Those are Hall of Fame numbers, of course. But that doesn’t account for the impact, the aura of Mickey Mantle. You say Mays was better? Maybe. DiMaggio? Could be. Snider? Hmmm. A few years ago Bill James, the guru of postmodern baseball statistics, analyzed parameters, vectors and paradigms and concluded that Mantle was in fact the greatest of all center fielders. It was a surprising conclusion. But Mantle’s stats are the most ambiguous, one might say the most metaphysical, in baseball. The numbers say he was a great success, but the drama of Mantle is that he was the most disappointing success of all time, measured against the expectations of everyone, including himself.
“To find yourself looking at a lifetime .298 average–it made me want to cry,” wrote Mantle in his autobiography. He wanted that metaphysical .300: those two extra points would have looked better but wouldn’t have mitigated the disappointment in a player who Ted Williams himself predicted would hit .400. So, Mantle was great but not as great as people thought he would be. So what? So this is where we start infusing cold facts with hot sentiment. This is our Eugene O’Neill Mick, a tragic figure, a country boy whose father worked in the lead and zinc mines of Oklahoma.
Elvin (Mutt) Mantle played amateur ball, named his son after the Philadelphia Athletics’ catcher Mickey Cochrane and taught him to switch-hit when he was 10 years old. Mutt, like most of the males in the Mantle family, died young, at 40, of Hodgkin’s disease. Yankee player Joe Pepitone recalled that Mantle “used to stay up and talk about being afraid of dying young because his father and two uncles died young.”
Mantle developed the bone-disease osteomyelitis in high school, almost losing his leg to amputation. Yet the powerful, blond kid who came up to the Yankees with a cardboard suitcase in 1951 was attacked by fans and writers who couldn’t believe he wasn’t fit to be drafted for the war in Korea. Under pressure, the draft board examined him three times, each time rejecting him. In 1951, his very first year with the Yankees, Mantle stepped on a drain in the Yankee Stadium outfield during a World Series game and tore up his right knee. This was the start of a history of injuries that grew to epic proportions. Mantle, the greatest blend of power and speed in baseball history, a player who created the “tape-measure home run” and was docked in an astonishing 3.1 seconds going from home plate to first base, was nonetheless never completely sound.
With that openness that helped him eventually to become the most popular player of his time, Mantle told Sports Illustrated last year: “Everybody tries to make the excuse that injuries shortened my career. Truth is . . . the doctors would give me rehab work to do, but I wouldn’t do it. I’d be out drinking.” Mantle’s Bacchic escapades with buddies Billy Martin and Whitey Ford were vary. Billy, said Mantle, “seemed to be the guy who had invented parties.” The parties became a 400 year immersion in alcohol, until Mantle in 1994 entered the Betty Ford Clinic, where his sons Danny and David had also been treated. Another son, Billy, died last year at 36 from a heart attack. This year came the liver transplant and the subsequent fatal spread of cancer.
This is the background against which Mantle’s career statistics must be measured. There is no drama to match it for sheer mythic fatality in all of baseball. Ruth, Gehrig, Williams, Di-Maggio, Musial–their stories, however compelling, are simple compared with Mantle’s. The kid from the Oklahoma lead mines was the real natural who came to the most-storied team in the greatest American sport, at the height of both their glories, and was going toper-form feats no one had performed. When Casey Stengel, who managed Mantle for a decade, left Mantle off his all-time team, it was as if he was punishing Mantle for not having become the supreme player that seemed to be his destiny. Now, when baseball is losing its mythic aura, Mantle’s death seems to mark that moment with a sad aptness. And for some, Mantle’s career symbolizes the failed prepotency of America itself. Is this the ultimate sentimentalism, the final afflatus of a kid’s game? If so, Mantle has at last become the Greatest, the greatest embodiment of a promise that couldn’t be kept.
