Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (50 page)

Although it could not immunize him from a sentence (a fine of $5,000 and two years’ probation), the explanation did have a ring of truth to it. Because Duke Snider’s health was indeed failing. But he persevered and always tried to be present when the Dodgers held their annual fantasy camps. To ease the pain of traversing the widespread facility at Vero Beach, he used a golf cart to travel from point to point. And so those who came to the camp often saw the Hall of Fame Dodger—the man who had “steel springs in his legs”—whisking up and down the camp’s pathways with wisps of his white hair blowing in the breeze.

 

Mickey Mantle played with the Yankees for twelve more seasons before retiring in March 1969. The statistical record was enough to earn him induction into the Hall of Fame in 1974—his first year of eligibility: 536 home runs (third on the all-time list at the time), 1,509 runs batted in, and a .298 batting average. But much of his allure was what might have been if he had not been plagued by injuries. He played in 150 or more games in only three of those twelve seasons, and often he was still hurting when he did play. “I used to love to run,” he told a sportswriter at one point. “Now it hurts to run.”

By the time he retired, Mantle was perhaps the most beloved player in baseball. A turning point came in 1961 when he and teammate Roger Maris competed with each other to surpass Babe Ruth’s then-magical milestone of sixty home runs in a season. Fans and teammates alike hoped that Mantle would be the one to succeed. And so crowds who had once booed the Yankee center fielder even when he was doing well now cheered his every move—and transferred their jeers to Maris as he came closer to the record. (“Hey,” Mantle asked his teammate, “are you trying to steal my fans?”)

Mickey remained a fan favorite over the ensuing years even as his performance faltered and he was reduced to almost limping around the bases. “Today,” said one sportswriter in 1968, “Mantle is one of the great heroes of America’s sports fans wherever he goes. He is cheered louder for hitting homers in batting practice than many players are for hitting them out of the park during the game.”

Retirement was not easy at first. A job in an office or any public forum was out of the question. He could not go anywhere without being mobbed by fans. And so he used his fame to make business investments and to garner speaking engagements. (“As he grew older,” said Bob Wolff, “this shy guy became one of the premier storytellers.”)

The demand for Mickey’s signature skyrocketed when the memorabilia craze hit the country in the mid-1980s. Suddenly his autograph on anything—a photo, a baseball, or a bat—would attract hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars. And now more than ever people were eager to be in his presence. (There was time when Bill Liederman—who had opened a restaurant with Mantle in New York City—came to him with a request from a caller who wanted the Yankee outfielder to attend his son’s bar mitzvah. “Fuck bar mitzvahs,” Mantle responded. “Tell ’em fifty grand”—no doubt thinking that the answer would end the inquiry. But when Liederman passed on the message—without the reference to bar mitzvahs—the caller could not have been more excited. “Deal!” he exclaimed.)

Mantle further exploited the nostalgia obsession with the fantasy camp he and Whitey Ford established in Florida (and which he continued to run after Whitey opened a separate camp). It not only capitalized on his aura but also gave him an opportunity to do something for his former teammates, who could earn needed money as coaches for older Yankee fans who spent thousands of dollars to play baseball for a week with their childhood heroes.

For other people in other circumstances, all of this might have been facile way to make a living. But Mickey Mantle was not one to move easily among strangers. And so liquor became his crutch.

He had, of course, begun his indulgence shortly after he came to the Yankees. The pace of Mantle’s drinking accelerated when he left baseball. Everyone wanted to give him a drink. That would have been trouble enough by itself. But Mickey usually had a couple of vodka tonics to calm his nerves before he went to any social event. By nighttime, he was often in oblivion, sometimes impatient and even nasty with strangers, and often forgetful about where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. The low point probably came with a speech in December 1993 when he introduced Reverend Wayne Monroe, who had organized the fund-raising event, by saying, “Here’s the fucking preacher.”

In the meantime, his marriage with Merlyn disintegrated. (“Mick was one of those men,” Merlyn later observed, “who wanted to be married, but only part-time.”) His sons were perhaps the real victims in this marital conflict, and Mantle would later bemoan his failure to give them the same attention that Mutt had given him—until they became his drinking partners.

Mantle checked himself into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, in January 1995. The first task at the clinic was to write a letter to Mutt to explain his situation. “You talk about sad,” Mantle later said. “It only took me ten minutes to write the letter and I cried the whole time.” But he persevered and returned to Dallas with a new perspective—without alcohol. But it proved to be too little, too late.

On May 28, 1995, Mantle was rushed to the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas with stomach cramps. The diagnosis: liver cancer. The former Yankee received a liver transplant on June 8, but it did not eliminate the cancer and Mantle was forced to return to the hospital within a couple of weeks to face a disease that could not be controlled. And so the family reached out to the people who meant the most to Mickey Mantle—his former teammates.

One of the first to be called was Bobby Richardson. From all appearances, he and Mantle could not have been more different. But Mickey respected his former teammate’s commitment to religion even though Mantle himself had never been one to attend church. The two former players stayed in touch after they had retired, even purchasing a town house together on Grandfather Mountain near Boone, North Carolina.

Richardson received the call in late June 1995 at his South Carolina home. Mickey had returned to the hospital and was asking for him. A few other teammates were there as well. Whitey Ford was particularly taken by the pain Mantle had to endure. There was an intravenous tube that would feed him pain medication, but it would have to be replenished constantly. “You would be talking with him,” Ford remembered, “and he would say, looking at the machine, ‘How much time do I have left?’” For Ford, it was tough to watch. “As much as I loved him,” he later said, “I was glad he finally went.”

The passage for the sixty-three-year-old Mantle finally occurred in the early-morning hours of August 13, 1995, with Merlyn and his son David each holding a hand.

 

Pee Wee Reese played with the Dodgers for two more seasons before retiring. Fortunately, there was an alternative. CBS was televising the Game of the Week and needed someone to join the incomparable Dizzy Dean as a commentator. Dean had been the National League’s premier pitcher in the 1930s until Cleveland Indians’ outfielder Earl Averill smashed a line drive that hit Dean in the foot in the 1937 All-Star game. And so a promising career was cut short.

Dean was a big man (six feet, two inches and 180 pounds) from rural Arkansas with little education but a gift for gab, and in retirement he became an even bigger man (in excess of three hundred pounds) with a personality that would not quit. It was well suited to television. All he needed in 1959 was a new partner.

Reese seemed to be a perfect fit. He too had a famous name but, more important, he had a sophisticated demeanor that would contrast well with Dean’s buffoonery. The two men developed into an engaging team that provided insight and entertainment on the weekly broadcast. (“Podnuh,” Dean would often say in his Southern drawl after Reese had finished two innings of on-air commentary, “that wasn’t too bad, but I guess I’m going to have to pick things back up.”)

For Reese, the experience could not have been better. “He loved working with Dizzy,” Mark Reese remembered. And then NBC purchased the Game of the Week in 1966 and replaced Dean with Curt Gowdy, who had been broadcasting the Red Sox games. From Reese’s perspective, the arrangement with his new partner seemed to be working well. And then one day in March 1969 he got a telephone call from a reporter after he got off a golf course in Louisville. He had been fired. The former shortstop was incredulous. It was not only the failure to understand the cause of the firing. It was equally difficult for Reese to accept the way in which he was informed—hearing it from a reporter instead of the company. (“Those gutless sons of bitches,” Reese complained to intimates. “They didn’t have the balls to tell me face-to-face.”)

The dismissal did not leave Reese with any financial concerns. He had a variety of business interests in Louisville. He and Dottie also had a lifestyle that left little to be desired. His daughter, Barbara, had grown up and was on her way to giving him grandchildren. His son, Mark, was still in school in Louisville but would soon be playing baseball at the University of Alabama. And then there was golf. Reese was passionate about the game and enjoyed success in being almost a scratch golfer. Still, he wanted some kind of employment, and so, in 1971, he joined the staff of Hillerich & Bradsby, the Louisville company that produced baseball bats (including the celebrated Louisville Slugger).

In all of this serenity, there was only one unsettled issue for Reese: whether he would be inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame. The first fifteen years of his eligibility passed without an affirmative vote, and in 1983 his name was passed on to the Veterans’ Committee. And then, on March 5, 1984, Reese—who was promoting bats at the Boston Red Sox spring training camp in Florida—received a telephone call from a reporter telling him of his election. “You’re sure?” Reese replied. “You’re not kidding? It’s true?” And so, when he gave his speech at the induction ceremony that August, Reese paid tribute to Durocher (“he gave a scared kid from Louisville the opportunity to play”) and Dottie (“I wore No. 1 on my back for all those years I played, but she was No. 1 in my heart”).

The sixty-six-year-old Reese retired from Hillerich & Bradsby in 1985 and divided his time between homes in Louisville and Florida, playing golf, attending card shows, and making appearances at the Dodger fantasy camps. And then he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The first doctor told him that it was terminal. But Pee Wee was a fighter. “I just switched doctors,” he later told a reporter, “had everything cut out, and now I’m fine.” (“Hell,” the seventy-five-year-old Reese told his son about the removal of his prostate gland, “I don’t need it anyway.”)

He resumed life in the belief that he had conquered cancer. But in March 1997 he was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the spring of 1999, the cancer settled in his brain, he became confined to a wheelchair, and, perhaps worst of all, he began to lose his cognitive abilities. “Pee Wee is often delirious, sometimes delusional,” Mark Reese wrote to sportswriter Roger Kahn a few months later. “The other day he stared at me with a blank look and said, ‘All my life I’ve pondered sleep.’” The next day—Saturday, August 15, 1999—the eighty-one-year-old Reese slipped away to that permanent sleep.

 

Yogi Berra remained a stalwart of the Yankee offense for several years after 1956. By 1962, he was playing less and the press was speculating whether he might retire and become a manager. Still, Yogi was caught off guard when Ralph Houk approached him in spring training in 1963 and asked if he would like to manage. “Manage who?” said a surprised Berra. The Yankees, Houk replied. Houk explained that a decision had been made for him to become the team’s general manager in 1964, thus creating the vacancy that Berra could fill.

On October 24, 1963, the Yankees announced that the thirty-eight-year-old Berra would retire and become the team’s new manager. Yogi left behind a remarkable record of achievement, including 358 home runs (313 as a catcher, a major-league record) and career World Series records for the most hits and doubles. His election to Baseball’s National Hall of Fame was never in doubt (and would come in 1972), but there was no similar assurance about his forthcoming performance as manager.

Berra found that managing the Yankees—for all their history and talent—was no guarantee of success. In a roller-coaster season, the Yankees were often chasing the Chicago White Sox for the American League lead. Although there were many factors to explain the club’s predicament, much of the blame was placed on the rookie manager. He was, said some, too slow to relieve a starting pitcher who faltered. Others said he made strategic errors in filling gaps created by injured players. And many players found fault because he failed to discipline teammates who were disrespectful. (“A gentle soul,” Mantle later said. “He didn’t have the heart to bawl out players who deserved it.”) By July—with the team struggling to regain first place—Houk decided that Berra would have to be replaced as manager for the 1965 season.

Yogi knew nothing of that decision and continued to push for victories. On the last day of the season, the team won its ninety-ninth game and the American League pennant. The seven-game World Series was lost to the Cardinals, but no one—at least so Berra thought—could complain about that. So he was expecting a new contract, perhaps a raise, and certainly congratulations for a job well-done. Instead, he got fired. (“It was pretty shocking,” he later said.) The Yankees offered him a consulting job, but Yogi turned it down and accepted an offer from the New York Mets to join Casey Stengel—that club’s first manager—as a coach.

Former Dodger Gil Hodges became the Mets’ manager in 1968, and he asked Berra to stay on as a coach. Life took an unexpected turn on April 2, 1972. Hodges died in Florida after an afternoon of golf with three of his coaches. The next day Yogi received a telephone call from Mets owner Don Grant, who offered him a two-year managerial contract. Carmen and Joe Garagiola tried to dissuade Yogi from taking the job. Coaches last forever, they counseled. Managers get fired. None of that mattered to Yogi. “I had a strong desire to take the Mets job,” he later said, “and I did.”