The last boy, p.33
The Last Boy, page 33
Mantle’s shadow clung to him as he trudged away from greatness: head down, shoulders hunched, a solitary figure framed against combed dirt. It was a gnome-like vision of The Mick, gnarled, diminished, alone. He gripped the bat below the label, where no one wants to make contact with the ball. The shadow of his former self embraced him, neither trailing behind nor pointing the way forward.
15
September 26, 1968
Last Licks
1.
It came as no surprise to anyone aboard the team bus that Mantle was the instigator of the Great Harmonica Crisis one muggy Chicago afternoon in the heat of the pennant race of his last great season. The Yankees had just lost their fourth straight game to the White Sox. No one was in a good mood. Phil Linz was feeling particularly aggrieved. He thought he should have been in the starting lineup and nursed his resentment along with more than one clubhouse beer while waiting an hour and a half for the bus to arrive. “We always had beer in the clubhouse,” Linz said. “I don’t think I’d ever have done it if I hadn’t had a couple of beers.”
Earlier that week in Baltimore, Tom Tresh had bought himself a Hohner harmonica; Tony Kubek appropriated it. So when they got to Chicago, Tresh took Kubek to buy one of his own. Linz tagged along. Kubek serenaded Neiman Marcus shoppers with his rendition of “Streets of Laredo,” a mournful cowboy lament about a guy who spent more time in the dram house than in the saddle.
Linz liked the sound and decided to buy a harmonica for himself. It came with instructions on how to blow in and blow out, and with the sheet music to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Linz practiced assiduously. When he left for Comiskey Park on Thursday, August 20, getaway day, he stuck the harmonica in the pocket of his sport coat and forgot about it until after the dispiriting 5–0 loss that left the Yankees in third place, 4½ games behind the White Sox.
En route to the airport for the flight to Boston, the bus was mired in the same traffic that had caused it to be late in arriving. Linz was sitting in back with Pepitone, Bouton, Maris, Tresh, and Mantle. “All the guys who kid around sat back there,” he said. “You couldn’t goof around in the front.”
Everything was quiet until he began to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Yogi Berra, the first-time manager, was up front with third base coach Frank Crosetti, an old-line baseball man if ever there was one. “I said, ‘No joking around,’” Berra recalled.
Linz asked, “What did Yogi say?”
Mantle answered. “He said, ‘Play it louder.’”
Linz knew Mantle well enough to know he was egging him on. He recognized the wicked-angel smile. But he played on anyway. “Shove that harmonica up your ass!” Berra said, charging down the aisle, throwing arm raised in anger.
“Here, take it,” Linz replied, and tossed it to the manager. “I flipped it to him, a double-play flip.” And then, because he was in a bad mood, he added, “What are you getting on me for? I play as hard as I can to win.”
Berra cocked his arm and fired the harmonica at the bad boys in the back of the bus. “He threw it at me,” Linz said. “I mean, he threw it. It hit Pepitone in the knee.”
Pepitone swore it drew blood and left a scar. That might have been the end of it, except beat writers traveled with the team then and witnessed Crosetti’s indignation at what he called “the first case of open defiance” he had seen by a Yankee player in thirty-three years.
“When we got to Boston the next day, it was all over the country,” Linz said. “It was like World War III.”
That afternoon at Fenway, he apologized to Berra, who was serenaded throughout the game by hundreds of harmonica-wielding Red Sox fans. “We shook hands, we hugged. He said, ‘Phil, I gotta fine you. The writers are coming. How much do you think I should fine you?’
“I said, ‘Whatever, Yogi. I was wrong.’
“He said, ‘How ’bout $250?’
“I said, ‘That’s fair.’”
More boldface headlines: “Yogi Fines Linz $250.”
Writers pounded Berra with invective—he was a “flip-top manager” who had “betrayed a sense of panic” in “un-Yankee-like” fashion. His team was said to be “cracking up.” Berra’s job was said to be “in jeopardy.” Western civilization was coming to an end.
This grave insurrection was regarded by the Fourth Estate as prima facie evidence that he was incapable of managing his former teammates. In fact, what Berra lacked was not gravitas but what he might have called young youth. It was getting late early in Berra’s managerial career.
The Yankees rallied for him, winning thirty of their next forty-three games to overtake the White Sox. Mantle slugged them back into first place on September 17, with a double, a single—his 2,000th major league hit—and a home run, the 450th of his career. He got a standing ovation. Linz got a $10 check from a bandleader, presumably for furthering the cause of music. He also received a barrelful of harmonicas, a $5,000 endorsement deal with Hohner, and a $250 bonus in his 1965 contract. “Houk put it in—$20,000 plus $250 for music lessons.”
Mantle had a good year—a career year for anyone else. He led the American League in on-base percentage and on-base plus slugging. He batted .421 right-handed (.241 left-handed), drove in 111 runs, and hit more than 30 home runs for the last time in his career, 15 right-handed, 20 left-handed. On August 12 in a home game against the White Sox, he hit one of each for the tenth and last time in his career. The left-handed homer came off Ray Herbert in the fourth inning. Mantle hurled his bat in disgust after the swing because he thought he hadn’t gotten enough wood on the sinking fastball. Herbert thought so, too, and turned to watch center fielder Gene Stephens make the catch. Back, back, back he went to the 461-foot sign in deepest center field. “Is he going to sit in the bleachers and watch the rest of the game?” Herbert wondered.
The ball landed fifteen rows into the black in the center field bleachers, where only one ball had gone before, also courtesy of Mantle. The Stadium manager said it was the longest home run ever measured in the Bronx. “Nice play,” Johnny Blanchard said, greeting him in the dugout. “You broke your last bat.”
Mantle was breaking down. Too often his right knee buckled beneath him when he swung left-handed. He surrendered center field to younger, more reliable legs. Reams of Conco tape and stoicism could not camouflage the deterioration of soft tissue. “They taped his legs so tight it cut off the circulation,” Pepitone said. “Sittin’ on the bench, they’d puff up from all the blood rushin’ down to his feet.”
When the tape came off at the end of the day, his legs were chalk white. Multiple surgeries and inattentive rehabilitation had left him with almost no muscle above his knees, compounding the instability in the knee. “There was no skin, no cartilage, no nothing,” Pepitone said. “Everything was gone. And scars. I mean lines down the side of his leg, Xs across the top, underneath. It looked like somebody got a knife and just kept slashing at his knees. You could see the stitching marks where they cut.”
To his buddy Roy Clark, the country singer, Mantle’s body looked like “a statue by Michelangelo that somebody had just started chopping at.” Mantle was self-conscious enough that he refused to put on a bathing suit at a family picnic when Frank Petrillo shot home movies. He played 125 games or more only three times after his thirtieth birthday.
Kids who imitated his stiff-legged arrival at second base didn’t realize it was the only way he could bring himself to a stop. His peers expected him to transcend because he always had. He was like a horse who “comes out of the stable just hobbling along,” said pitcher Billy Hoeft. “You figure, ‘The Brute’s not gonna play.’ Then he’s out there taking batting practice and he’s in the lineup, and then he hits a ball and he’s gotta run like hell and he does.”
2.
The 1964 World Series between the Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals marked a paradigm shift ably documented by David Halberstam in October 1964. Stan Musial had just retired. The Cardinals’ lineup, with Curt Flood and Lou Brock in the outfield, showcased the future of America—young, black, ethnic, fast. They left the old white Yankee establishment in the base-path dust. Mantle, Milton Gross wrote in the New York Post, was “playing on memory and nerve.”
The shoulder injured in the 1957 World Series betrayed him and would require off-season surgery to tie the tendons together. Four times he threw wildly to the infield; twice in one game he was caught off base; he was thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double and thrown out on an RBI grounder that should have been a hit. He threw his batting helmet in despair and disgust—it was his best throw of the Series. “Couldn’t throw the baseball the length of the room I’m sitting in hardly,” Cardinal shortstop Dick Groat said. “And yet he knew that the Yankees were a better team when he was in the lineup and the team felt better when he was in the lineup.”
An egregious error in the fifth inning of game 3 at the Stadium allowed the Cardinals to tie the score at 1–1 and set up the last great unorchestrated moment of his career. “By that time I couldn’t run too much anymore,” he told me. “They put me in right field and Maris in center. Somebody hit me a ground ball. I nonchalanted it. It went through my legs, and the guy scored.”
In the bottom of the ninth inning, the Cardinals’ manager, Johnny Keane, gave him a chance at redemption by summoning Barney Schultz from the bullpen. Jim Bouton, the Yankees’ exhausted starting pitcher, was at the water cooler at the end of the dugout when Mantle came to collect his bat. “He was standing there with the bat on his shoulder watching Barney Schultz. His warm-up pitches were coming in about thigh high and breaking down to the shin, to the ankles—two or three in a row. Mickey said, ‘I’m gonna hit one outta here.’
“It wasn’t a big announcement. He wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a grand-stander. He understood that Barney Schultz was the wrong guy for them to bring in. Mickey had two different batting strokes: right-handed, he would hit on top of the ball. He would tomahawk the ball. Even his home runs to left field, a lot of ’em were line drives with top spin on ’em. They get out there real quick and sink and dive down into the bleachers. Left-handed, he undercut the ball. So here’s Barney Schultz throwing right into his power. Barney Schultz’s ball is breaking down, and Mickey’s bat goes down and…”
Schultz was an old knuckleball pitcher, playing in his first World Series at age thirty-seven. In the bullpen he felt “the good pop” between his right elbow and his hand that presaged a promising outing. “The ball just bounced all over,” he said. “It was the probably the best stuff I had all Series.”
Tim McCarver, the Cardinals’ young catcher, knew Mantle was hurting. “I could even hear him groaning on some swings,” McCarver said. “A swing and a miss was real bad.”
Had he been privy to the dugout conversation, McCarver would have walked Mantle intentionally. “He was not a man who said boastful things about himself,” he said. “When somebody like that says something like that, you have a tendency to think that he’s gonna do it.”
Mantle stood in. Schultz wound up. McCarver knew right away: “Nothing good was gonna come of this pitch.”
It didn’t dance or flutter or defy expectation. It didn’t do anything at all. “It wasn’t thrown,” McCarver said. “It was dangled like bait to a big fish. Plus it lingered in that area that was down, and Mickey was a lethal low-ball hitter left-handed. The pitch was so slow that it allowed him to turn on it and pull it.”
The ball sailed over Len Melio’s head in the right field third tier, a high, majestic thing—he could see the laces spinning, a pinwheel of red and white coming right at and then over him. As he turned to see where it landed, his elbow hit the beer of a Yankee hater and “spilled all over him,” which, he said, “was what I was happy about.”
Schultz took one quick look over his shoulder and walked off the mound. “I crossed the third base foul line as he was rounding third base,” he recalled. “I didn’t even watch him run the bases. I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in punching myself in the mouth.”
In the locker room, a clubhouse attendant handed him a note from a secret admirer, the actress Rosalind Russell. It said, “Barney, you’re still the greatest.”
Schultz finished the World Series with an 18.00 ERA. Mantle hit two more homers, the last of his eighteen World Series home runs—still the major league record. But the one off Schultz mattered most because it lessened the sting of his fielding error. “It got me off the hook, being the goat,” he told me. “And besides that, it broke Babe Ruth’s home-run record in World Series play.”
As fans poured out of the box seats, Crosetti escorted Mantle home—a departure for the self-contained third base coach. McCarver waited at the plate amid a pinstriped scrum to make sure Mantle crossed the plate.
The next day, Groat engaged Mantle in conversation at second base. The Yankees were leading 3–0 and had men on first and second with no outs. They were on the verge of putting the game out of reach. “I said, ‘Mickey, you didn’t have any doubts about that home run goin’ out?’
“He said, ‘No, why?’”
Groat described Mike Shannon’s elaborate pantomime in right field. “I said, ‘I thought the ball was off the end of the world, and Mike stood like he was gonna catch the ball. I thought, ‘Maybe the ball is not hit as far as I thought it was.’ And Mickey started to laugh.”
Roger Craig went into his motion, pitching from the stretch position. Mantle took his lead off second base. “I could see in his head he was still chuckling,” Groat said. “He put the weight on that right foot, and I said, ‘Oh my, do I have him.’
“I went over. Roger Craig gave me an absolutely perfect throw, and Mickey is out by a mile.”
Mantle dove back into second base face first and had a few choice words for Groat after he was called out. Good manners precluded him from repeating what was said, but Mantle called him “the same dirty name” from then on. “Every time I saw him at an exhibition game, he ended up saying, ‘Sure, tell me a funny story and then pick me off second base.’”
The Cardinals came back to win the game, to tie the Series, and become World Champions. Later, many pointed to the pickoff play as a turning point and a portent for the future of the Yankees.
3.
The Yankees followed Mantle downhill. Berra was fired. Johnny Keane was hired. Jerry Coleman, Mantle’s onetime roommate, then a Yankee broadcaster, came to believe that the Yankees’ decline paralleled their behavior off the field. “They slid into a degenerate-type thing,” Coleman said. “That’s why they went downhill.”
This is a notion that rendered even Bouton speechless. “We were as debauched in 1963 as we were in 1965,” Bouton said. “We weren’t as good at it in 1965. We didn’t have the energy for it. Guys were older. We didn’t really lose anything on the debauchery front.”
They just lost. In 1965, the Yankees lost more games than they won for the first time since 1925. “I shoulda quit right then,” Mantle told me.
But the Yankees needed him. “He was really the only ballplayer on the club that anybody cared anything about,” said Howard Berk, a team vice president from 1967 to 1973.
Berk and company invented reasons to come to the ballpark to see him, including the first Mickey Mantle Day, held on September 17, 1965, his 2,000th major league game. The Tigers’ starting pitcher, Joe Sparma, walked off the mound to shake his hand.
Mantle asked that all donations be made to the Mickey Mantle Hodgkin’s Disease Research Foundation at St. Vincent’s Hospital, which had been dedicated the year before. Still, he received enough loot to fill two mimeographed sheets—a car, a year’s supply of gasoline and bubble gum, two rifles, two quarter horses, a mink for Merlyn, and a six-foot-long, 100-pound salami in the shape of a bat. He told the sellout crowd that he hoped to play another fifteen years.
The 1966 season was even worse. When a reporter asked Mantle in spring training how the Yankees were going to do, he replied, “We’re going to surprise some people—we’re going to finish last.”
They did—twenty-six games out of first place. Days before the All-Star Game in St. Louis, he called American League manager Sam Mele and said his legs were killing him. “Hell, yeah, take three days off,” Mele replied, replacing him on the roster with Rookie of the Year Tommie Agee.
The response was vituperative. “You’re a nigger lover, picking Agee,” a caller to Mele’s hotel room snarled. “And by the way, when you go on the field I’m going to shoot you and Tony Oliva.”
Local police and the FBI provided security, Mele said, but no peace of mind. When he delivered the starting lineup, he ran to home plate, hid himself among the men in blue, and raced back to the dugout.
Mantle played in 661 games over the last five years of his career. If they all ran together in a blur of at-bats and road trips and getaway days, it was partly the result of the repetitive motion of eighteen years in the major leagues and partly the result of increased consumption. The longtime trainer for the Detroit Tigers regaled pitcher Mickey Lolich with a tale about the time he tried to drink Mantle and Ford under the table. There was an afternoon game the next day, and he figured he’d take one for the team. When the bar closed at 2:30 A.M., he bought a bottle of vodka from the barkeep and suggested a nightcap back at the hotel. “When he left at 6:30 A.M., Mickey and Whitey were in no condition to play baseball,” Lolich said. “He had done his job as far as he was concerned. He said, the next day Whitey pitched nine innings of shutout ball and Mantle hit two home runs.”
If the morning after was rough, the trainers provided a pharmacological pick-me-up. Greenies, the players called them. Everybody took them. Mantle, too? “By the handful,” Linz said. “Then he’d go out and play.”
Mantle’s capacity was admired, envied, and imitated—to the detriment of some of the young Yankees, who were expected to become him. “You’re going to be a helluva player,” he told Joe Pepitone when he was living with Mantle in his hotel suite. “Don’t do what I do.”
