Mantle In Milwaukee: Sixty Years Ago

Milwaukee commuters wrestling their way down highway 43 may not know that the pavement between Locust and Burleigh Streets is hallowed ground, the former site of Borchert Field, home of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers for much of the first half of last century.  Borchert Field was an old, rickety ballpark with crazy dimensions: the foul lines were only 267 feet (who knows how many home runs Braun and Fielder would have hit in this ballpark?).  And the Brewers, in the early 50s, were a very good minor league team, the triple A affiliate of the Boston Braves and two-time Junior World Series Champions.

Sixty years ago this July 16, on a warm, foggy evening, a small crowd of 3400 came to watch the Brewers host the Kansas City Blues, both teams tied for second place in the American Association league.  Fans that night couldn’t have known they were about to witness a glimpse of future hall-of-fame greatness.  It happened to be the first minor league appearance that season for a 19 year-old Oklahoman who’d been wearing pinstripes just days before. 

Mickey Mantle had struggled for the previous month as a New York Yankee, his average sinking to .260, and it was decided that he should regain his swing in Kansas City.  When Yankee manager Casey Stengel told Mantle privately of the decision, Mantle cried.

Days later in Milwaukee, the fog was so thick, Mantle quipped, “I may need a mask out there tonight.”

That evening, the switch-hitter batted left handed and went 1 for 4, his only hit a bunt single to the first-base side.  Those in attendance got to witness Mantle at his blazing best: that is, among the fastest to ever play the game (batting left handed, he'd been timed running from home to first in 3.1 seconds).

The following evening, after word had spread that Mantle was in Milwaukee (both the Sentinel and the Journal had articles highlighting his appearance), the crowd swelled to over 10,000, and Mantle went 0-4.  In fact, he played so poorly for the next couple of weeks, he considered quitting baseball altogether.  Luckily for baseball, he didn’t.  And luckily for the Brewers, by the time they faced the Blues again, Mantle was already back up in the majors, having hit .361 with 11 home runs and 50 RBIs during his six week stint in the minors.  He was never to return.

And as fate would have it, he was just a month away from an injury that would rob him of his full potential. 

That October, during game 2 of the ‘51 World Series against the Giants (who’d made it there after Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”) Mantle caught his spikes in a drain in right field while trying to avoid a collision with Joe DiMaggio, on a ball hit by another celebrated rookie, Willie Mays.  It was the convergence of three of the game's best, linking the past with the future, including Mantle's.  He blew his knew out on the play, and would never run the base paths again without pain.  

Although his injury may have kept him from realizing his full potential with regard to speed, it certainly didn't keep him from achieving greatness: he would go on to win three MVP awards and seven World Series titles. 

As for Milwaukee, the Brewers and Borchert field gave way to the Braves and County Stadium in 1953, beginning a thirteen year stint.  Mantle would return to Milwaukee again in 1955 as a Yankee All-Star, almost four years to the day of his appearance at Borchert Field.  He wasted no time getting the American League on the board, hitting a three run home run in the first inning.  And in his next game in Milwaukee, he hit yet another home run, this time in game 3 of the ‘57 World Series, a 12-3 whooping for the Yankees over the Braves. 

For those in attendance that fall day at County Stadium, perhaps a handful could remember seeing Mantle six years earlier, when he was a struggling ballplayer with lightning speed and limitless potential.  A potential, it would appear, that was now - even if slightly hampered - fully realized.

The Latest Biography on Mickey Mantle

Author Jane Leavy’s latest biography has a preposterous title, but that doesn’t take away from its achievements.  The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the end of America’s Childhood is an expertly researched and well-written tale about a sports icon whose legacy might be as exaggerated as the book’s implication that somehow Mickey Mantle paralled the end of America’s innocence. 

This whole idea that America’s purity was soiled in the 60s and 70s has been exploited countless times, but bittersweet nostalgia still sells books to a generation that believes America’s best years have passed.  Depending on which book you read, America lost its innocence with the assassination of JFK, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, Watergate, or the “me” decade of the 80s.  All of these notions are overblown, but at least within the realm of reason.

But Mickey Mantle?  That’s a bit of a stretch. 

The title notwithstanding, Jane Leavy’s book is hardly a trip down nostalgia lane, but rather a look at where reality and legend intersect and diverge. 

During his best years, from 1952 to 1964, Mantle was among the greatest baseball players ever, rivaling New York’s other center field stars, Willie Mays and Duke Snyder (not to mention another outfielder, Henry Aaron, the most underappreciated player of them all).  Mantle won the Triple Crown in 1956, earned the top spot in three MVP contests, and appeared in twelve World Series, winning seven of them.  The injuries he endured were numerous and devastating, starting with his rookie season in 1951, when he tore his knee in game 2 of the World Series so badly that he would never play without pain again.  Some of the stories surrounding Mantle’s baseball career are so grandiose, so epic in proportion, it would take a Hollywood movie to properly capture them, and in some sense they were in Barry Levinson’s The Natural, albeit through the fictitious Roy Hobbs.  But Mantle really did drive a ball off a the façade of Yankee Stadium  – twice, some 510 feet had the balls travelled unimpeded – and he really did play with blood seeping through his jersey in the ’61 World Series.  Roy Hobbs had nothing on this guy.

Throughout the 387 page book, Leavy interweaves a personal encounter she had with Mickey Mantle in 1983, and this very effective tactic (borrowed from Doug Write’s play, I Am My Own Wife) helps to illuminate not only the various traits of one of the greatest ballplayers to play the game, but also how the public’s perception of the Mick changed over time.  As is so often the case with sports figures, Mantle’s off-the-field activities undermined the heroic status he garnered from so many star-struck fans in the 50s and 60s (Tiger Woods, anyone?).  Starting prior to his retirement in 1968, and especially in the twenty years that followed, Mantle’s life degenerated into one long binge of drinking, philandering and selling himself with no less shame than Orson Welles did during his final years.  As a result, the public became more aware of Mantle’s humanity, for better or for worse, and it’s this realization the Leavy attempts to link to the end of America’s childhood, a broad attempt that falls short.  But as a personal journey of disillusionment, it works beautifully.

Mickey Mantle’s greatest achievement may have been his sobriety for the last eighteen months of his life, perhaps the first grown-up decision he’d ever truly made, and no doubt the most difficult.  Appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1994 to talk about his alcoholism was more important than any of his 536 home runs.  This turn around, along with the revelation of Mantle’s own sexual abuse as a child and the portrayal of his stern and discontented father, help end Mantle’s story on notes of empathy and redemption.  Mantle was no human being to emulate, but he was human through and through.

Packer Essay broadcasted on 89.7, WUWM Milwaukee

Press play to listen to my essay broadcasted on 89.7 WUWM's Lake Effect program on Feb 9, 2011.

The Waiting: A Packers Championship

I was still in the womb when the Packers won their second Super Bowl in 1968, and my daughters were in the womb twenty-nine years later when the Packers finally won their third.  Although it might have been somewhat poetic had the Packers' fourth Super Bowl victory taken place with the next generation in utero, I’m happy to say that my children won’t have to spend their first three decades on earth hearing about the Glory Days.  Instead, they witnessed them firsthand last night, when the Packers beat the Steelers Super Bowl XLV.

It just so happens that the first Packer game I can remember also took place against the Pittsburgh Steelers, this one in 1975, a 16-13 loss at County Stadium in Milwaukee.  My father and brother went to the game while the rest of the family watched on TV, and I was certain that I could see my father’s checkered pants and my brother’s lanky frame as the camera scanned the crowd.  Losing had become such a tradition in Green Bay by 1975 that the Milwaukee Sentinel headline the next day read (if memory serves): “Losing Packers: Don’t Feel Bad.”  That’s right.  A close game against the defending Super Bowl champions was considered a moral victory for the lumbering Packers. 

Green Bay finished with a 4-10 record that year, and while people kept telling me that Bart Starr was The Man, The Myth, The Legend, as head coach he appeared significantly less than legendary.  I’d never seen clips from the first two Super Bowls or the classic quarterback sneak in the Ice Bowl against Dallas.  I'd only heard the stories.  For many, those last great victories had taken place merely seven years earlier.  But for me, they'd occurred a lifetime ago. 

Prior to yesterday’s victory, it had been fourteen years between Super Bowl wins for the Packers.  Even if another fourteen years times two pass before Green Bay wins the next one, that’ll be sooner than how long those born in the tumultuous year of 1968 had to wait to witness a championship.

Soak it up, young fans.  Championships are a thrill for they simple reason that they happen so infrequently.  You may have to wait a little longer for the Brewers to win a World Series, but I put down some money in Vegas last week for a Brewer appearance in the next October Classic at 8-1 odds.  And who knows?  After last night and the Packers finishing the year with an improbable six straight victories, anything can happen.

A Pain Unparalleled - A History of Packer Heartbreaks

You remember.

Oh, you remember alright. 

You remember the Miracle at the Meadowlands on November 19, 1978, which ultimately led to an Eagle record of 9-7, inching out the Packers’ 8-7-1 record and keeping them out of their first playoff since 1972.

You remember the games against the Bears in the 80s.  Take your pick, except from 1989.  William Perry.  Sweetness.  Only we never called him that.  Not back then.

You remember our playoff hopes dying in 1995 as the Vikings whooped the Pack 27-7 on December 27.

You remember Jim McMahon completing a 45-yard pass to Eric Guliford with 6 seconds to play on September 26, 1993, leading to yet another Viking victory over the Packers.

You remember the no-call fumble against the 49ers, followed immediately by the game-ending touchdown pass to Terrell Owens on January 4, 1999.

You remember the loss to Atlanta on January 4, 2003 followed by the loss to the Vikings on January 9, 2005.

And of course you remember the interceptions:

The fourth quarter interception against the Cowboys on January 14, 1996.

Six against the Rams on January 20, 2002.

The overtime interception against the Giants on January 20, 2008, Favre’s last pass as a Packer.

And let’s not even bother to dwell on the fourth and 26 against the Eagles on January 11, 2004.

But as we prepare for the Game of the Century, the matchup we all wanted, let us not forget that a loss to the Bears this weekend will lead not to a wound that merely surpasses those prior heartbreaks, their scars still shiny, a gnawing reminder of what might have been.  No, a loss this weekend will likely lead to an open bloody gash, inoperable, life-threatening, an injury so painful, you’ll be begging for death or for a scalpel to amputate that part of your brain that makes you feel.

On the other hand, the upside is so damn appealing...

I can't wait.  Packers 24.  Bears 13.