Mantle Took Us Back To Another Era In Baseball

My connection to Mickey Mantle came through my father. He was born in the Bronx to a hard-drinking Irish cab driver and a mother who, widowed young, stood in line for government-issue oatmeal to feed her eight kids. There were no camps, no swimming holes.

In my father’s neighborhood, the afternoon New York Yankees game provided the background music to the summer. He never lost the habit.

Every summer weekend when I was growing up, he would mow the grass then sit in his lawn chair with a Pabst Blue Ribbon and watch us play wiffle ball, the transistor radio on a folding table by his side. Joe DiMaggio had been his idol, but he fell hard for Mantle, as anyone who followed New York baseball in the 1950s and ‘60s did.

God, he figured, must be a Yankees fan, or else how did Mantle happen to come along when DiMaggio was leaving, just as Joe D came when Lou Gehrig left?

“I remember when Mantle hit a ball off the facade of Yankee Stadium,” my father said by phone from Florida on Sunday. “It came within 18 inches of going out… . It was like a bullet. I don’t think he was even out of the batter’s box when the ball hit the facade.

“He was such an awesome hitter, he could have grabbed the bat by the barrel and hit the ball into the stands with the handle. And when he missed, there was nothing left in the batter’s box.”

He recalled how, after home runs, Mantle returned to the dugout with his head bowed, as if he couldn’t understand all the fuss. Mantle had come from a poor family, too, and drank hard and joked about himself and never complained about his bum knees. Mantle was like the people my father knew, except he was blessed with this Herculean strength. You could fall in love with Mantle because he was everything you would want to be if you played baseball, right down to the boyish grin.

When Mantle died Sunday morning at the age of 63, I thought of the last time most of us saw him - in a televised news conference from Baylor University Hospital in Texas last month after his liver transplant. In a time when addicted players blame their problems on their childhood or their injuries or the pressures, Mantle held himself accountable for the alcohol abuse that ultimately destroyed him. At the news conference, he poked fun at himself while delivering his most important message: Don’t be like me.

His notoriety increased awareness of organ donations a thousand-fold. So despite accusations he received preferential treatment in getting a new liver and despite the aggressive cancer that made the transplant futile, Mantle didn’t cheat anyone. He will end up saving more lives than he could have if the liver had gone to someone else.

For my father, Mantle’s death didn’t signify the end of an era. The era ended a long time ago, he said, when Mantle retired before the 1969 season. The whole world was changing, and baseball changed with it.

Players earned free agency and began hopping from team to team. The money and fame pulled the players farther from the fans. The media exposed drug problems, marital difficulties, drinking binges, legal scrapes, salary-haggling.

Baseball grew up, leaving behind childhood crushes. We have our affairs today, but I’m not sure we commit ourselves to the ballplayers the way our parents did. We’re not easily awed. When Jose Canseco hits a home run to the upper decks, we’re impressed, but inevitably some kid will say, “For the kind of money he makes, he ought to be hitting them up there.”

Mickey Mantle represented what I envy about my father’s era. The ballplayers might have been no different from today’s, but I don’t think I’ll be telling stories to my children about them the way my father did about Mantle.