He was the brightest star, a talisman of the supernatural.
—Buzz Bissinger, The Classic Mantle
Mickey Mantle’s star power was unchallenged by any other athlete . . . not approached in American sports until Michael Jordan in the 1990s.
—Allen Barra, Mantle and Mays
A sports book author penned that superlative not in the fifties or sixties but fifty years later. The Mantle legend lives. Authors produce doorstop-sized biographies about him. Not only does the legend endure; with each passing year it is embellished and grows. Much of the Mantle legend is justified, based on his performance and his exploits. But here and there the Mantle legend seems to grow beyond all bounds, obscuring from view the achievements of Mantle’s baseball contemporaries such as Larry Doby, Roger Maris, Ernie Banks, or even Ted Williams.
Mantle stood five feet eleven; he weighed 195 pounds.1 He hit 536 home runs over an eighteen-year career. Mantle holds the record for home runs in the World Series, at eighteen, having surpassed no less than Babe Ruth (fifteen). Revisionists today term his achievements all the more remarkable because of his supposed small stature: “His talent was unlike what anyone had ever seen, his power an anomaly because of a diminutive frame of 5-11 and 190 pounds.”2 Even more remarkable yet was that “power hitters in the big leagues were big, hefty . . . all compaction.”3
True, for his day, Babe Ruth was “big and hefty”: six feet two, 215 pounds. But almost all the power hitters, in Mantle’s time and subsequently, were smaller, not larger, than Mantle, contrary to what Mantle hagiographers would have you believe. A partial list would include
Henry Aaron, six feet, 180 pounds, 755 home runs
Willie Mays, five feet ten, 170 pounds, 660 home runs
Ernie Banks, six feet, 180 pounds, 512 home runs
Stan Musial, six feet, 175 pounds, 475 home runs
Willie Stargell, six feet two, 188 pounds, 475 home runs
Carl Yastrzemski, five feet eleven, 175 pounds, 452 home runs
Duke Snider, six feet, 179 pounds, 407 home runs
Roberto Clemente, five feet eleven, 280 home runs
With weight training many of the power hitters of the eighties and later decades became bigger, for instance, Frank “The Big Hurt” Thomas of the Chicago White Sox (521 home runs). The arrival of the steroid era in baseball brought even greater numbers of bigger power hitters: Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, Rafael Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, Sammy Sosa, and Albert Pujols. In fact, seven of the last eight players to join the five-hundred-or-more-home-runs club have been proven users of banned performance-enhancing drugs (Pujols is the exception), which bulked them up to extraordinary size.4 The steroid era, though, came in the mid-1990s and later, not in the era in which Mantle played.
Nonetheless, the legend overrides the reality. With his small college-fullback’s build and his bull-like seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck, Mantle is celebrated not only for his accomplishments but as standing out all the more because of his compact, supposedly “smaller” size.
Another Mantle legend began with his home runs in a 1951 exhibition game that the Yankees played against the University of Southern California baseball team, as recounted in the last chapter. The legend became lore, though, with the home run Mantle hit against the Washington Senators (“first in the hearts and minds of their county men, last in the American League”) at Washington DC’s Griffith Stadium in April 1953. With wind blowing at twenty miles per hour and gusts up to forty, Mantle hit what appeared to be a long pop-up. The baseball, however, cleared the stadium wall by a large margin, seeming to go on forever. Arthur “Red” Patterson, the Yankees public relations man, immediately saw the “entrepreneurial potential.”5
Patterson exited the stadium and found the neighborhood youth who had retrieved the home run ball, who showed Patterson the spot in a back yard where supposedly the ball had landed. Without a tape measure, Patterson paced off the alleged flight of the baseball, then passed off as absolute truth that the ball had traveled 565 feet. “None of the intrepid residents of the press box ventured out of the stadium to interview the neighborhood boy” or verify Patterson’s measurements. Without raising any question whatsoever, the New York Daily News reported that “the magnificent moppet of the Yankees today hit the longest home run in the history of baseball.”6 Mickey Mantle “exploded on the national scene in 1953 when he hit his first ‘tape measure’ home run,” meaning the home run at Griffith Stadium that April.7
Experts have later determined that the ball probably traveled 506 feet, or 515 feet, but not 565 feet, or 600 feet, as later accounts embellished it. “The myth of the Tape Measure Home Run,” though, became ensconced in Mantel mythology.8 The myth then proceeded to grow. “Hondo [Frank Howard] and Boog Powell are two of the only people on the planet who know what it is like to hit a ball as hard as Mickey Mantle.”9 Mantle became “the Yankee mighty man of muscle.”10
In his later career Mantle did hit some truly tape-measure home runs. He hit a ball out of Briggs Stadium, home of the Detroit Tigers.11 He hit two over the high Griffith Park center field wall, into an oak tree beyond.12 Casey Stengel said, “They tell me that the only other fella to hit that tree was Babe Ruth.”13 Even Mantle himself, however, discounted the tape-measure home run from which the legend emanated: “The one I hit in Washington I had a 50 mile-per-hour tailwind,” he told author Jane Leavy.14
Moreover, the Mantle legend masks completely from view the feats of others that equaled or exceeded Mantle’s “historic” home run. Josh Gibson, a star of the Negro Leagues, hit one out of Griffith Stadium, at least as long as and long before Mickey Mantle did. In times close to Mantle’s supposed feat, Larry Doby hit a ball over the thirty-one-foot wall bordering Griffith’s right field, something no one had done before.15 Nonetheless, the enhanced tape-measure home run legend, despite its dubious origin, seems to live on and obscure all that occurred before it.
Mickey Mantle had numerous injuries throughout his career. Subsequently, Mantle followers have expanded the ambit of injury and pain longitudinally, back further in time, as well as latitudinally, broadening out through his playing career. An example of the former is the hint, of recent vintage, that the high school football injury that resulted in the osteomyelitis, which, in turn, kept him out of the army and the Korean War, can be traced to infections earlier in his youth.16 It seems he had afflictions from an age earlier than we have thought. For example, even in the year (1956) in which Mantle won the triple crown, hitting .353, with 52 home runs and 130 RBIs, becoming only the fourth player in history to do so (after Ty Cobb, Roger Hornsby, and Ted Williams), the revisionist claim is that Mantle was hobbled by injuries and pain that year.17
Mantle had many injuries throughout his baseball career. It seems unnecessary to enhance and expand them, as recent biographers have done. Additionally, although one cannot question the incidence of his injuries, one can raise questions about the severity of the injuries, the pain they induced, and the effect on his playing career. Those questions may be inferred from his stellar playing performance; his longevity; what the physicians found and said at the time; and what he himself opined after his playing days had ended.
Performance. Mickey Mantle batted over .300 ten times in his career. He hit over fifty home runs twice, over forty four times, and over thirty nine times. The Yankees won the American League pennant twelve of the first fourteen years Mantle played, the exception being 1954 (Cleveland Indians) and 1959 (Chicago White Sox). The Yankees won seven of the twelve World Series in which they and Mantle appeared. Mantle won the triple crown in 1956. He was the American League Most Valuable Player three times (1956, 1957, and 1962). He was an All-Star sixteen times.
Further evidence, aside from his performance on the baseball field, that his injuries could not have hobbled him that badly comes from outside of baseball. Postseason in 1953, after he had injured his right knee in 1951 (the uncovered-drain incident), and after, in 1953, he had undergone open knee surgery to trim his medial meniscus, he organized a basketball team, Mickey Mantle’s Southwest Chat All Stars, to barnstorm through Missouri and Oklahoma. Not only did the Mick coach the team; he played point guard.18 One cannot play competitive basketball at that level, or at any level, with the injuries and pain that the sportswriters and biographers have always ascribed to Mantle. Mantle worshippers ignore this evidence perhaps because it is strongly contrary to what they wish their audiences to believe.
Longevity. Mantle played for eighteen seasons. He played in over 2,400 Major League games, 2,401 to be exact, the all-time Yankee record until Derek Jeter surpassed it in 2011. It would have been a herculean effort to have done so with the injuries and pain ascribed to him. Perhaps it was, that is, a herculean effort, but the length of his career, as well as his productivity, constitute evidence on the other side of the ledger.
Medical opinions. In October 1951, after the uncovered-drain field incident, Mantle was hospitalized for five days at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. Doctors there diagnosed no lasting injury to his knee and also determined that surgery was unnecessary. They released him with a prescription for rest.
In December 1951, at the Yankees’ request, Mantle journeyed to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to get a second opinion. The knee did not bother him, but the Yankees wanted to assure themselves that nothing was amiss. Orthopedists at Johns Hopkins examined him and gave him a clean bill of health. He returned home to Oklahoma.
Then, on August 8, 1953, Mantle injured, or reinjured, his right knee while chasing down a fly ball in center field at Yankee Stadium. Thereafter, Mantle experienced “swelling, locking and buckling of his right knee,” symptoms common to those who have torn cartilage in the knee.19 Dr. Dan Yancey performed open knee surgery in Springfield, Missouri. He found only “a bucket handle tear of the medial meniscus,” the most common injury of the knee, which affects many athletes, amateur as well as professional, including this author and several of his friends.20 Dr. Yancey found the surgery “unremarkable, the post-operative course smooth, and the future unimpeded.”21 “It’s a fairly common thing,” the orthopedic surgeon continued. “If you had to have something wrong with the knee, you’d want this to be it.”22
Undoubtedly something else went on inside Mantle’s knee. An educated theoretical diagnosis was made by Dr. Stephan Haas, medical director for the National Football League Players’ Association. His guess? “It appears that the most likely critical event was an acute combination of torn medial and anterior cruciate ligaments [ACLs] and medial meniscus tear.”23 That verdict, however, was a guess made only many years later, without the benefit of a physical examination, or X-rays, or an MRI. The several doctors who physically examined Mantle previously found no such injuries, at least at the time.
The legend and the lore, though, continue to endure and to expand. Mantle’s 1951 injury “alter[ed] the entire course of his career,” asserts author Allen Barra, writing in 2013.24 “Mickey caught his cleat on the open drainpipe . . . forever destroying the possibility that he would be the greatest baseball had ever seen.”25 Mantle won MVP Awards and the triple crowns playing “in terrible pain.”26 Buzz Bissinger introduces Mantle’s Yankee career with the preview that “he always played hard despite constant and unimaginable pain.”27 Later on the 2010 Mantle biography adds: “That October [1951] afternoon was the last time Mantle set foot on a baseball field without pain.”28
What Mick himself said. Mantle himself did not see it the way many of his biographers do. In response to author Jane Leavy’s question, “What about the injuries? The knees, the hamstrings, the shoulder, the spike caught in the drain?” Mantle told her, “That was overplayed. A lot of times I felt great. I wasn’t always a one legged guy who looked like a mummy. I never had any problems from the waist up. I didn’t hurt as bad as everyone thought I did. I still ran down to first faster than anyone. I played twenty-four hundred games . . . eighteen years.”29
Something does not add up with respect to the received wisdom about Mickey Mantle’s pain and injuries. At least the issue bears reexamination.
Yankee Roger Maris won the American League Most Valuable Player award in 1960 and again in 1961. Yogi Berra won the MVP award in both 1954 and 1955 (Cleveland Indian Larry Doby finished second in the 1954 voting). In between, occasionally, other players from other teams won (Jackie Jensen, Red Sox, in 1958; Nellie Fox, White Sox, in 1959). Yet to author Allen Barra, Mantle “should have won [MVP] award[s] for eight straight seasons from 1954 to 1961.”30 By a single stroke of the pen, Barra dismisses, or attempts to erase altogether, Maris’s, Berra’s, Jensen’s, Fox’s, or anybody else’s achievements and their value to their teams.
Matching Mantle up against another legend, Barra, a contemporary Mantle biographer, purports to find that “Mantle was not only better [than Ted Williams] but by a significant margin.”31 For the year in question, 1957, Williams won the numbers race hands-down, .388 versus .365 in batting average, 38 to 34 home runs. The Mantle worshipper explains away the difference by finding that Williams played in the more hitter-friendly Fenway Park, so his superior numbers do not really count. In particular author Barra trashes Roger Maris, who played right field next to Mantle and who, in 1961, broke Babe Ruth’s single season of sixty home runs, a record that had stood for thirty-four years. He mentions Larry Doby only to note that he was “a fine centerfielder.”32
In 1960 Roger Maris hit .283; Mickey Mantle hit .275. In home runs they were about the same: Maris 39, Mantle 40. Maris drove in quite a few more runs than Mantle, 112 to 94. The baseball writers voted Maris the MVP. Yet to Barra, “Mickey was the better player.”33
The following year began the quest for which Maris is famous, the run at Babe Ruth’s sixty-home-run record. On October 1, 1961, Maris hit home run number sixty-one, breaking a record that many thought might never be broken. The journey there was beyond arduous: “Maris lost gobs of hair; the circles under his eyes appeared etched in charcoal.”34 His smoking habit ratcheted up to three packs a day. When Maris opened up to sportswriters, acknowledging, “I can’t make it, not even in 162 games [versus the 154-game season in which Ruth played],” rather than sympathizing with Maris, sportswriters turned on him, accusing him of the “big sulk.”35
The background to all of this was that until early September it had been a Maris-Mantle race, “The Bronx Bomber Thrill Show.”36 Mantle injured himself, dropping out of the race with a fifty-four-home-run total. But Mantle, the loser, was the winner; Maris, the winner, was the loser. The reason? Even back then Mickey Mantle was the darling of the fans and the sportswriters. He could do no wrong. “He [Maris] beat Babe Ruth and he beat me, so the [Yankee fans] hated him. Everywhere we’d go I got a standing ovation,” Mantle acknowledged. 37 Editors judiciously selected the photos to appear in newspapers: “The pictures of Ruth and Maris looked like mug shots. Mantle looks[ed] like a choir boy.”38 Roger Hornsby called Maris a “punk baseball player”; Jimmy Cannon called him “a whiner.”39 Immediately after he had hit sixty-one, Maris was asked by a radio announcer: “As you were running around the bases, were you thinking about Mickey Mantle?”40 Even back then it was all Mickey, all the time.
It continues, unabated, to the present day. Mantle biographer Allen Barra concludes with another over-the-top assessment: “In 1961, Mickey Mantle was better than Roger Maris . . . or any other player in baseball by a wide margin.” “Mantle was by far the superior ballplayer” and should have been named the MVP.41
Maris broke a long-standing, almost sacred record and helped his team to a 4-1 World Series victory over the Cincinnati Reds, a series in which Mantle played well. The sport writers elected Maris, not Mantle, the MVP, and the vote was supported, amply so, by the record. Remember that it is for the player most valuable to his team, not necessarily the one with the best numbers or superior athletic ability. Poke through the fog of Mantlemania—give Maris, other players of the time, and the sportswriters who voted for MVPs other than Mantle, their due.
My wish is not to negate Mantle’s skills and accomplishments; Mickey Mantle played hard every day. He played with injuries and with “absolute toughness.” He was the ultimate “gamer.” He never bragged. He sublimated his ego in the clubhouse and elsewhere. He was the most popular among his teammates and considerate of them, the opposite of a Satchel Paige. After his playing days had ended, Mantle never forgot the other Yankees with whom he had played and shared a clubhouse, keeping in contact with them and benefiting them in many ways. This is an aspect of the Mantle lore that, if anything, is downplayed, deflated rather than conflated. For that reason this seldom-seen aspect of the Mantle legend bears further examination.
The Gamer. In 1961 Mantle had gone for injections by the “feel good doctor,” whose methods were less than sanitary. Mantle had to have an infected mass the size of a golf ball removed from his right buttock. In the World Series against the Reds, he hit a single, and while he was running to first base, the stitches gave way, the wound opened, and blood gushed out. Mantle shielded the bloody patch on his uniform pants from view, using his glove as he ran to and from center field. In the fourth inning Mantle hit a ball into the gap in right-center, a possible double. Running, he had to stop at first, and his leg was a bloody mess. Everybody could see how badly he was hurting. Manager Ralph Houck lifted Mantle for a pinch runner. Limping back to the dugout, Mantle received a standing ovation from his Yankee teammates. The incident demonstrates “his absolute toughness. Teammate after teammate attested to it, the acceptance of pain, however severe.”42
He was the ultimate gamer. “The one thing he always did was try,” Yankee second baseman Jerry Coleman said. “Mickey never, ever stopped doing the best he could.”43 “He was a hero in the clubhouse because of the respect the other players had for the way he played the game—not just his ability but the intensity he played it with.”44
Humble and Modest. Another “thing other players, teammates and opponents, admired” was Mantle’s humility: “No ego,” said Gil McDougal. “Great control of his ego,” said Reggie Jackson. “Wasn’t no individual,” said Jim Coates.45 With all his home runs, Mantle always ran the bases with his eyes and head down, neither taunting the pitcher nor celebrating his own prowess and superiority, as many modern athletes do. He “never showed anyone up, never called anyone out, never blamed anyone but himself.”46 Longtime teammate Tony Kubeck appreciated Mantle off the field as well as on it: “He [Mantle] didn’t want to be exempted as one of the great players. He just wanted to be with his boys.” He was seen as “the best teammate ever. . . . He didn’t phony up anything.”47
Loyal Forever. Mantle gave, not loaned, money to ex-teammates when they were out of luck even if Mantle could ill afford to do so. When the sports memorabilia craze escalated in the 1980s, Mantle was among the biggest draws at card shows and signing events. He used his star power to drag along lesser-known former Yankees, often several at a time. In the years he ran fantasy camps, for which middle-aged men paid $5,000.00 or more for a week of “spring training,” Mantle hired all his former teammates as counselors.48 His generosity and loyalty to his boys knew few bounds.
The hype and exaggeration seem to crescendo at higher and higher points each year. One 2010 baseball biography ratchets upward Mantle’s torn medical meniscus, suffered in the 1951 World Series. “[Mantle’s] spikes of his right shoe caught the rubber cover of a sprinkler. His knee collapsed and he lay motionless, a bone sticking out of his right leg.”49 So with the passage of time, Mantle’s cartilage tear, which necessitated surgery only two years later and was followed by a winter of basketball barnstorming, has become a compound fracture, possibly with Mantle’s blood spurting out onto the field.
At the height of the card-show craze, actor Billy Crystal paid $239,000 for a baseball glove Mickey Mantle once wore. “Crystal says the glove is more valuable to him than the Picasso hanging in his home.”50 The Topps Bubblegum Mickey Mantle baseball card “went from $600 to $3,000 practically overnight.”51 So the conflation has continued and, in some instances, cannot be quantified and monetized.
Mickey Mantle was a great athlete and baseball player. The onrushing legend and the shadow it casts, or most of it, are justified. The human tragedy that his life as a whole, including his self-destruction, exemplifies makes the Mantle story all the more poignant. In the words of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, “He was born but to be his own destroyer.”
The downside of the Mantle legend is that the ever-burgeoning legend masks from view the athletic accomplishments and milestones others in baseball achieved, which should not be forgotten. In the context of this book, the accomplishments of outfielder Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians, a contemporary and a competitor of Mantle’s, and the man who broke the color barrier in the American League, have been largely blocked from view by, among other things, the Mickey Mantle legend and its aura.