How about Mantle for your mantle?

TULSA, Okla. – Leo Evans held the bat, a bit too heavy for his young arms, and took a cut while staring at the mirror. He pictured himself as the next center fielder for the New York Yankees, the next Mickey Mantle.

What made it seem realistic was the fact that The Mick once swung the same bat – and in the World Series, no less.

“It still had pine tar on it,” Evans recalls. “You’d get your hands sticky like the big leaguers did.”

When neighborhood kids came over, sometimes they’d hold the bat and other times they wouldn’t. Many times, it just stayed in the closet. There was no hoopla.

“I can’t remember any kids making that big a deal out of it,” Evans said. “I’m sure they thought it was cool, but I don’t ever remember kids going whacko.”

Decades later, the bat is more than a child’s toy. It’s a rare artifact from one of baseball’s legends – the only bat Mantle is known to have used in the 1951 World Series.

The 19-year-old rookie ordered two bats for the series, which the Yankees won in six games against the New York Giants, and the other is missing. So was this one, until Evans made a trip to the Hall of Fame and was told how much the bat might be worth. He came home and retrieved it from his nephew, who had borrowed it years earlier.

A number of factors make the bat a valuable item, and the 52-year-old Evans put in up for auction this past week at Lelands.com.

First, of course, it belonged to Mickey Mantle. It was used in a World Series, and Mantle hit a record 18 career World Series home runs. On top of that, it’s from 1951 – Mantle’s rookie year, and the only season he spent in the Yankees outfield with Joe DiMaggio.

Gomer Evans, Leo’s father, had a friend named Marshall Ishmael who coached high school football. On the team was Mantle’s brother. After Ishmael passed along word that Gomer’s children were big baseball fans, Mantle sent them a bat.

At the time, Mantle was a young ballplayer off to a strong start. It would be several years – and hundreds of homers – before The Mick was a legend.

So, the bat wasn’t locked away as a keepsake. Instead, it found a home in the Evans’ closet.

“We didn’t appreciate it really – I guess – in a way like you would think,” Leo Evans said. “I don’t know why that is. You would think it would just have been worshipped.

“We liked it. We loved having it. We just didn’t think about it that much. It was just in the closet for years and years and years.”

It wasn’t like the family didn’t realize Mantle’s stature. Evans remembers checking the box scores in the newspaper every morning, taking time to see what Mantle did in the previous day’s game.

“Being in Oklahoma, Mickey Mantle was the only celebrity we had other than Will Rogers,” Evans said. “He was it. The fact that he was from Oklahoma, playing for the Yankees and a superstar, I think almost all Oklahoma kids were big Mickey Mantle fans. I know everybody in my family was.

“I can remember watching him strike out and it just killed me.”

That Oklahoma connection – Mantle was born in Commerce and took the nickname “The Commerce Comet” – adds to the bat’s attraction.

Evans and his three siblings, two older brothers and an older sister, decided it was time to put the bat up for auction and see what happened.

“I think what our hope is that it goes someplace where it can be displayed and people appreciate it,” Evans said. “It is a piece of Americana I think anybody that was around in the ‘50s and ‘60s would say, ‘Wow, that’s really something.’ “

Mantle retired from baseball in 1968 with a career average of .298, hitting 536 homers with 1,509 runs batted in. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1974 and died Aug. 13, 1995.