October 1964 Read online

  Stengel had his eye not merely on winning pennants, which he certainly wanted to do, but on history as well, and as far as his players were concerned, he seemed to be interested chiefly in courting writers. As far as Stengel was concerned, the writers were the critical link to history, and in return, they glorified his professional skills. The writers had always been important to him, and he always basked in their attention; many seemed as interested in him as they were in the game itself, and their interest was seductive. On one of the rare occasions that his Yankees did not win the pennant—in 1954 when Cleveland beat them—Stengel was stunned to find the New York writers abandoning him and his team to follow the Indians as they moved on to the World Series. “Jesus,” he told one reporter, “I’m losing my writers.”

  Many of the writers remembered him from his leaner years of bad teams and second-division finishes, nine seasons of managing, and only one team that finished above .500; when he became the greatest manager in the game of baseball, the legitimate heir to the great John McGraw, it was all the sweeter. After all, he represented not just the present in baseball but the past as well, and the writers were interested in the past, as the players were not. Once when Mantle was young and the Yankees were going to play the Dodgers in the World Series, Stengel took Mantle out on the field in Ebbetts Field and tried to explain to him how he had played this particularly treacherous right-field wall. “You mean you actually played here?” asked the astonished Mantle. Later, Stengel gathered his writers around him, told the story, and shook his head. “He thinks when I was born I was already sixty years old and had a wooden leg and came here to manage,” Stengel said.

  Later in his career with the Yankees, Stengel became even more drawn to the writers and, if anything, more protective of them. Aware that some of his players were less than hospitable to certain of the more irreverent journalists, Stengel often went out of his way to make sure that the shunned writers were taken care of. After more than a decade of Casey Stengel, the writers worshiped him, but the players had come to look upon him as a rather cold-blooded albeit wealthy grandfather who still controlled the family will and who turned on his very considerable charm only for outsiders. Ralph Houk changed that overnight. His loyalty was to the players. They were not just his players, they were his pals, or, in the vernacular he used, his “pardners.” He was an extremely political man, and he had a shrewd sense of the mood in the clubhouse and the resentments that had festered under Stengel despite all those years of winning. Houk was very much aware that Mantle had come to resent Stengel’s treatment of him and Stengel’s thinly veiled criticism (which tended to show up in the stories of various New York writers). Stengel always seemed to imply that no matter how much Mantle did and how well he played, he might somehow achieve even more and play at an even higher level, that he somehow never quite lived up to his potential, and, worse, that he was not a particularly smart baseball player. There was even a standing joke in the Yankee locker room among the players: Mickey, a player would ask Mantle, when are you going to live up to your potential?

  The relationship between Mantle and Stengel had evolved over the years. Stengel had been a mediocre ballplayer himself, and for much of his career he had managed ballplayers even more mediocre than himself; when he finally got the Yankee job late in his career, he had been uneasy with Joe DiMaggio, who was at the end of his career, and who was an icon beyond the reach of a rookie manager. But Mantle had come to him as a boy, the greatest player Stengel had ever seen—all that power, all that speed; “My God,” said Stengel the first time he saw Mantle play, “the boy runs faster than Cobb!” Stengel had eagerly anticipated the chance to mold Mantle, to add to that magnificent body a mind filled with all the baseball knowledge and lore he had accumulated over four decades. “Mantle,” as the sportswriter Milton Gross wrote at the time, “was to be the monument the old gent wanted to leave behind. Casey wanted his own name written in the record books as manager, but he also wanted a creation that was completely his own on the field every day, doing things that no other ballplayer ever did, rewriting all the records.” But Mantle frustrated him; he remained pure Mantle, not a hybrid of Mantle/Stengel. It was then that Stengel tried to reach him by criticism, often meted out through the sportswriters. Again and again the player rejected Stengel’s advice. He would play hard, drive himself relentlessly in his own way and on his own terms, but he would not be Stengel’s creation.

  There was already enough pressure on Mantle as it was—the, pressure of playing in New York, the pressure of replacing the great DiMaggio, and, above all, the pressure of living up to his father’s, Mutt Mantle’s, high expectations for him. He needed no additional pressure, no more lessons; what he needed was a means of escaping the pressure. It took everything he had to get through each day, and the last thing he wanted was a father figure as boss. If his and Stengel’s was to be a father-son relationship, it was, as the writer Robert Creamer noted, “that of an angry father and a stubborn son.” Over the years the relationship continued to deteriorate. “Telling Mantle something is like telling him nothing,” Stengel once told reporters, summing up his attitude toward his greatest player. To Stengel, Mantle was someone who had fallen short of his own true greatness, and to Mantle, his manager was more and more just a querulous old man who was never satisfied. It seemed even to the other players that Stengel saw not so much what Mantle did as what he did not do. To some degree Stengel’s attitude colored the attitude not only of the New York writers but of the New York fans as well. The glory that should so readily have been Mantle’s, the acclamation by the New York fans of his greatness and of his ability to carry the team year after year, came only after a decade of play and only when Roger Maris challenged him in the 1961 home-run derby. Then the fans somehow decided that it was Mantle’s prerogative to challenge Ruth, not Maris’s. Only then did they begin to cheer Mantle, as they jeered Maris. Hearing them boo Maris, Mantle noted with some degree of amusement, “Roger has stolen my fans.”

  Ralph Houk knew that this was Mantle’s team, and the first thing he did as manager was to go to the center fielder and tell him what he knew: that Mantle was the leader of the team and therefore now the captain of it. That moment symbolized a significant change: Houk would cater almost exclusively to the players, often at the expense of the writers, whom he did not so much shun as treat as a necessary evil. In place of the brilliant press-conference soliloquies by Stengel, which some reporters thought worthy of Mark Twain, Houk gave the press a measure of bromides, reflecting both his eternal optimism and a shrewd awareness that his players would read his praise of them in the next day’s newspapers. With Houk the writers sensed a bunker mentality, a them-against-us attitude. If Stengel had his eye always fixed on history as recorded by the sportswriters, Houk was content merely to win pennants and world championships.

  No one appreciated that more than Mantle. The Houk years were largely happy ones for the players, and frequently less happy for the writers. The younger players, who often played with considerable anxiety and insecurity, found Houk reassuring, a sort of surrogate father. He had been an average ballplayer himself, a backup catcher during the Berra years. During World War II he distinguished himself in the Battle of the Bulge, and ended the war as a major. Some of the older writers still called him “Major” (which irritated the younger, more iconoclastic writers to no small degree). He possessed an intuitive sense of how to get the most out of his players, whether they were stars or journeymen, and he was very good at walking the delicate line between being their pal and knowing exactly when to draw the line. He gave the players a perfect example of that in the 1963 season when the Yankees went into Boston for a two-admission day-night doubleheader. As the Yankees arrived, one of the Boston papers printed an interview with Mantle in which the star discussed how much he loved to play for Houk and how if Houk asked him to go through a brick wall, he would ask only where the wall was. On the day of the doubleheader, the two teams were barely able to finish the first game, for i
t began to rain heavily during the late innings. As they waited for the rain to stop and the second game to start, the players became restless and bored, anxious to get on with it one way or another—either to go back to the hotel or to play. In the dugout, Mantle was passing the time by telling country-boy stories, including one about carnal relations with farm animals. When Houk walked by, Mantle asked, “Hey, Ralph, you ever done it with a sheep?” The atmosphere suddenly became tense and the other players realized that Mantle had crossed a line; Houk, good guy, abiding friend and pardner of the players, was not to be asked ribald questions, not by anyone, not even a star. His authority as manager was suddenly at stake. Houk called Mantle over, and then, as if he were speaking privately to him, but at the same time in a voice that everyone could hear, he thanked Mantle for the generous things he had said about him in the Boston paper. “Those are really kind words, Mickey, and I want to tell you they mean a lot to a manager.” “That’s okay Ralph, I meant every word,” Mantle answered. Then Houk continued, “Mickey, can you play in the second game if I need you?” Mantle shrugged and asked Houk to look at the field, where the rain was still pouring down. “Yeah, I know, Mickey, but with the field in that crappy condition I figure I may need you, because I’m thinking I don’t want to take a chance on getting any of my regulars hurt.” It was a masterful response, thought the players: Houk had held on to his authority and defused the situation, had even turned it to his advantage by using Mantle as his straight man, and yet in no way had he wounded the ego of the team’s best and most beloved player.

  Houk constantly told each player how good he was, how critical he was to the team’s success, no matter how small his role. Every player talked to Ralph Houk and managed to hear what he had wanted to hear. If he did not seem to be entirely on their side in their negotiations with management for larger salaries, then at least he did not seem to be against them in such negotiations either—that is, until Houk was made general manager in time for the 1964 season. Suddenly the nature of his job changed dramatically. In an organization famed for its reluctance to pay top salaries and in which World Series checks were traditionally counted by management as part of a player’s salary instead of as a bonus, Houk went overnight from player’s man to company man. Some of the players suspected that he did it too readily and too completely, and that, like his predecessor George Weiss, he received a bonus based on how much he held down the team payroll. The previous fall, after the Dodgers swept the Yankees in the World Series, Steve Hamilton, a young relief pitcher who had had a good year, asked Houk for a raise. He found a very different Houk than the one who had just managed the team and who had always told Hamilton how important he was to the team’s success. “You know, Hammy, I’d love to give you a better contract, but I can’t. The Series, you know, only went four games and we didn’t make any money,” Houk said. The former manager had gone overnight, Hamilton, who still admired Houk, said later, from blowing smoke to blowing acid rain.

  Houk’s replacement as manager was a surprise to the team and to the media: Yogi Berra, the longtime star catcher. Berra was chosen, it was believed by those who knew the front office well, partly to compete with the upstart team in the New York area, the Mets, who were now managed by none other than the indefatigable Charles Dillon Stengel, soon to be seventy-four. Brilliant and verbal, live and in color, a nonstop one-man media show, Stengel could be safely called many things, but no one ever called him boring. The combination of the Mets’ virtually pristine incompetence and Stengel’s singular charm made the Mets a major draw, to the surprise of the Yankee ownership, which valued winning over fun. The more talented of the young New York sportswriters preferred covering the lowly Mets rather than the dynastic Yankees. The Yankees under George Weiss did not think in modern terms about the entertainment dollar, and the general manager had not wanted to broadcast the games on television, thinking that it was giving his product away for free. He had even been reluctant to sell the paraphernalia of modern baseball, including Yankee shirts, Yankee caps, and Yankee jackets. He did not want every kid in New York going around wearing a Yankee cap, he said, for it demeaned the Yankee uniform. The Mets were the reverse of this, and indeed part of their success in the earlier years happened because they successfully blurred the line between player and fan. The Mets were perceived as inept but lovable by a new generation of fans, while the Yankees were coming to be seen as the athletic equivalent of General Motors or U.S. Steel. Something profound was taking place in the larger culture and it was extremely troubling to the Yankee high command. In 1963 Yankee attendance slipped again, the second year in a row in which that had happened; it had surged to more than 1.7 million in 1961, the year Maris and Mantle had chased Ruth’s record, but fell by more than 200,000 a year in the two years after. In 1963 the Yankees drew only about 220,000 more fans than the Mets, and it seemed likely that in 1964, when the Mets moved into their handsome new home at Shea Stadium, they might well outdraw the Yankees (which, in fact, they did, with 1.7 million customers, or nearly half a million more than the first-place Yankees). “My park,” said Stengel, surveying Shea for the first time, “is lovelier than my team.”

  In a somewhat misguided effort to become more popular, the Yankees decided to make Yogi Berra their manager. Over the years the New York media had viewed Berra as something of a cartoon figure: funny, awkward, but lovable, much given to inelegant but ultimately wise aphorisms. Some of the famous Yogiisms were genuine, but a good many were manufactured by the writers, and the real Yogi Berra was quite different from the one that had been invented by the press. He was shy and wary with strangers, particularly the media, because of their jokes about his looks (his wife, Carmen, smart and extremely capable, hated those jokes) and about his lack of education. In the beginning the jokes were more than a little cruel, but Yogi was shrewd enough to go along with them; had he resisted, the jokes would have taken on a longer life. But it still did not mean he liked them. Nor was he the easiest of interviews. “Why do I have to talk to all these guys who make six thousand dollars a year when I make forty thousand dollars a year?” he once asked in what was to become a rallying cry for thousands of ballplayers yet unborn.

  The truth was that the Yankees had made a serious miscalculation if they hired Berra because he was good with the media. Rather, the media was good with him—inventing a cuddly, wise, witty figure who did not, in fact, exist. It was no surprise that as the Yankee players arrived for their first workout that spring, there was a cartoon on the New York Daily News sports page entitled, “A Few Words Before the Season,” which showed a grinning Berra in baseball uniform with a tiny cartoonist armed with pen and sketchbook standing on his arm and saying, “A cartoonist’s dream! With that mug of yours I hope y’ stick aroun’ forever.” As a player, Yogi had been surprisingly quick and nimble in a body that did not look particularly athletic, and he was a very dangerous late-inning hitter. “A rather strange fellow of very remarkable abilities,” Stengel once said of him. His new assignment was going to be difficult: he was replacing a popular manager who was still close to the players and who was now his boss. Moreover, he was going to be managing his former teammates, who respected him as a player but who had frequently joked about him, and who thought him, among other things, uncommonly close with a dollar. Yogi was not a man who by his very presence inspired the respect of his teammates, as Mantle, Ford, and even Elston Howard, the catcher, did (though it was too early for anyone in baseball to think of a black man like Howard as a manager). When his friend and teammate Mickey Mantle was asked how the team would do now that Berra had replaced Houk, Mantle answered, “I think we can win in spite of it.”

  Berra was aware of the reservations of his teammates, and he was determined to get off to a good start with them. Before his first team meeting he stopped by to see Bobby Richardson, the veteran second baseman, in order to give a dry run of his first speech to the team as its new manager. “Okay,” he was going to say, “this is a new season. We’ll put 1963 behind us.
We’re going to have new rules: no swimming, no tennis, no golf, no fishing.” Then he would pause and say, “I’m kidding. We’ll play hard, we’ll play together, we’ll be relaxed, and we’ll win.” Richardson thought it a fine way to start the season, particularly for a manager addressing former teammates. But during the actual speech, when he got to the list of fake new rules, Mantle said very loudly, “I quit!” and the speech had been ruined. It was not a good start.