A BASEBALL LIFE

Part One

       Baseball was a very large part of my life as a boy growing up in Bonham, a small town in Northeast Texas, during the 1950’s. Whether playing catch with my older brother Ray, or playing a game we called “flies and skinners”, or tossing up pebbles and swatting them with a home-made bat, or actually playing the game itself on a vacant lot with teams of 4 or 5 players to a side — I don’t remember ever having a pick-up game with a full complement of players  — I was always doing something related to baseball. In the summer, if I wasn’t physically engaged in some aspect of the game, I was reading about it, listening to games on the radio or playing made-up board games using bubble gum cards and dice. I actually devised a board game that, over the course of 2 or 3 years became fairly sophisticated in the sense that actual player stats were input into a numbers formula on a grid I created so that each player’s performance in the board game would closely approximate his performance stats of the prior major league season. In other words, in my game, Stan Musial’s performance stats from 1953 would be similar to his board game stats in my summer games in 1954. That occupied a lot of my indoors time.

       One of the greatest moments in my baseball life occurred in the summer of 1952 when somehow, some way, Little League baseball came to Bonham and all 11 and 12 year-olds were invited to sign up. Four teams were formed, all with full uniforms, bats and balls, and with games played under the lights twice a week with coaches and umpires on a dedicated baseball diamond. I could hardly believe my good fortune, but I reveled in it, building my entire summer around the games that never seemed to come quickly enough.

       I worked all that summer for my dad in his carpentry and construction business, doing all the dirty work, mostly under and on top of houses. My dad sensed my love of the games, so on days when I was scheduled to pitch in the game that night, he would let me off work at noon so I could rest up. Those days I would laze around the house and listen to the Mutual Game of the Day on the radio, usually with Buddy Blattner doing the play-by-play and Dizzy Dean providing color commentary. The next summer was much the same, though I did begin to worry a bit about what would come next in my baseball life.

       As it happened, Pony League baseball came that next summer for the first time, a program for 13 and 14 year old boys. So two more joyous summers of organized baseball came my way. But what happened in the next summer managed to top everything that had gone before in my baseball world. A couple of parents organized a city team to participate in a north Texas league of eight teams from towns in neighboring counties with games to be played in Sherman, a college town with a significantly larger population than Bonham. My brother Ray was the unquestioned star of our team and I was an insignificant role player as the youngest on the quad. Still, I thought I had absolutely made it to the pinnacle of boy’s baseball with those games being played at a higher level of competence and competitiveness than I had ever experienced. This, I thought, was what baseball was all about. And I loved every minute of it.

       Of course, I played baseball in high school, but it never felt the same to me. The sport seemed to be mostly about practice, which was held every day, and very little about games, which were played only occasionally, or so it seemed. While this may sound like heresy to baseball purists, all high school games were played in the daytime, whereas all my youth league games were played at night, with the result being that the day games didn’t seem like real baseball to me. After my high school graduation, there was no baseball in my life, as a participant, for quite a while.

       I attended my first Major League game, albeit an exhibition, in the spring of 1955 in Dallas, a rematch of the teams from the 1954 World Series, the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians. Not many regulars played in that game, but I did get to see Willie Mays bat and Herb Score pitch.

       My next personal exposure to professional baseball came on July 4, 1956, when I went to see a double header between the Greenville Majors and the Ponca City Cubs, a Class D minor league match-up. One of the few, perhaps the only, Black player on either team was a very young Billy Williams, just starting a career that would ultimately land him in the baseball Hall of Fame. Somewhere during the long afternoon, Monte Stratton made an appearance in some capacity, maybe as a manager, coach or just a home town celebrity, I cant remember for sure. His story, already memorialized in a movie starring James Stewart and June Allyson, was one of my all-time favorites.

Part Two

       Moving forward several decades, as my 45th birthday approached, a time when many men struggled with one form or another of mid-life crises (I didn’t), my wife, Beverly, presented me with a gift of a lifetime — a week-long trip to a fantasy baseball camp in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the home of the New York Yankees’ spring training facility. She had worked for a year or more at a local sporting goods store and set aside out of her earnings enough to pay for the trip and the camp. This was to be my birthday gift from her. We share the same birthday — always a point of curiosity and about which she is quick to point out, “yes the dates are the same, but I’m much younger.”  By way of contrast, my gifts to her that year were some scented toiletries.

       Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were conducting the fantasy camp, along with several other greats from the Yankees of old, including Hank Bauer, Bill “Moose” Skowron, Tom Sturdivant, Jake Gibbs and others. I need to digress here. Mickey Mantle was a boyhood hero of mine, as he was to millions of other kids at the time. He was, simply put, the perfect baseball player, and he looked the part. Blonde-headed, big, strong, good-looking, and with an appropriate amount of athletic arrogance, he represented what we all thought a super athlete should be. As a player, he could do it all and then some. He hit monster homers, of course, but he was also an accomplished bunter. He was extremely fast and had a strong throwing arm. He actually came to the major leagues as a shortstop, so his fielding skills were also superb.

       When I headed off to the camp, meeting Mickey Mantle in person was as much a part of my anticipation as playing baseball again. I don’t know what I expected of him exactly. Certainly, I did not expect him to speak in long, flourishing complete sentences, sprinkled with polysyllabic descriptions delivered with an Oxford accent. Still, given his many years in New York, living in the limelight, I guess I did expect a somewhat higher level of sophistication, not only in his speech, but in his demeanor. So, for sure I was disappointed to the point of rethinking my opinion of him as my childhood hero. In his retirement, he just didn’t measure up to what I would consider the natural evolution of a super star into middle age and beyond.

       But as the days passed that week and I found myself totally absorbed in the routine of doing nothing much but playing baseball, my disappointment began to fade, mostly because I was having the time of my life. We played 2 games every day with a huge clubhouse spread for lunch in between the games. I was magically transported by this routine all the way back to my childhood. It wasn’t as if I was fantasizing about playing in the big leagues. To the contrary, I was fantasizing about playing Little League and Pony League baseball again as a youngster and I absolutely loved it.

       Toward the end of the week, after playing the second game of the day, I was lingering in the dugout, partly because of exhaustion from the long day and partly because I just wanted to savor the moment for as long as possible. There were no other campers in the dugout when Mickey stepped inside, looked up and down and, seeing only me, asked if I wanted to join him and a few others for a beer. Of course, I jumped at the chance. “Great”, Mickey said, “get dressed and meet me and Whitey at the back exit.”

During the course of the next hour or so, my initial harsh assessment of Mickey’s personality began to soften as he regaled us with stories of his time with the Yankees. Whitey didn’t have a lot to say, but he also seemed genuinely interested in the stories and occasionally chipped in a comment or two. A couple of Mantle’s stories stuck with me.

“In 1956‚” Mickey began, “I had a really good year and we won the pennant and the World Series” (I think it fair to say here that he had more than a really good year; he won the triple crown in the American League with numbers that would have won the triple crown in the National League as well, a rare feat that has been accomplished only a couple of times since then). “So”, he continued, “when I went in to see the boss about my new contract for the coming year, Mr. Topping offered me a contract with a bit of a raise, certainly nothing on the scale of what players make now; and it was quite a bit less than expected and I said so. I told him I thought I should make more than any other player in the league, to which he replied, ‘believe me son, you do.’ Well, I had no way of disputing that and I suspect he didn’t have any way of knowing for sure himself.

“The next year, I had another great season, batting .365, my highest average ever, but I finished behind Ted Williams for the title. My homers and RBI’s were down a bit, but were still among the league leaders. When I went in to see Mr. Topping this time, he presented me with a contract calling for me to take a pay cut, explaining that I didn’t have as good a season as the year before. Can you imagine that happening in today’s era of free agency?”

I couldn’t.

I really wanted to ask him about the 1961 season when he and Roger Maris put on an unbelievable show chasing Babe Ruth’s home run record of 60 for a single season. Finally, I was able to turn to that topic and Mickey’s eyes lit up when he thought about his response.

“I would have hit at least 61 for sure if hadn’t come down with a hip infection in September, but that’s just me talking now. The really interesting thing about my competition with Roger, which was always friendly, was something he said to me in all sincerity as the chase headed into the final month. ‘Mick’ he said, ‘if we’re still close as we get to 60, I’m going to back off because if anyone is going to break the Babe’s record, it should be you. I’ve only been here a couple of years, whereas you represent everything it means to be a Yankee, so it just has to be you. And, that’s clearly what the fans want.’

“I said, Rog, you can’t do that. It wouldn’t feel right to me and you could get in trouble with the league if they figure out what you did. ‘Relax’, he said, ‘I’ll make sure they could never think I did anything intentionally.’ Well, I guess in one way it was a good thing I had to sit out when I did so it never came to that. But Roger elevated himself in my estimation by even suggesting such a thing, making it even easier for me to root for him to break the record. Throughout the summer, the press tried and tried to manufacture stories about me and Roger feuding, which we never did. In fact, me and him shared an apartment that summer, along with Bobby Cerv, and we used to fake arguments in front of reporters and then scour the next day’s sports sections to read about our so-called feud.”

The foregoing remarks by Mickey have been edited by me to eliminate his frequent use of vulgarities, to synthesize his commentary and to iron out some wrinkles in his rambling delivery.  The essence of his stories has been preserved, however.

So, after my initial aversion to the personae of the grown-up version of Mickey Mantle, which was quite strong, it began to settle in with me that this man was a baseball hero pure and simple — one of the greatest ever. That was enough for me as a child and, finally, it is enough for me now.