To Cable or Not to Cable - OR - Holy Crap! The Brewers are REALLY GOING to WIN their Division!

A little perspective:

In 1982, my friend John and I sat in the last row of the leftfield bleachers at Milwaukee County Stadium during Game 5 of the World Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and the St. Louis Cardinals.  We won.  I was 14.

Guess what?  Now I have two fourteen year-olds.  If someone had told me back in ’82 that the Brewers wouldn’t win another division until I had children as old as I was back then, I probably would have become a Yankees fan.  I mean, come on!

But here we are.  It’s 2011.  I have two Freshman in high school, and this is the first time my kids will actually have something to brag about pertaining to the Brewers.

Let’s face it: 2008 was a mess.  The Brewers lost  15 of their first 19 games in September that year, leading to the firing of Ned Yost.  Yes, they won 6 or their last 7, but their final victory of the season, a necessary one, came against a Cubs team that was resting several of its starters.  That and a Mets loss allowed us to get into the playoffs.  True, it gave us a chance, but no one was thinking we could go all the way, even with CC Sabathia. 

This year is different.  As I write this, the Crew is 10½ games ahead of the Cardinals, and though stranger things have happened in baseball, I am confident (and this is big for a guy who’s usually skeptical) that the Brewers will in fact win their first division title since I was a pimple-faced, cocky little punk in 9^th grade at Brookfield East High School.

It’s all so glorious.

But the question remains: do I now purchase a cable TV package?  After all, both the Division and the League series are to be aired on WTBS, NOT one of the 6 or 7 channels we get on our rabbit ears antennae.

You see, in 2000, my family moved back to the Midwest after a 6-year stint on the East Coast.  After the move, other priorities took hold, and my wife and I spent the first month in our new house not worrying about cable TV, and instead we rented a lot of movies and watched what little we could on our antennae. 

Turns out we didn’t miss cable even a little.

Here we are, over a decade later, and probably about $6000 richer than had we gotten cable.  True, my children are considered weird, and their friends discuss shows my kids have never seen before, but they’ve gotten used to it, and we try to rent what few cable shows are worth watching through Netflix.  My "cableless" children seem no worse for the wear.

But alas, this year is DIFFERENT.  We’re talking MLB playoffs, baby.  If my kids are as unlucky as I, we’ll still be talking about this baseball season TWENTY-NINE YEARS FROM NOW!!  I'll be 72!  Holy crap.

So really, can I honestly NOT get cable?  I think not.

But then I have visions of a three game sweep by Atlanta in the first round of the playoffs, and me stuck with 256 channels of crap for the next twelve months.

But a victory.  A National League Championship Series appearance, or even...gasp!...a World Series.  I would pay a monthly cable fee ten times for that experience.

I’ll be calling Comcast in the morning.

Mickey Mantle broadcasted on 89.7 WUWM Milwaukee

Press play to listen to my essay on Mickey Mantle broadcasted on 89.7 WUWM's Lake Effect program on July 16, 2011.

Variations of my essay can also be found at two other sites: BorchertField.com, a website devoted to preserving the history of the old ballpark in Milwaukee, and Seamheads, a haven for all things baseball.

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.