The Twins play the Yankees tonight in New York but there is something else going on in Yankee Stadium more important to me. The Yankees are giving away 18,000 Mickey Mantle Triple Crown Bobbleheads to fans. It was 60 years ago, in 1956, that Mantle won the American League’s Triple Crown, achieving the rare distinction of leading his rivals in batting average, home runs and RBI.
This is a timely day to pay tribute to The Mick.
Count me among the millions of adolescents who idolized the Yankees superstar centerfielder while growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s. I had heroes like Willie Mays, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West and a handful of Gopher greats including Bobby Bell and Sandy Stephens. But no one was bigger to me—and much of America’s youth—than the incomparable Mantle.
Mickey was a god to us. He was 5-foot-11 and weighed about 200 pounds. Baseball people said he was built like “concrete” and moved faster than light. I can’t remember who—maybe it was Billy Crystal or Bob Costas—who also said no ball player ever filled out a uniform like Mantle wore his. With bulging forearms and a sculpted body, when No. 7 walked toward the plate fans were in awe.
Crystal and Costas—just like the John Q. Publics of the world—revered Mantle who was small town handsome with his blue eyes, blonde hair and impish smile. I read that to this day Costas, now 64, carries a Mantle baseball card in his wallet. My best Mantle cards are in a safe deposit box and I probably have lots of company on that.
In 1956 The Mick was at a tipping point in his career. He joined the Yankees in 1951, not yet 20 years old. The hype was already starting about this phenomenal talent from small town Commerce, Oklahoma who might just become the greatest Yankee of all time. More heroic some day than Babe Ruth. More loved than Lou Gehrig. A better all around player than Joe DiMaggio.
Mantle was going to make a habit of hitting 500 foot home runs. He was going to break Ruth’s single season record of 60 home runs. Not only would he be the greatest switch hitter in baseball history, he would run to first base faster than anyone in the game. He would steal bases with ease, and run down sure doubles, triples and home runs in center field where he replaced the graceful and sure-handed DiMaggio.
By the spring of 1956 The Mick was damn good but he wasn’t Superman. He had led the American League in home runs in 1955 and three times helped the Yankees advance to and win the World Series. He was a regular on the American League All-Star roster, but not the greatest player in the game on his way to being the best ever.
Nope. Not yet, and maybe never.
Frustrated Yankees fans—with dysfunctional expectations—sometimes greeted Mickey’s plate appearances with boos. The shy kid from Oklahoma was more mortal than Ruthian, and in the early Mantle years the paying customers in at Yankee Stadium weren’t happy. In 1956, however, the Bronx boo-birds went bye-bye.
That year the 24-year-old Mantle apparently decided to ease up on himself and all the pressure he had felt in the past playing under the biggest of microscopes in New York. The results were amazing and they fulfilled the daydreams of hero worshipping fans. Mantle hit 52 home runs, drove in 130 runs and batted .353.
It was and remains one of the greatest seasons ever for combining power and batting average. His slugging percentage was a career-high .705. Mantle excelled in the field and on the bases, too, making big plays for a Yankees team that won the American League pennant and World Series. Mantle won the first of his three career AL MVP awards, and his 1956 season was so admired he was honored with national athlete of the year awards.
Many who saw Mantle in 1956—ballplayers, writers and probably even little kids—will swear to this: “Nobody ever played baseball better than Mickey Charles Mantle that year.”
In 1956 The Mick was the epitome of the five-tool player: run, hit for average and power, field and throw. It was his greatest of 18 seasons in the major leagues, and even inspired him after retirement to write a book about that year—My Favorite Summer 1956.
Mantle would go on to have several other worthy seasons including 1957 when he hit a career high .365. But there would only be a single other “one for the ages” summer for the great hall of fame slugger. That came in 1961 when Mantle and teammate Roger Maris chased Ruth’s home run record.
By then Mantle was worshipped even by the impossible to please Yankees fans. It was Maris that was greeted with boos at Yankee Stadium, not The Mick. The gods of baseball, the fans thought, should let Mantle break Ruth’s record, not Maris who had played for two other big league organizations before joining the Yankees and was viewed as unworthy of comparisons to Mantle and The Babe.
The left-handed hitting Maris, having a career season and with a gifted ability to pull the ball toward the short right field foul pole at Yankee Stadium, broke Ruth’s record by hitting 61 home runs in 1961. An abscessed hip hospitalized Mantle late in the season and slowed his chase of Ruth and Maris. The Mick finished the season with 54 home runs, and left much of America disappointed that it was the Hibbing-born Maris who was baseball’s new home run king.
Mantle’s career was characterized by bad luck and physical frailties. Even prior to reaching the big leagues he was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone. In Mantle’s rookie year of 1951 he badly hurt his knee on a play in the outfield during the World Series. Severe knee issues dogged his entire career. He also had hamstring problems and other challenges including a drinking problem and carousing.
Who knows how great Mantle might have been? He had almost constant problems with his body, at times wrapping himself in so much athletic tape he looked like a mummy turned ballplayer. He likely believed the boozing helped him deal with the pressures and insecurities of his fame. Then, too, there was a family history of males dying young from cancer. That made The Mick want to party and live for the day—even at the expense of playing at his best.
But that wasn’t the stuff we heard much about back when Mantle was a magazine cover boy and Teresa Brewer was cooing a record in 1956 called “I Love Mickey.” Writers covered up the problems and demons afflicting sports heroes back in the 1950s and 1960s.
That made it easier for a little kid in south Minneapolis to worship No. 7. I wanted to be just like Mantle. I became a switch hitter, and I loved the good fortune that my nickname from birth was Mik. In a schoolyard, out in the street or in the backyard, I tried to be Mickey.
When Mantle and the Yankees came to town to play the Twins starting in 1961, the series brought more excitement than Christmas. Mantle, Maris, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Elston Howard and all the rest. This was baseball’s greatest dynasty led by baseball’s greatest hero. Elvis and The Beatles were big—Mantle and the Yankees were bigger.
I collected every Mantle baseball trading card I could find. Still own them all. Maybe a couple dozen Mantles from the late 1950s and 1960s. Even now there is so much enjoyment in looking at The Mick and recalling how great he was—and how much more he might have been.
Wouldn’t trade the cards or the memories for anything—not even a Triple Crown Bobblehead.
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