This is no ordinary February for those who revere Mickey Mantle.
It was 60 years ago this winter that “The Mick” first went to spring training with the Yankees. In 1951 he was 19, Godly gifted and already being crowned a “wonder boy.”
It was also the last year of Mantle’s life when he would be healthy. The Oklahoma son of a miner raised to switch hit, Mantle was destined to be a great baseball player from the time of his birth when he was named Mickey after hall of fame catcher Mickey Cochran.
By the time the Yankees were barnstorming in late March of 1951, the Mantle legend had begun. Playing against the USC Trojans in Los Angeles, Mantle hit two towering home runs, including one that may have travelled over 600 feet. USC coach Rod Dedeaux and other onlookers were amazed as they watched Mantle’s power during a perfect 4-for-4 day at bat.
“The greatest show in history,” Dedeaux said in Jane Leavy’s extraordinary book, The Last Boy, Mickey Mantle.
Mantle started the season with the Yankees but by summer had been sent to the minors to polish his batting. He earned his way back to the Yankees later in the season and played in his first World Series in October of 1951 against the New York Giants. In one of the most famous and tragic plays in baseball history, Mantle tripped on an outfield drain pipe cover and had to be carried off the field on a stretcher.
Mantle’s badly injured right knee would never be the same, nor would his potential. Decades ago medical procedures were archaic compared with today and he played his 18 year big league career victimized by physical problems, at times almost playing on one leg and at least once with blood drenching his uniform.
I don’t remember the early years of Mantle’s career but by the late 1950s he mesmerized me and millions more. He was blond, handsome and had forearms to be envied by a blacksmith. No player ever filled out a uniform more perfectly than Mantle.
Switch hitting was a phenomenon that swept across the ball fields of America in the 1950s and 1960s. I learned to be a switch hitter because of Mantle. It didn’t motivate me that it was an advantage when hitting against both left-handed and right-handed pitching. You batted on both sides of the plate because that’s the way Mantle did it.
He was that cool. So cool that Emmy Award winning broadcaster Bob Costas carried a Mantle baseball trading card in his wallet. So special that Billy Crystal said he spoke in an Oklahoma drawl at his bar mitzvah. So extraordinary that Mantle’s 1952 Topps Baseball Card has for years been the most valuable of all post-World War II trading cards.