Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (22 page)

In writing his autobiography many years later, Snider complained that he did not remember reading the article “until it appeared in
Collier’s
.” However,
The Sporting News
carried a story at the time in which the Dodger outfielder was quoted as saying, “I wasn’t misquoted at all.” In either event, the
Collier’s
article generated predictable criticism in the press. Red Smith of
The New York Herald Tribune
took Snider to task for being unhappy with a $50,000 income for seven months’ work. “Chances are,” wrote Smith, “he hasn’t more than the foggiest notion of how the other 99.99 percent lives.”

Ironically, at the time the article appeared, Snider was on his way toward establishing a new Dodger record for home runs in a season (a league-leading forty-three) and once again leading the team to another World Series with the Yankees (although Duke later expressed disappointment with his performance that season because his .292 batting average represented the first time in five years that he fell below the .300 mark). He was also making plans to develop the avocado ranch in southern California that he had mentioned in the
Collier’s
article—a sixty-acre parcel near the Camp Pendleton marine base that he had purchased with a friend.

Duke Snider appears to be a study of concentration—with no thoughts of avocados—as Hank Bauer steps into the batter’s box to start the fourth inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. The afternoon shadows are now covering a third of right field as Sal Maglie takes the sign from Campanella and throws a curveball to the Yankee right fielder. Bauer fouls that pitch off and then works the count to one ball and two strikes before hitting a routine ground ball to third base. Jackie Robinson grabs the ball and fires it to first base for the out.

Yankee first baseman Joe Collins follows Bauer to the plate. He fouls off one pitch but soon becomes Maglie’s second strikeout victim with a sharply breaking curveball that home-plate umpire Babe Pinelli calls for a third strike.

Maglie has now retired the first eleven Yankees to face him, and, as Mickey Mantle steps into the batter’s box, the Dodger pitcher is no doubt hoping to make it twelve in a row. While Mantle gets ready for the first pitch, the Dodger infield shifts again to the right side of the field. Mantle gives no indication that he is even aware of the shift, let alone that it bothers him. But that can provide no satisfaction to the Dodgers. Mantle is a threat regardless of where the fielders position themselves. And they instinctively know what Mantle later discloses, long after he retires from baseball—that he is almost always swinging for the fences. (When interviewers would later ask him if he ever went up to the plate “just trying for a home run,” Mantle would invariably smile and say, “Every time.”)

Mantle fouls off a pitch, takes a ball, and then gets a called second strike on another sharply breaking curveball. (“It is almost unbelievable,” says radio announcer Bob Neal, “to see this ball, the way it is jumping around.”) The count moves to two balls and two strikes, as the Yankee center fielder continues to foul pitches off to the left side of the plate. And then Maglie comes in with a fastball. Mantle swings hard, and the ball leaps off the bat in a low trajectory. “There’s a drive into right field,” screams Neal. A pause. And then, as the ball barely flies over the short fence and into the stands near the 344-foot mark, the radio announcer loudly describes what is obvious to the fans in the stadium: “And there’s a home run for Mickey Mantle.”

As the Yankee center fielder trots around the bases with his head down, Maglie stares ahead, angry with himself, but equally frustrated by the circumstance of Mantle’s round-tripper. To those who would ask him about the game in later years, Maglie would complain that Mantle’s hit was “the shortest home run in baseball” and that, “in any other field, it would have been an out.” Certainly that would have been true if the game had been played in Ebbets Field, where the right-field fence stood more than thirty feet tall (meaning that Mantle’s home run probably would have been at best only a double or, with Carl Furillo handling the carom, perhaps only a single). But they are not playing at Ebbets Field, and Maglie turns his attention to Yogi Berra, who has stepped up to the plate with the Yankees now leading by a score of 1-0.

Maglie quickly gets a one ball-one strike count on the Yankee catcher. Berra then swings at a curveball and sends a line drive into left center field. Snider is off to his right with the crack of the bat and with the outcome uncertain. “Snider is digging for it,” Neal yells, “and still coming on.” And then, as Neal tells his listening audience, the Dodger center fielder makes a “diving, grabbing catch of the ball.” Yankee broadcaster Mel Allen is equally impressed, telling a national television audience that Snider’s effort is “one of the most sensational catches you’ll ever see.”

Maglie now walks back to the Dodger dugout, no doubt wishing that he could take back that one bad pitch to Mickey Mantle.

9

F
or those who tuned in to watch ABC Television Network’s
Good Morning America
on August 1, 1995, the sight was unexpected and the message grim. The man in the videotape had the familiar smile and the country drawl they knew so well. But he did not look like the robust athlete who had captured the nation’s imagination forty years earlier. His face was gaunt, and the white baseball hat he wore looked like it was too big for his head.

He did not waste time with formal introductions. “Hi,” he said as the video opened. “This is Mick.” He did not dwell on where he had been or why he was now speaking to this national television audience. He assumed that most had seen the never-ending headlines over the preceding weeks and were familiar with the medical problems that had previously driven him to Baylor University Medical Center in his hometown of Dallas. He proceeded to relate the results of a recent checkup. The news was not good. “The doctors found a couple of spots of cancer in my lungs,” he explained without emotion. “Now I’m taking chemotherapy to get rid of the new cancer. I hope to be back to feeling as good as when I left here.”

It proved to be a false hope. He was dead within two weeks. “This was,” one of his attending physicians later said, “the most aggressive cancer that anyone on the medical team has ever seen.” And so thousands made the pilgrimage to the memorial service in the Lovers Lane United Methodist Church in Dallas to listen to eulogies from NBC broadcaster Bob Costas, former teammate Bobby Richardson, and other speakers who extolled the virtues of a man who had meant so much to so many.

As he stands in center field waiting for Don Larsen’s first pitch of the fifth inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series, Mickey Mantle cannot know the fate that lies before him. But if he could have foreseen all of those adoring crowds and all of those laudatory speeches at the funeral, he would have been embarrassed. Few things trouble the Yankee switch-hitter more than the attention people shower on him.

Not that he was ignored while growing up in the 1930s in Commerce, a small town in the Dust Bowl of eastern Oklahoma. Quite the contrary. Few boys received as much attention as young Mickey did from his father. Mutt Mantle, as his son remembered, “lived and died for baseball.” And he had a plan. His firstborn son was going to be an outstanding major-league baseball player.

From all appearances, it was a preposterous notion. Mutt Mantle was a coal miner who could barely afford the necessities of life. Mickey was born in a two-room, unpainted house at the end of a dirt road in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, and the Mantles never had a telephone or indoor plumbing until their nineteen-year-old son used his first World Series check to buy his parents a new house.

Mutt not only lacked money. He had no connections to organized baseball. All of that left Mutt with only one choice—he would mold his son into a player whose talents would capture the attention of a major-league club. “The feeling between Mutt Mantle and his son,” Mickey’s wife, Merlyn, later observed, “was more than love. Mick was his work, just as much as if his father had created him out of clay.” And for his part, Mutt’s son was a willing subject. “I just wanted to please him more than anything else,” Mickey commented many years later. (The pressure to please his father, however, had its costs—Mickey would wet his bed until he was sixteen years old.)

The starting point of the father’s dream was the boy’s name. Mutt wanted to name his son after a player whose achievements would be the guidepost for future development. For reasons that were never entirely clear, Mutt decided to name his son after Mickey Cochrane, the Philadelphia Athletics’ All-Star catcher. (Cochrane’s first name was actually Gordon, and Mantle would later express gratitude that his father remained ignorant of that fact. “I hope there are no Gordons here today,” he told the audience as he was inducted into the National Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1974, “but I’m glad that he didn’t name me Gordon.”)

Mutt, a muscular man of medium build, would come home from the mines in the late afternoons, the ever-present Lucky Strike cigarette dangling from his mouth, and his young son would greet him with an old glove and a worn-out tennis ball. They would then spend the rest of the day practicing the basics of baseball.

Mutt knew enough to know that future major-league managers—much like the Giants’ legendary John McGraw—would “platoon” players (so that some right-handed batters would face limited playing time against right-handed pitchers and some left-handed batters would face limited playing time against left-handed pitchers). Guided by that expectation, Mutt decided that his son—a natural right-handed batter—should learn to hit left-handed. Mutt, a right-handed player, would pitch to young Mickey while he batted left-handed, and Mutt’s left-handed father would toss the ball to his grandson when he was practicing his swing from the other side of the plate. It was a disciplined approach, and never could young Mickey deviate from his father’s plan. (Some years later, Mutt watched from the stands as his teenage son batted right-handed against a right-handed pitcher in a sandlot game. The father did not waste any time in leaving his seat and sending Mickey home with a stern admonition: “Don’t you ever put on that baseball uniform again unless you switch-hit like I taught you.”)

Mickey’s mother remained largely a passive observer through all of this. A small woman with dark, curly hair, Lovell Mantle was not given to expressing her emotions, and Mickey would later say that he could never remember getting a hug from his mother or any statement of love. Still, there was no doubt about Lovell’s devotion to her family, and Merlyn would later acknowledge that she “was a tireless and protective mother.” (She was also a strict disciplinarian, and Mickey would vividly remember the time she smacked his young son David with the back of her hand—something he too had experienced as a child—and that, said Mickey, was the last time he left her alone with any of his children.)

As Mickey got older, Mutt decided to explore the benefits of farming, becoming a sharecropper on a 160-acre tract of land five miles outside of Commerce where he could grow corn and raise dairy cows. It was an idyllic time for young Mickey, who could ride his horse, Tony, to school. But it did not last more than a couple of years. Torrential rains caused the nearby creek to flood, and, when all the crops were lost, Mutt was forced to abandon the farm and return to the mines.

None of those setbacks interfered with Mickey’s athletic progress—which was nothing short of phenomenal. To be sure, he was blessed with a natural ability in anything that required eye-hand coordination, but there was so much more to explain his success in whatever sport he chose—whether baseball, basketball, or football. He had a remarkable strength in his arms (which Mickey said he got from milking cows twice a day and later from a summer job digging ditches for the local graveyard). And he could run with a speed that made heads turn. When he attended his first spring training camp with the Yankees in 1951, Mantle was clocked in running the ninety feet from home plate to first base in the astounding time of 3.1 seconds. After watching him run the bases during an exhibition game, Cardinal second baseman Red Schoendienst screamed, “Look at that guy go. He must be part jackrabbit!”

Mickey did not confine his athletic activities to baseball when he was growing up. In retrospect, that was a grave mistake. At football practice one afternoon in 1946, the fifteen-year-old halfback got kicked by a teammate who tackled him. By the next morning the ankle was swollen to twice its normal size and discolored with a purple hue. Unfortunately, the Commerce physician was not able to diagnose the injury because the town did not have an X-ray machine. When infection set in, Mutt decided to take his teenage son to the hospital in nearby Picher, Oklahoma. The diagnosis could not have been worse for the budding athlete: osteomyelitis, a chronic inflammation of the bone that can sometimes be controlled but never cured. Seeing no permanent alternative, the attending physician told Lovell that they would probably have to amputate the leg. “The hell you are!” responded the doting mother. Unwilling to accept the Picher physician’s verdict, she and Mutt took Mickey to the Crippled Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City, where doctors applied the new wonder drug—penicillin—to reduce the swelling, eliminate the fever, and enable their son to return home.