The last boy, p.34
The Last Boy, page 34
Easier said than done. Steve Whitaker fell under Mantle’s spell his rookie year after Mantle extended an unexpected and much-coveted invitation to dinner. Pretty soon, Whitaker says, they were going out every night—and staying out. Mantle made New York City feel small. He knew every restaurant and every maître d’. He introduced Whitaker to “the life,” as Linz calls it, to joints like Dudes ’N Dolls, where Goldie Hawn danced and Joe Willie Namath partied. “I didn’t care if I slept at all in New York,” Whitaker said. “It’s open 24/7, and, trust me, I closed it.”
There was a quid pro quo, though it didn’t feel like one at the time. “I was kinda like his shill, the guy to make sure nobody was hawkin’ his table,” Whitaker said. If there were women present, they had to be with him, not The Mick. The price didn’t seem high until later, when he realized the opportunity he had squandered. “In fact,” he said, “it probably was the end of my career.”
By 1967, Mantle was the only reason to go to the Stadium. The weight of the listing franchise rested uneasily on his fragile pins. He became a first baseman and kept his promise to Merlyn to hit his 500th home run on Mother’s Day which the Yankees turned into another occasion to honor him and boost attendance. “The gimmick was, every five hundredth fan entering the ballpark got an autographed ball,” Berk said. “We asked him if he’d sign. He did it. Signed for hours and hours. I got a summons from the state of New York for violating the lottery law. A five-hundred-dollar fine.”
Mantle conceded that he would never catch or match Willie Mays statistically. That debate was over. But Madison Avenue saw a different future for The Mick. George Lois, the groundbreaking art director and adman, had a certain editorial genius—his conceptual covers for Esquire magazine were the subject of a 2008 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He also had a keen instinct for marrying pop-culture pitchmen to unlikely clients. He put Mantle (and Joe Louis) in TV commercials for a Wall Street brokerage house. “When I came up to the big leagues, I was a shufflin’, grinnin’, head-duckin’ country boy,” Mantle said to the camera. “But I know a man down at Edwards & Hanly. I’m learnin’. I’m learnin’.” It became one of Johnny Carson’s stock lines.
Lois also put Mantle to work on behalf of the baby cereal Maypo. “Mickey was visiting me on a set for some other commercial. I said, ‘Mickey, do me a favor.’”
He handed Mantle a bat and a Yankee jersey and explained how they were going to transform Maypo into “the oatmeal cereal that heroes cry for.” All he had to do was blubber—“I want my Maypo”—when the voice-over said, “Mickey Mantle?”
Mantle boo-hooed perfectly and on cue.
“I shot that in three or four seconds,” Lois said. “The sales tripled. I hardly had to work with him at all. I gave him the shtick once or twice, and he’d give it back better. He was a natural, fluid.”
Mantle was such a hit, agents for Wilt the Stilt, Dandy Don Meredith, and The Say Hey Kid called, wanting in on the action. Mantle called, too: “Hey, George, go fuck yourself.” It seemed that wherever he went, he elicited a chorus of “I want my Maypo.”
“He was kidding,” Lois said. “He loved it. Probably got five hundred dollars and was happy to get it.”
4.
Mantle’s last opening day was Marty Appel’s first as an assistant to PR chief Bob Fishel. Growing up in Rockland County, New York, Appel wore his Mickey Mantle T-shirt until his mother disposed of the shreds. On his first day of work, Fishel took him down to the clubhouse to meet Mantle, leaving him alone at his empty locker, where Appel discovered his hero’s trove of hard-core porn—“guys in black masks and socks.” All he could think was, “Oh, my God, I’m looking at Mickey Mantle’s porno!”
Every day that summer, he invented a reason to consult The Mick about his fan mail, picking three or four letters or invitations from the hundred or so that arrived daily for Mantle’s inspection. “He saw through the scam and would look at me with a little smile,” Appel said. “Then he’d crumple them up and toss them into the trash. Once he got an invite to serve as a judge for the Miss Nude America pageant. He didn’t crumple that.”
When he returned from road trips, Mantle brought the unpaid “vice president of fan mail” the gift certificates he received on out-of-town post-game shows, pulling rumpled vouchers from his pockets: Brew Burger, Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, Big Yank Slacks, Midas Muffler, Getty Gasoline, and Thom McAn shoes. Some Appel kept as souvenirs; others, like the one from Thom McAn, he used. He thought of The Mick with every step he took.
Appel visited him in the clubhouse while everyone else was on the field doing the daily chores that Mantle now eschewed—stretching, running, infield, and batting practice. “That whole season was surreal to him,” Appel thought. “He just felt lost. ‘Who are these guys? What am I doing batting .238 and being a teammate of Thad Tillotson?’”
Mantle’s 1968 farewell tour of America was a welcome distraction in a year of national anguish and upheaval. In the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK, the inner-city riots and Vietnam protests, his familiar grin—and the possibility he still brought to the plate—brought out the love.
On road trips, he disguised himself in a pair of glasses and a derby hat, his collar pulled up around his ears. Sometimes he got off the Yankees’ bus and walked the last block to the team hotel. Sometimes Whitey Ford, the Yankees’ new pitching coach, rented a car and went back to the ballpark to collect him. In New York, he shared his suite at the St. Moritz with Mike Ferraro. In the evenings, they played cards and ordered in. Going out was too much of a hassle.
Most of the eyewitnesses to his best years were gone: Kubek and Linz left after 1965; Richardson and Maris after 1966; Elston Howard was traded midway through the 1967 season. The isolation in the locker room was compounded by his frustration on the field. “He’d strike out, and he would explode,” said Ross Moschitto, who arrived in 1965. “He would come in the dugout—it didn’t matter if he had gone 3 for 4 the day before. Next time he struck out, he’d come back, and wham, beat the locker.”
On May 30, 1968, the 100th celebration of Memorial Day, the day the Beatles began recording the White Album, Yankee Stadium offered a reprise of the good old days. Mantle had one of the best days of his career. Frank Howard was stationed at first base for the Washington Senators. The starting pitcher was Joe Coleman, who had struck out Mantle four times in a row the week before. “I went to the mound and said, ‘How are you going to pitch the Big Fella?’” Howard recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to blow that dead red in that blind spot.’”
Nine innings and six Washington pitchers later, Mantle had two home runs, a double, two singles, five RBI, and three runs scored. It was the third time in his career that he went 5 for 5. He raised his average from .221 to .254.
First inning: two-run home run.
Third inning: singled and scored.
Fifth inning: home run.
Sixth inning: RBI double. “I’m holding the runner on first base,” Howard said. “He hits a line drive between me and the bag that’s no further than it is across this table. I go to stab it. If it had been hit right at me, it would have taken me to the 296-foot marker.”
Eighth inning: RBI single. “I’ve never seen five balls scalded like that in a ball game before,” Howard said. “He laid out two thousand feet of line drives.”
The scoreboard flashed the news: “Mantle’s finest game since his Triple Crown season of 1956.”
Privately, he was wistful—the performance served to remind him of what he could no longer do. One night, he asked Ferraro, “Did you ever see me run? When I could run?’ ”
Clark Griffith was then vice president of the Minnesota Twins, and he and Mantle had become drinking buddies. “Near the end of his career, I had a marvelous evening with him,” Griffith said. “He was hurting and in decline. He said, ‘Man, it really hurts. I just can’t do it anymore.’
“We got into a long discussion about how the game had changed. He started talking about pitchers he had to hit against in the Fifties and early Sixties, Chuck Stobbs, Spec Shea, Connie Marrero, short, round guys who didn’t throw hard—and who he has to hit against now, guys who are six foot five and throw hard. His skills had not been able to keep up with the evolution of the game. The size had gotten to him. It had literally outgrown him.”
In July, Mantle was named captain of the American League All-Star team, but he stayed in Anaheim only long enough for a quick how-do-ya-do. “All-Star Games were like a cocktail party to me and Whitey,” he told the writer Tom Callahan years later. “I got there late, missed the team picture, hurried to get dressed. They pinch-hit me in the first inning. I got dressed, got back on the helicopter, flew back to Dallas, changed clothes to play golf. I went to Preston Trail, and the game was still on the TV. Tony Perez hit a home run in the fifteenth inning. I’m damned ashamed.”
As the Yankees headed into a series at home against Cleveland on the weekend of July 19, Bill Kane, the team statistician, walked into the PR department and told Appel, “Mick’s lifetime average is going to drop under .300 this weekend unless he goes 3 for 10 or better, and he’s not gonna do that.”
He went 2 for 8. His average was .299545 at the end of play on July 21. A week later, on July 27, Mantle ceded the title of lifetime .300 hitter for good. He went 0 for 12 in his next three games, striking out four times on July 29. As he passed pitcher Stan Bahnsen on his way back to the dugout, Mantle muttered, “This is my last year. I missed about five pitches I should have hit.”
On August 4, the Yankees held yet another day in his honor, Mickey Mantle Banner Day. The contestants with the three best entries won season tickets. All Mantle had to do was shake the winner’s hand. “The elderly star,” the Times called him. He sat on the dugout steps as two thousand fans paraded past him carrying signs proclaiming I WANT TO BE JUST LIKE THE MICK!
Five days later, he was thrown out of the game for cursing the home-plate umpire, only the seventh time he’d been ejected in eighteen years. Soon after that, Appel watched him try on a new pair of spikes in the clubhouse, tossing the old ones away with a perfect peg to the trash can. “This will be my last pair of shoes,” Mantle said. Fishel assured his concerned young assistant that Mantle had said the same thing the year before.
Six weeks passed between his 529th home run on June 29th and his 530th and 531st, against the Twins on August 10. He tied Jimmie Foxx for third place on the all-time home-run list with 534 home runs twelve days later.
On September 17, the Tigers clinched the American League pennant by beating the Yankees in Detroit—a rainout the next night enabled them to recover their senses in time to play an afternoon game on September 19. When Mantle came to bat in the eighth inning, Denny McLain walked off the mound to allow him to bask in the standing ovation offered by the meager crowd. Mantle was his hero, the reason he had become a switch-hitter in high school. McLain had already won his thirtieth game of the year, becoming the first pitcher since Dizzy Dean to do so. He could afford to be magnanimous.
None of the Tigers knew what he was thinking when he called his catcher Jim Price out to the mound. “Listen, he only needs one home run,” McLain said. “Let’s give him a shot at it. You just go behind home plate, put your glove up, and let me see if I can hit it.”
Price nodded and squatted behind the plate. Like McLain, Price idolized The Mick—“he still had that look, that Mickey Mantle look, but all he had was the look.”
As Price got down in his crouch, he gave Mantle a look. McLain gave him a batting-practice fastball.
“So the first pitch it was, like, fifty miles per hour and almost on an arc,” McLain said. “And dummy takes it for strike one. Mantle looks down at Price and said, ‘What the fuck was that?’
“And Price says, ‘I dunno.’
“So Mantle says, ‘Is he gonna do it again?’
“And Price says, ‘I dunno.’
“So Price starts trotting out to the mound. He gets about halfway, and I said—so loud the whole park can hear it, and there weren’t a lotta people in the park—‘Just tell him to be ready.’
“Mickey could certainly hear it. The dugout could hear the whole thing. So Price turns around and goes behind home plate and I throw the next pitch almost the same way but the pitch slid a little bit and he fouled it off. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, Jesus, now I got him oh and two.’
“I gotta tell you, the worst thought that went through my head is ‘I’m through fucking around with this. I’m just gonna strike him out.’”
Exasperated, McLain yelled out, “Where the hell do you want it?”
Mantle pointed to where he wanted it.
“I throw one more pitch, and he hit a line drive into the right field seats,” McLain said. “I think we all had tears in our eyes because Mickey Mantle represented the game of the 1960s right up to the day he retired. So he goes by first base, Norm Cash hits him on the ass with the glove. He goes by second base and short. ‘Nice going.’ ‘Congratulations.’ Now he gets between second and third, and he starts screaming at me, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ I’m thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m gonna get a letter from the commissioner.’
“So he hits third base, going down the third base line, and he’s still saying, ‘Thank you, thank you. I owe ya, I owe ya.’
“I says, ‘Mick, that’s enough.’
“So now he steps on home plate. The crowd is going crazy, and there’s a standing ovation.”
The entire Tigers team stood on the top step of the dugout applauding. “And he comes back out of the dugout, and don’t you know he starts coming toward the mound? I almost pooped in my pants. I just did not want him to get to the mound.”
Among the 9,063 spectators, there was some initial confusion about what had transpired. But Yankee announcers Phil Rizzuto and Frank Messer had no doubt about what they had seen. “Aw, you gotta give that McLain some credit, I wanna tell ya,” Rizzuto said.
Pepitone waited at home plate to shake Mantle’s hand. It was a tough act to follow. In the batter’s box, he motioned to McLain where he’d like to have the pitch. “He threw a ball ninety miles an hour at my head,” Pepitone said. “I went down. I get up. I look at the dugout. Mickey’s got his hand over his mouth, laughin’ his ass off.”
Not everyone was amused. McLain was cross-examined by righteous scribes defending the purity of the game and questioning Mantles right to third place on the all-time him run list. “They charged down to our clubhouse,” said Dick Tracewski. “McLain denied it, of course. What else could he do?”
A letter from baseball commissioner William Eckert arrived soon after. “Word had come to him that I was attacking the integrity of the game of baseball,” McLain said, paraphrasing the letter. “Mickey Mantle didn’t need any help with home runs, and they would start an investigation and da-da-da-da.”
Red Smith offered much-needed perspective in his column, “Sportif,” in Women’s Wear Daily, his flagship paper after the demise of the Herald Tribune: “When a guy has bought 534 drinks in the same saloon, he’s entitled to one on the house.”
After the game, Mantle autographed the ball for McLain: “Denny, thanks for one of the great moments in my entire career, Mickey.” It (and the commissioner’s letter of opprobrium) was destroyed in a house fire in 1978. Mantle sent another ball. “Until the day he died, he kept thanking me and thanking me and thanking me,” McLain said. “I said, ‘You could have popped it up. You coulda hit it on the ground. You coulda fouled it off again. You could have missed it.’
“And he says, ‘Nah, I wasn’t gonna miss the last one.’”
There was palpable relief when Mantle hit his 536th and last major league home run the next evening at Yankee Stadium with no help whatsoever from Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg. He played his last home game five days later on September 25. Mantle: 1 BB, 2 SO, 1H. The single off the Indians’ Luis Tiant was the Yankees’ only hit of the night. Later, in the locker room, Mantle made no declaration of intent. He stuck resolutely to the facts—“I just can’t hit anymore, it seems”—and packed a bag for the last road trip of the season.
5.
There are two kinds of baseball fans: those who bellow invective at the opposition no matter what and those who stand for a worthy adversary. On September 28, 1968, 25,534 Fenway Park congregants stood up for Mickey Mantle. Gail Mazur evoked the heterogeneous homogeneity peculiar to Red Sox fans in her gorgeous 1978 poem “Baseball”: “the four inevitable woman-hating / drunkards, yelling, hugging / each other and moving up and down / continuously for more beer / and the young wife trying to understand / what a full count could be / to please her husband happy in / his old dreams, or the little boy / in the Yankees cap already nodding / off to sleep against his father /…and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine, / screaming at the Yankee slugger / with wounded knees to break his leg.”
The old woman wasn’t at Fenway Park when Mantle walked to the plate in the top of the first inning. Ralph Houk, who had returned to the dugout in 1967, told Mantle to expect one, maybe two, at-bats in Boston. Mantle had been taking Butazolidin (phenylbutazone alka), the anti-inflammatory drug that caused the disqualification of Kentucky Derby winner Dancer’s Image that spring. By 1968, doctors knew that bute was potentially lethal to human tissue—the Dodgers’ team doctor joked it worked great, except when it killed the patient. “Ralph told him he wasn’t going to play, so he took himself off the stuff,” Gene Michael recalled.
The Yankees were accustomed to seeing him struggle up the dugout steps. If there was a railing, he made use of it. Otherwise, Andy Kosco said, “he put his bat down, used it as a cane.”
Houk wrote Mantle’s name third on the lineup card, as usual. With one out in the top of the first, he walked to the plate to face Jim Lonborg. Like Mantle, Lonborg wasn’t the player he had been. That winter, after pitching the Sox pennant-clinching game and winning the 1967 American League Cy Young Award, he had torn up his knee while skiing. He was too worried about his future to consider Mantle’s past. “There was a sense we might not ever see him again, but I was so wrapped up in myself, you didn’t care,” Lonborg said. “I had no sense of history.”
