Mantle Praise Not Against Mays

The way Carl M. Cannon of the Baltimore Sun’s Washington bureau sees it, a grave injustice was dealt the American public because Willie Mays received scant mention in the eulogies, tributes, etc. tended Mickey Mantle upon his death Aug. 13.

Cannon never did explain why, in his Sunday Sun piece of a couple of days ago, he deemed it necessary that the feats of the marvelous Mays should be included in the obituary and the remembrances of the life and times of Der Mick.

An “orgy of revisionism” he called references to the Yankees center fielder’s impact on baseball, particularly in New York, as “The Mantle Era.” Mays was better, the numbers say so, but so were Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial and others. Hey, were these words about Mantle or a comparative analysis of all the game’s greats?

It’s too easy to kick holes in Cannon’s theory that the “Say Hey Kid” was the equal of Mickey in the minds of not only the fans but the people grinding out the publicity in Planet Earth Media Central (the Big Apple).

Mantle arrived in 1951. Before he came East, there were tales of Ruthian clouts coming out of the spring training camps in Arizona almost daily. The Yankees, who had won pennants and World Series the two previous seasons, just kept on winning: Exit DiMaggio, enter Mantle. The mechanism was already in place, going back decades. Mays played just 34 games in 1952 and missed the entire 1953 season due to a two-year hitch in the Army. Meanwhile, Mantle got bigger and bigger.

There weren’t many games on television back then, but a staple was the World Series. Year after year, the Yankees were playing in late September or October and No.7 always seemed to be swatting the ball over a fence, either at majestic Yankee Stadium or over in Brooklyn.

Mays came back in 1954 and was the National League batting champion and his Giants swept the Cleveland Indians in the Series. But who would deny that Fall Classic belonged to a left-handed pinch hitter by the name of Dusty Rhodes? Over the next three seasons, the men played spectacularly, of course, but Mantle’s Triple Crown in 1956 gave him a huge edge.

Then Mays was gone (to San Francisco) in 1958, away from the ramshackle Polo Grounds with its thousands of unused seats while Mantle still held forth in the glamorous Stadium, a stone’s throw across the Harlem River in the Bronx.

The Yankees won every year, and Mantle was always at the fore. He was the symbol of the team’s dominance. If anybody or anything deserved inclusion in “The Era,” accepted as the term describing the decade-long (1947-57) dominance of the New York teams, it was the Dodgers. They were always the party of the second part in those gripping “Subway Series” events.

Cannon asked if the exclusion of Mays from tributes to Mantle is “a subtle form of racism?” then answered his own question, “certainly, that’s part of it.” Now, in the thoughts and words of writers and broadcasters four decades later? Sure, blame us.

Joe Krivak does. Remember the former Maryland football coach whose five Terps squads went 20-34-1?

He’s an assistant at Virginia and he told the Washington Post, “(Administration) people didn’t come out and give me the support I needed. They left the door open, a crack, and, of course (the media) jumped right in.”

And ran poor Joe out of town (with a hefty settlement covering the last four years of his contract). If the media had any influence whatsoever, Joe wouldn’t have gotten that lengthy extension of his contract prior to being zapped less than a year later.

Honest, guys, I had nothing to do with the second bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. I was at a piano lesson at the time.