The Baseball 100: No. 11, Mickey Mantle

Starting in December, Joe Posnanski began counting down the 100 greatest baseball players. Initially, we published one a day to count down to Opening Day — but with the start of the season pushed back, we’ll be counting down the last 13 with three essays per week. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.

There is a famous Mutt Mantle story you may have heard, a story about how Mutt found his son at a low point, ready to quit baseball forever, and promptly kicked his son’s butt, threatened to drag him back to work in the Oklahoma mines, and, through a heavy dose of tough love, launched his son’s legendary baseball career.

The story, best we can tell, is absolutely true.

But inside the story is something else, something hard, something painful. Mickey Mantle’s baseball career was a glorious triumph. Nobody, other than perhaps Babe Ruth himself, launched more dreams. Mickey Mantle was unlimited — the perfect baseball name, the perfect baseball body, a switch-hitter who hit titanic home runs from either side of the plate (they invented the “tape-measure home run” for him), a hitter with an incredible eye, a blazing fast baserunner, a stunning force of nature standing in center field at Yankee Stadium.

He won the Triple Crown in 1956. He was even better in ’57. He played 18 years in the big leagues, and his Yankees went to the World Series in 12 of them. He hit 536 home runs and won three MVPs and along the way, he inspired the hopes of countless kids. Singer/songwriter Paul Simon was one of those kids, and when he wrote “Mrs. Robinson,” he really was thinking, “Where have you gone, Mickey Mantle.” But “Joe DiMaggio” had the right amount of syllables.

“For a huge portion of my generation,” one of those kids, Bob Costas, said at Mantle’s memorial, “Mickey Mantle was that baseball hero. And for reasons that no statistics, no dry recitation of the facts, can possibly capture, he was the most compelling baseball hero of our lifetime. He was our symbol of baseball at a time when the game meant something to us that perhaps it no longer does.”

Mantle himself couldn’t understand it. I saw Mantle a few times late in life — at events, at baseball card shows — and his body was destroyed by injuries and alcohol and all those late nights, and people would approach him with tears in their eyes as they tried to find the words to explain the role he had played in their lives. And, more often than not, he would turn away from them, as if he couldn’t tolerate their affection or, more likely, as if he felt entirely unworthy of their love.

For Mickey Mantle, living was the hard part.

Charles Mantle was a ballplayer. His son Charles “Mutt” Mantle was a ballplayer. His son Mickey Mantle was a ballplayer. Of the three, though, none loved the game like Mutt. The game consumed him. Mickey always thought Mutt had the talent to play the game professionally, but that was never really an option. Mutt got married at age 17 and worked the fields as a tenant farmer.

He knew with a chilling certainty that his future son would be called Mickey, after his favorite ballplayer Mickey Cochrane, and that Mickey Mantle would be the best ballplayer of them all.

Mutt could not support his family farming and by the time Mickey was 3, Mutt was working in the lead and zinc mines of Oklahoma. The work killed him daily. “Every time he took a breath,” Mickey remembered, “the dust and dampness went into his lungs. Coughed up gobs of phlegm and never saw a doctor. … He realized that if he didn’t die of cancer, he’d die of tuberculosis. ‘So what the hell, live while you can,’ he’d say and light another cigarette.”

Mickey was his father’s life’s work. His mother, Lovell, would say that when Mickey was 12 hours old, Mutt showed him a baseball for the first time and felt just a little bit heartbroken when Mickey turned toward milk instead. Mickey said he was taught baseball player positions before the alphabet and his nightly lullaby was the radio broadcast of St. Louis Cardinals games.

Mickey told his wife Merlyn that at 5 years old he already knew that he would not be able to face his father’s disappointment if he did not become a great big league ballplayer.

There’s an extraordinary moment in the film “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” The movie is about a chess prodigy, Josh Waitzkin, but just as much it is about his parents’ struggle to figure out exactly what they are supposed to do. Josh’s father, played by Joe Mantegna, is a sportswriter who can’t help but think from his own experiences that he must push his son to greatness. Josh’s mother, played by Joan Allen, meanwhile fights to let Josh be a child.

“How many ballplayers grow up afraid of losing their father’s love every time they come to the plate?” Allen asks Mantegna in the crescendo scene.

“All of them!” Mantegna roars. The scene was so powerful that Mantegna, who has been an actor for closing on 50 years and has performed in hundreds of thousands of scenes, remembers the specific power of the moment. “I thought it was a terrific statement,” he says, “especially for baseball fans.”

Yes. Well, it’s Mutt Mantle’s scene.

Every day throughout Mickey Mantle’s childhood, he played baseball with Mutt — though “play” is probably the wrong verb. Mutt did not believe in play. Everything in his dark and harsh life had told him that to get ahead in life, you needed to beat the system. So he came up with a plan, and the plan definitely did not involve play.

No, instead, he would make Mickey a switch-hitting, switch-throwing phenomenon. He guessed that with baseball becoming more specialized, the ability to hit from both sides of the plate and the ability to pitch with both arms would be an enormous advantage. So he had Mickey throw for a half-hour with his right arm and then a half-hour with his left. Mutt would have Mickey hit left-handed against his pitches and right-handed against his father Charles, who was a lefty.

Mickey hated it at first. All of it. But he mostly hated the switch-throwing part; throwing lefty drove him crazy. And so, for perhaps the only time in his childhood, he rebelled and refused to do it. A deal was struck. Mutt would stop making Mickey throw left-handed.

But Mickey had to promise to hit left-handed handed against every righty pitcher he faced for the rest of his life.

As it turns out, Mickey Mantle broke the promise twice. The first time came three or four years later when playing in a neighborhood game. He had struck out two or three times against a righty-pitcher, and he was furious, and so the next time he stepped in righty. But before the first pitch was even thrown, he heard that voice: “Go on home!” That was Mutt Mantle, who was watching, who was always watching, and that evening Mutt made it clear that if Mickey didn’t hit left-handed the next time, he would never be allowed to play ball again.

The next time was when Mickey was 25 years old. It was May 30, 1957, five years almost to the day after Mutt Mantle died. The Yankees led Washington 9-0, and Senators’ pitcher Emilio Hernandez was on the mound. Mickey had twice that day come close to homering left-handed but his shots died at the warning track, and he wanted a home run, so he took a crack from the right side, his better power side. “He doesn’t have much of a curve,” Mickey would say of Hernandez. “I figured I might get a high fastball which I could hit into the left-field seats.” Mantle hit into a double play instead, the first time he’d done that all season. Later, he tried the switch again against Hernandez and hit a soft ground ball.

The headlines across America read: “Father knows best.”

There’s another thing about the movie, “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” that is worth mentioning here: There was no Joan Allen character in young Mickey Mantle’s life. His mother, Lovell, was distant and detached. Neither of Mickey’s parents said, “I love you,” throughout his childhood.

The love, as it was, came through daily baseball workouts. Mickey would come home from school, and Mutt would come home from the mines, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, exhausted from his day, and the sessions would begin. They were long and intense and inescapable no matter the weather.

“Dad, I’m hungry,” Mickey would say when dinner time hit.

“Your belly can wait,” Mutt would growl, and that’s when he might throw one at his son’s head to get the point across.

“When his Dad would pitch to him for hours,” Merlyn wrote, “out of a hundred pitches, Mick would be in terror of missing one and looking bad and having his father frown or criticize.”

Mickey Mantle wet his bed until he was 16 years old.

There was a time when people told the Mantle story like it was a fairytale; here was an Oklahoma miner who, through sheer stubbornness, raised baseball’s greatest star. It was no fairytale, however, and these days it’s hard to find much love for Mutt Mantle, who raised a legendary ballplayer but also a son who became an alcoholic, an absentee father, an unfaithful husband and a deeply depressed man.

Mutt’s pressure on his son was unrelenting. Nothing was good enough. Nothing could be good enough. When Mickey was in high school, he played for a semi-pro team called the Baxter Spring Whiz Kids, and he once had a game where he hit three long home runs, a performance so awesome that the crowd passed around the hat and raised more than $50 in coins to give to him in appreciation.

“He coulda done better,” was Mutt’s summation of the performance.

How much of Mickey Mantle’s greatness was due to his father’s single-minded focus? It’s impossible to know, but it must be said that he was an extraordinary athlete, one of the greatest to ever play baseball. You could argue that his youthful combination of speed and power is unmatched in Major League history. The power is obvious. The speed — the legend has always been that he was timed at 3.1 seconds to first base, the fastest time ever recorded.

Let’s say for the record: It didn’t happen. Not 3.1 seconds. No way. I asked Tom Tango — who spends his days breaking down the Statcast numbers — to think about someone going 3.1 seconds to first base, and he pointed out that in 2009, when Usain Bolt set the world record in the 100, he ran the first 30 meters in 3.78 seconds.

Translate that to yards and it’s roughly 3.5 seconds. If you want to say that maybe the stopwatch didn’t start until the batter was out of the box, maybe cutting it down to 88 feet, you might be able to get it down to 3.2 or 3.3 seconds.

But again, this is comparing Mantle to USAIN BOLT running with perfect form on an ideal running track with the best equipment a runner can have.

Zero chance Mantle actually ran a 3.1 to first unless the stopwatch didn’t click until he was three or four steps down the line.

But the exact time doesn’t matter: The point is Mantle could fly. People miss this because he stole only 153 bases (compared to Willie Mays’ 338, for example) but part of this was because his knees went out and part of this was because he didn’t try to steal much. Mantle’s 80 percent success rate is actually fantastic; it ranks sixth among Hall of Famers with more than 100 stolen bases.

He was a football phenomenon, once scoring four touchdowns of 80, 75, 45 and 20 yards in a game. He was a basketball phenomenon, the best player on his high school team. He had world-class speed. He was impossibly strong.

So is it possible he would have turned into a great ballplayer even with a father who stayed back and just cheered from the little wooden bleachers by the fields? It seems so.

But Mickey himself never believed it. “My father is the only reason I became a ballplayer,” he would say.

He became a ballplayer. The Yankees signed him with some fanfare. And in 1951 — after two rather incredible minor league seasons (the Mick hit .383 in Joplin, Mo. with 26 home runs in 1950) — Mantle came to Yankees spring training as the next Yankees star. The team was so sure about it that they gave him uniform No. 6, to put him next in line.

Uniform No. 3: Babe Ruth.

Uniform No. 4: Lou Gehrig.

Uniform No. 5: Joe DiMaggio.

Uniform No. 6: Mickey Mantle.

Sportswriters loved him. What a story! They kept finding new and ever more glowing ways to celebrate Mantle’s talent. He was “the fabulous kid,” the “eye-popping Oklahoman,” “the infant phenom,” “Miraculous Mantle,” the “Colossal Kid,” “the next Mel Ott,” and, most directly, “The Future of Baseball.”

This is what Mutt had prepared him for all his life, and Mickey hit right through the pressure. That spring, he hit .400 and cracked nine home runs. Yankees manager Casey Stengel said, “He should lead the league in everything.”

He made the club. How could they leave him off? And after the season began, he kept on hitting. He crushed a 440-foot home run at Comiskey Park. He scored three runs and drove in four against Bob Lemon and Cleveland. He was still hitting .300 on May 22.

It’s hard to say exactly when things started going south. It wasn’t any one thing. There was no death-defying slump. He just began to lose confidence. He went a month without homering. His strikeouts shot up. He felt isolated, alone, particularly because the great Joe DiMaggio was so cold toward him. But it wasn’t just that. The draft board rejected him because of a bone disease, but people still called him a draft dodger. For a few weeks, there were rumors that he would get sent down. The newspaper reporters who had built him into a demigod during spring training now took their cheap shots. “The next DiMaggio,” one wrote bitingly, “struck out on three pitches.”

“He is lacking a bit,” Stengel admitted. Stengel loved the kid and didn’t want to send him down. He fought it for as long as he could, but on July 13, Mantle struck out three times and made a poor throw home and Stengel benched him.

There is a possibility,” the New York Daily News crowed, “that the front office will send him to Kansas City at long last.”

And so they did, the very next day. Mantle fought tears when he heard the news.

“He’ll be back,” Stengel assured reporters. “And he’ll be a great ballplayer.”

Mantle was not so sure.

Mickey Mantle told the story this way: He went to Kansas City and went 1-for-22 — his one hit was a bunt — and he was so beaten down that he told his father he was quitting baseball.

The truth — as truth tends to be — seems to be a bit tougher to get at. Mantle did not go 1-for-22. He did start out 3-for-18, but he quickly turned himself around and started mashing baseballs all over the place, including one game where he went 5-for-5 with a single, double, triple and two home runs. It’s unclear when he met with his father. According to one story, it was July 22 before Mickey’s first home game with the Kansas City Blues. According to another, it was quite a bit later, Aug. 11, on the day that was supposed to be “Father-Son Day” at Kansas City Municipal Stadium (the game was rained out).

Whatever the case, it seems that Mickey did turn to his father back in the hotel after the game and say, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to quit.”

“I thought he was going to give me a pep talk,” Mickey would later say, which is odd because there is nothing whatsoever I can find in Mutt Mantle’s life to suggest he was the pep talk kind. This was also at a time when Mutt Mantle had to be in great pain. He was dying of cancer.

We will never know the exact scene, but it seems like Mutt never raised his voice. He might have even nodded as his son spoke. And then, he began grabbing Mickey’s clothes and throwing them into a suitcase.

“What are you doing?” Mickey asked.

“I thought I raised a man,” Mutt said. “I see I raised a coward instead. You can come back to Oklahoma and work the mines with me.”

“No, wait a minute,” Mickey said.

“Bullshit. You come and work the mines with me. I didn’t raise a man. I raised a baby.”

Mantle would say that both men were crying at this point.

And then Mutt Mantle just left. On the way out the door, he said, “If you can’t play, get a bus and come home.”

“It was as though,” Mickey would say, “Mutt had leveled a double-barreled shotgun at my head.”

Mickey stayed, of course, and he was back in the big leagues by late August. He hit .267 for the season and then got just seven plate appearances in the World Series before getting hurt — this was when he gave way at the last possible second on a fly ball hit between him and DiMaggio. Mutt was there for the game and he took Mickey to the hospital. Mickey’s knee was never the same. And Mutt Mantle died seven months later.

Many years later, when Mickey Mantle was at the Betty Ford Center trying to deal with his alcoholism, they asked him to write what they call a “grief letter” to his father. He told Sports Illustrated that in the letter he apologized to his father for not living up to expectations. He wrote about his desperate wish that Mutt could have seen him become a star. He wrote about his four sons.

And, yes, he wrote, “I love you, Dad.”

But to close friends — according to Jane Leavy’s seminal biography — the Mick explained that he also wrote about the pain of expectations, and how he wanted Mutt to stop running his life, and how much better off he would have been had he not tried to be all that Mutt Mantle wanted him to be.

When I was 20 years old, I sat next to Mickey Mantle in a baseball dugout. He was in Salisbury, N.C. for a celebrity baseball game arranged by Costas, and I was there to write about the game and him. It was the first big assignment of my life. I was deeply nervous.

And as I sat next to him, he was slouched over, his eyes half-open, and he so clearly did not want to talk, which was good because I had no idea what to ask him. So we just sat there for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, in complete silence. I just kept looking over at him, this Great American Hero, and he looked so old, so tired, so beaten by life. I was just a kid with the hope of being a great writer someday, and I remember wishing I had the words to capture all of him, all those home runs, all those great catches, all those World Series moments, all the pain he endured, all the blurry nights that wrecked him.

But I didn’t. And I still don’t. Life is so much more complicated than it should be. So I just sat there silently until finally he stood up and limped away.

Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.

(Photo: Bettmann)