catcher and future manager, said, “I’ll say six hundred feet—and I lie a lot.”

Years later, Dedeaux told me he doubted that any ball could have traveled 600 feet—science be damned—given the placement of the diamond among the buildings and athletic fields on campus. But to the day he died, Dedeaux swore he saw Mantle hit two 500-foot home runs on March 26, 1951, one left-handed, one right-handed.

In the telling and retelling of the events of that day, memory calcified into fact and a myth was born. In the fine print of history, and the vaults of university film, where fact resides, a different version of Mantle’s second home run emerges. According to the box score, Dedeaux used only three pitchers that day; Cesca, the lefty, pitched only the ninth inning, which means that Mantle’s sixth-inning home run had to be an opposite field shot hit left-handed. Ben Epstein’s game story in the
Mirror
stated: “Mickey obtained all his extra-base shots batting left-handed.” The Los Angeles
Herald-Examiner
concurred. None of the profuse dispatches filed by New York writers mentioned a home run from each side of the plate, and none of the Trojans recalled it that way, either.

Proof positive came from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in the form of a two-second film clip in the 1951
Trojan Review.
There’s number six, Mickey Mantle, batting left-handed in the top of the sixth. His bat is a blur as he steps into the pitch. Front toe turned inward, back foot lifted
off the ground, he follows the flight of the ball over the left field fence. Everyone is looking that way, the third base coach, ump, runner, and the news photog squatting along the base line; and all the fans clustered behind the chain-link fence in the shade of a eucalyptus tree near the first base dugout. The narrator is solemnly impressed: “Yankee flash, Mickey Mantle, bangs out his second home run to score a pair of teammates.”

When the game ended, Mantle was hitting .432; DiMaggio was batting under .200, having left the field after two at-bats, a normal spring training accommodation for an aging, aching star. Fans besieged the press box, wanting to know the answer to Carmen Berra’s question: Who
is
this Mickey Mantle? Coeds swarmed the team bus. By the time the Yankees got back to Phoenix the next morning, autograph hounds were offering two of anybody else’s signature for one of Mantle’s.

The press of expectations was upon the nineteen-year-old Mickey Mantle. Six days earlier, he had been mere background in a Hollywood flack’s snapshot, happy just to be in the picture. Now he had moved to stage center, where he would remain for the rest of his life. “It becomes doubtful that Casey Stengel will dare to let him out of his sight,” Arch Murray wrote in the
New York Post.

The future was manifest in the March 26 box score: Mantle, 5 AB, 4 H, 2 HR, 1 3B, 1 1B, 7 RBI. More than a decade would pass before he drove in that many runs again. Houk and Berra looked at each other and said, “My God, whadda we got here?”

Headline writers invoked classical mythology in an effort to convey the epic proportions of the day. “One for the Mantle,” the
Los Angeles Times
declared. “Yanks Dismantle Troy.”

A half century later, Justin Dedeaux described the wonder of it all more simply: “This was the day the whole world opened up.”

A
LETTER FROM
M
ANTLE’S
father, Mutt, was waiting for him in Phoenix. His local draft board wanted to reexamine him, and wanted to do so within the next ten days. When the Yankees headed east after another week of exhibition games in Arizona, Mantle wasn’t with them. He detoured to Miami, Oklahoma, and then to Tulsa to have his draft status reviewed. Again, he was declared medically unfit to serve; Stengel lobbied hard to put him in a Yankee uniform instead Mantle expected and wanted to be sent to the class AA team in Beaumont, Texas.

His fate was still undecided when he boarded a night flight out of Kansas City for New York on Friday, April 13. The Army’s decision generated suspicion distilled with typical sports page asperity. “So Mantle has osteomyelitis. What’s the big deal? He doesn’t have to
kick
anybody in Korea.”

Welcome to the big city, kid.

Landing at 7:30
A.M.
, Saturday, he headed straight for Ebbets Field, where the Yankees were scheduled to play the Dodgers in the second
game of the annual interborough exhibition series. Mantle prevailed upon Stengel to put him in the starting lineup, but not before the manager showed him how to play the tough right field corner that had been his turf when he played for the Dodgers at the dawn of the twentieth century. “First time the kid ever saw concrete,” Stengel told his writers; they were always
his
writers.

On Sunday, the kid went 4 for 4, with a home run over the 38-foot scoreboard in right field. General manager George Weiss put him on the major league roster. The next DiMaggio had arrived before the original departed. There was tension in that for both of them. “How’d you like to replace George Washington?” said teammate Jerry Coleman.

Stengel didn’t make it easier. “Stengel loved Mantle, and didn’t like DiMaggio,” said future Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog, “So Joe held that against Mickey.”

That was apparent when the Yankees opened the season against the Red Sox at the Stadium on April 17. DiMaggio pointed him out to columnist Jimmy Cannon: “This is the next great ballplayer.” But when an enterprising photographer posed DiMaggio and Ted Williams on either side of Mantle, Joe D. declined the opportunity to introduce them. The Splendid Splinter handled the niceties himself.

There was a time, back in high school, when Mantle idled through fourth-period study hall with a two-page magazine spread devoted to Joltin’ Joe. He bragged to his classmate Joe Barker, “I’m going to take his place in center field at Yankee Stadium.”

But Stan “The Man” was Mantle’s boyhood idol. He mentioned Musial the day he signed with the Yankees. Weiss immediately corrected that misconception, telling his young star the story line he was expected to follow—Joe D. was his hero. Given DiMaggio’s intimidating frostiness, it was little wonder Mantle never asked for help. Gil McDougald said, “When Joe was in the dugout, nobody would say a word. Joe would sit down. He’d like to smoke, so he’d be sittin’ down close to the runway. Everybody else would be sittin’ down toward the water faucet at the end of the dugout.”

DiMaggio gave three years to the war effort, helping to make the world safe by playing baseball for Uncle Sam. He returned to the Yankees in 1946 with an ulcer, an unwanted divorce, and bone spurs that would
plague him for the last six years of his career. By 1951, it was clear to everyone, including Joe’s brother, Dom, the Red Sox center fielder, that this season was likely his last. “He staggered through it,” Dom said.

Two photographs taken in the Yankees’ locker room documented the imminent succession. Pete Sheehy had given Mantle the locker next to DiMaggio’s. In the first photo, taken five days before opening day, Sheehy is filling the empty cubicles in preparation for the new season, hanging Mantle’s crisp number 6 beside DiMaggio’s venerable number 5. A week later,
Life
magazine photographed them in street clothes in posed post-game chat, Mantle sitting on his stool in pants too short to cover his white socks, with DiMaggio towering above him. Joe looks immaculate, the way he always did—white shirt, braces, Countess Mara tie—the whole upwardly mobile bit. “Looked like a senator,” Billy Martin said, and Mantle agreed: “Like you needed an invitation to approach him.”

Red Smith devoted his opening-day column in the
Herald Tribune
to the rookie who played his first major league game wearing “impoverished baseball spikes” and “soles flapping like a radio announcer’s jaw.” The Commerce Comet hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before. He gave the cabbie who took him to the Stadium the next morning a nickel on a $3.00 fare. The son of the undertipped hack said his father never forgot the slight.

Another Yankee rookie, public address announcer Bob Sheppard, filled the Stadium for the first time with a stentorian voice that sounded older than his years.
In right field, number six, Mickey Mantle. Number six.
A speech teacher who became an adjunct professor at St. John’s University, Sheppard immediately appreciated the qualities and construction of Mantle’s name: soft, flowing sounds that conveyed his grace alternating with hard, tough consonants that suggested his power—a staccato rhythm that implied speed. It was almost as if his name embodied the traits that defined him. “It said, ‘He’s an American guy from the Midwest,’” Sheppard said. “If it was Michael, it wouldn’t be as good.”

Mantle went 1 for 4 in his first big league game with a single and an RBI. But he was monosyllabic with reporters who wanted to know his every thought. How could he explain himself to people who believed Commerce, Oklahoma, was a made-up name?

“I was shy, scared,” Mantle told me decades later. Too scared to get off the bus and go to the reception at Whitey Ford’s wedding, too scared to
face the scrum of sportswriters who dogged his locker room. “They called me aloof. I thought that meant horny.”

Hank Bauer and his roommate, Johnny Hopp, took him in and took him on as a project. They worked to purge the rube of his wardrobe and introduced him to the finer things in New York: corned beef and other pleasures of the flesh. They had an apartment above the Stage Deli on Seventh Avenue. Hymie Asnas provided food on the house; Bauer took care of him when World Series time came around. “He weighed 170 pounds,” Bauer said. “By the end of the season he weighed 190.”

In those days, veterans taught rookies how to look and how to act major league; they enforced the code of clubhouse etiquette and on-field behavior. They took care of one another. Bauer’s generous example—as well as DiMaggio’s cold shoulder—would inform the way Mantle treated rookies for the rest of his career. “I knew he didn’t have the proper attire,” Bauer said. “He came in Hush Puppy shoes, white sweat socks, rolled-up pants a little bit short, and a big white tie with a peacock and a tweed sports coat. Next day, I said, ‘Come with me, and I’ll buy you a couple of sports coats.’ Took him to Eisenberg & Eisenberg.”

Bauer made him presentable, but he couldn’t make him savvy. Mantle spent $30 apiece for “cashmere” sweaters that turned out to be made of a flammable synthetic. He would later purchase $2,700 worth of stock in a nonexistent insurance company. He was an easy mark. “Very naive about people,” Merlyn Mantle told me. “He would trust shady characters.”

Older, wiser teammates tried to help. Bobby Brown took him aside in the outfield one day: “You’ve got the world by the tail. Take good care of yourself, work hard, stick with the straight and narrow. You’ll make a lot of money.”

Mutt Mantle knew better than anyone that his son was easily led—he made him that way. He approached Red Patterson, the Yankees’ publicity man, for help. In a rough draft from an unpublished memoir provided by Patterson’s son, Bruce, he wrote: “During a rainout in St. Louis, he came to my room and asked if he could discuss a matter with me which had him disturbed. ‘I would like you to take good care of Mickey when he goes all the way up to the Yankees. He is going to get a lot of attention and there will be people making him offers but I wish you would handle him. He can use all of your advice.’

“In effect, he was asking me to act as a sort of agent for Mickey. I explained that as a Public Relations man for the club I would give him as much help as possible but I could not be his agent.

“True to his Dad’s concern Mickey was beset by agents and somehow got tangled up with two at one time. It took legal action by the club to straighten out the mess. I can recall one conversation Tommy Henrich and I had with Mickey in which we asked him if he had obtained a lawyer to represent him in his transactions. ‘No, I didn’t have to. They had a lawyer up in their room.’”

An opportunistic agent named Alan Savitt waylaid Mantle in the lobby of the Concourse Plaza Hotel his first week in New York, promising $50,000 a year in endorsements, to be split fifty-fifty. Short of cash, Savitt soon sold a 25 percent interest in Mantle futures to a showgirl named Holly Brooke, who introduced the rookie to scotch and the art of picking up a check.

Carl Lombardi, Mantle’s minor league teammate and friend, tried to warn him off the deal—and the girl who came with it. Lombardi recalled trying to reason with his obdurate friend during an evening at a Jersey roadhouse. “I said, ‘Mick, before you make a commitment, do yourself a favor, go to the front office and talk to them about it.’ Like I said, he was stubborn. After he signed it, he said to me, ‘Boy, I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.’”

On the field he did well enough to merit a major profile in the June 2 issue of
Collier’s
magazine. But as the pressures and distractions of New York mounted, his production decreased and his temper flared. He kicked water coolers and lost his cool—often enough that DiMaggio confided to
New York Times
beat writer Louis Effrat, “He’s a rock head.”

Pitchers began to figure him out and exploit the holes in his swing, particularly when he batted left-handed. Satchel Paige, then pitching for the St. Louis Browns, made Mantle look so bad he laughed out loud at him. By mid-July, his batting average had dropped to .260. “I was striking out about four out of every five times up,” he told me.

Not true. By then Mantle had bought into the revisionist history that exaggerated his futility. He struck out only .9 times per five at-bats during the first two months of the season, according to Dave Smith of Retrosheet. Between May 30 and July 14, he struck out 25 times in
97 at-bats, 1.56 strikeouts per five at-bats. (For the season, he averaged 1.09, just a little above his lifetime average of 1.06 strikeouts per five at-bats.) The fawning newspaper hacks turned into jackals: “The next DiMaggio struck out on three pitches.”

On July 14, in Cleveland, Mantle broke up Bob Feller’s attempt for his second no-hitter in two weeks with a sixth-inning double. Asked what he had thrown the rookie, Feller said tartly, “A baseball, I presume.”

After the game, the Yankees announced the purchase of pitcher Art Schallock from Brooklyn, meaning that someone had to be dropped from the roster. Four days later, Mantle, the team leader in RBI, cried when Stengel told him that he was being sent down to the Triple A Kansas City Blues. For years afterward, Mantle would recount the mutually tearful conversation. “This is gonna hurt me more than you,” the manager insisted.

Joe Gallagher, a young gofer doing stats for Mel Allen, saw Mantle in the lobby of the Cadillac Hotel as he was getting ready to leave. He was still crying. “Kind of like it was the end of his career,” Gallagher said. “All I could say to him was ‘You’ll be back.’”

He played his first game for the Blues in Milwaukee in a fog so thick he said he might wear a catcher’s mask in center field. He dragged a bunt down the first base line for his only hit, showcasing his speed. Manager George Selkirk minced no words letting him know he was there to regain his swing, which promptly went south. He didn’t hit a home run for twelve days. Johnny Blanchard spent four days with him before being sent to Double A. “He said, ‘Make room for me, Blanch, I’m coming down,’” Blanchard recalled.

When his minor league buddy Keith Speck came to visit, Mantle told him, “I ain’t never getting back up there.”

Folks back home and some in the Yankees organization thought he had already acquired too many big-league habits. Hank Bauer later told Tony Kubek that when Mantle moved into the apartment above the Stage Deli, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s arrived with him. “A lot of people thought that he’d just got to drinkin’ and carousin’ so much with Billy [Martin] and some of these other guys, he got completely out of whack,” said Frank Wood, whose father played American Legion ball against Mantle in Picher, Oklahoma.

One night, Mantle treated his boyhood friend Bill Mosely and his
wife to a night on the town in Kansas City. Mosely was in the Army, stationed at Fort Scott, fifty miles away. The evening was a revelation—not just because of the style to which Mantle had become accustomed but because of the bravado with which he indulged and the conviction that it would not interfere with his ability to play the next day.

“We’re drinkin’ there and eatin’ and everything, things I never heard of before. Caviar. Is that right? And a guy by name of Harold Youngman, he’s Mickey’s sugar daddy, so he’s footin’ the bill. I’m thinkin’ all we had there comes to around a thousand dollars. In my time that was a lot of money. Still a lot of money. But anyway, we had a ball and I got to talkin’ to Mickey and come to find out he’s got a doubleheader to play the next day! I don’t know how in the hell he did it, but he did.”

In fact, he wasn’t doing much. Welcomed to town as a “tonic” by the
Kansas City Star
on July 16, he became a “dejected and harassed young man” by August 4. After that bunt single in his first at-bat, he told me, “the next twenty-two times up I didn’t even hit the ball at all.” His statistical recall was slightly off—he had had three hits in his first eighteen at-bats for the Blues—but the memory of his futility was indelible. “I was pretty scared. Probably I was more disappointed than scared that I wasn’t doing better because of my dad, y’ know. He lived and died for me to be a baseball player, and it looked like I wasn’t going to do it.”