Quote of the Day (Joe DiMaggio, on the Importance of Shortstops)

“The shortstop roams far and wide for his chances, and his duties are numerous enough to keep him busier than a one-armed paper hanger. Above all players he must be fast of foot, strong of arm, acrobatic as a trapeze artist. He must throw hard and far, overhand, sidearm, underhand. He must make his pegs while running, falling, skidding, from a crouch, even while in the air—with both feet off the ground.”—New York Yankee and Baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio (1914-1999), Baseball for Everyone: A Treasury of Baseball Lore and Instruction for Fans (1948)

Anthony Volpe’s multiple problems—for his first two seasons, at the plate, and now there and in the field—have nettled Yankee fans like myself who became accustomed to the yearly consistent excellence of Derek Jeter.

When Joe DiMaggio looked at the shortstops of the Bronx Bomber clubs of his time, he could see models of defensive stalwarts in Frank Crosetti, who held the position in his first years, and Phil Rizzuto (pictured), who did so through the end of the Yankee Clipper’s career, and beyond.

Implicit in DiMaggio’s analysis is how a great shortstop can relieve pressure on a pitcher—rescuing him from a desperate situation, or avoiding a prolonged at-bat that can put runners on base, tax his arm, and exhaust his spirit.

Though the Yankees have enough offensive power to go far into October, as they did last year, their weakness at shortstop may form part of a larger defensive vulnerability that could doom their chances. In any case, the top brass will have difficult conversations in the offseason about Volpe, a player they once characterized as one of their hopes for the future.

This Day in Yankee History (Much-Heralded Mantle Gets Hit in Big-League Debut)

Apr. 17, 1951—So anxious about his hype as the successor-in-waiting to Joe DiMaggio as centerfielder for the New York Yankees that he couldn't sleep the night before his major-league debut, Mickey Mantle got his first of 2,414 career hits, contributing to the team’s 5-0 season opener victory over the rival Boston Red Sox.

Yankee veterans and fans alike were curious to see the 19-year-old rookie. His output that day, a single in four at-bats, gave only the slightest indication of the exhilarating combination of power and speed that led the Oklahoma native to be nicknamed “The Commerce Comet.”

Over the years, Mantle’s statistics for his first season and his own recollections underscore 1951 as a sometimes painful period of adjustment. (It wasn’t this much-heralded minor leaguer who was named AL Rookie of the Year but his teammate, infielder Gil McDougald.)

But it wasn’t until after Mantle’s death that a circle wider than his intimates realized how a traumatic childhood and the heavy burden of expectation combined to produce what he called the worst day of his life.

Start with his family background. His father, Elven “Mutt” Mantle, had drilled him in the basics of baseball, in the hope that the boy’s talent would carry him far from life in the zinc and lead mines where Mutt worked.

But Mickey was not only carrying family hopes but terrible secrets, a fact not disclosed in depth until Jane Leavy’s 2010 biography The Last Boy. As a youngster he had been sexually abused multiple times—by a half-sister, neighborhood boys and a high-school teacher. Few realized at the time the psychic damage (including Mantle’s adult promiscuity and alcoholism) caused by such events.

In coming to the Bronx, he was also the proverbial fish out of water—a country boy in a city environment, removed from his normal emotional support and painfully aware of how inarticulate he could sound.

All of this he carried inside. What people saw on the outside was a ballplayer that Bob Sheppard---also making his debut that game, in the stadium public-address role he would have for the next half-century—described, in contrast to a later Yankee centerfielder, Mickey Rivers, as “Mick the Quick with muscle.”

Manager Casey Stengel put it even more memorably, in his eccentric fashion, to sportswriter Bob Deindorfer: “He has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster—and nobody has ever had more of both of them together. This kid ain’t logical. He’s too good. It’s very confusing.”

One gift the youngster did not have was the ability to play shortstop. But Stengel converted him to right field—a position he himself had played—and then took the time to teach him the rudiments of the position.

Anyway, it was just a marker until DiMaggio—a superstar that Stengel had difficulty relating to—retired, as so many expected him to do the following year, given the increasing toll that injuries had taken on his body.

As for DiMaggio himself: perhaps he was jealous of the attention given Mantle by the press and Stengel, or perhaps this most graceful of centerfielders disdained how green the youngster next to him looked. But the proud, touchy Hall of Famer remained aloof from his teammate, further increasing Mantle’s unease.

In mid-July, Mantle—with a high propensity to strike out—had been reassigned to the Yankees’ Triple A Kansas City Blues unit. But, still slumping, and now with his power seemingly snuffed out, the despondent Mantle called his father to say he wanted to come home.

That would be fine, Mutt Mantle told his son. “But, if that’s all the man you are, then get your clothes and let’s go home.”

How much of Mutt’s reaction was due to frustration that the boy in which he’d invested so much emotionally wasn’t turning out as planned? How much of it was an attempt at tough love? How much was it a secretly ill man who would be dead within a year of cancer simply unable to contain his emotions?

Whatever the source of his reaction, it led Mickey to reconsider going home. He stayed and began drilling the ball again with the power and authority everyone had predicted. He was recalled to the majors, this time with his old uniform number 6 exchanged for #7, the one he wore for the rest of his career (and which the Yankees retired when he stopped playing 17 years later).

One more trying event remained for Mantle in the 1951 campaign: In Game 2 of the World Series against the New York Giants, pulling up short when DiMaggio called him off on a fly ball between the two, Mantle tripped over an exposed drain pipe in right center and injured his right knee. He would be dogged by the pain from that knee for the rest of his playing days.

Even so, he would progress steadily in the next few years. The following season, he batted over .300 and placed third in the voting for MVP. In 1956, he put all his offensive skills together by winning the Triple Crown, leading the league in home runs (52), RBIs (130) and batting average (.353).

Over the years, some have seen Mantle as a real-life embodiment of Roy Hobbs, the astonishingly gifted player who never achieves his full potential, in the novel and movie The Natural. In addition to injuries, Leavy has pointed to the personal flaws that crippled him inside. In an interview with sportswriter Bill Madden, she observed: 

“The tragedy of Mantle is that he had so little time, at the beginning of his baseball career, and at the beginning of his sober life, to be his best self. He was a decent man who was genetically pre-disposed to alcoholism and enabled his whole life by the trappings of his celebrity.”

Yet other players with the gift-curse of potential never went on to enjoy the Hall of Fame career that Mantle did. When he stepped down at the end of the 1968 season, he ranked indisputably among the greatest players in baseball history:

*He influenced players of subsequent generations to become switch-hitters, and though many became Hall of Famers themselves (e.g., Pete Rose, Eddie Murray), he remains, by common consent, the best;

*He hit home runs so far—particularly one he blasted out of Griffith Stadium in Washington in 1953—that a new term was coined for the phenomenon: the “tape-measure homer”; and,

*Most important to him, he became the cornerstone of the Yankee dynasty after DiMaggio retired as anticipated after 1951, leading the team to 12 pennants and seven World Series championships.

Flashback, June 1968: ‘Mrs. Robinson’ Climbs to #1 on Pop Charts

More than six months after the film that inspired it premiered, “Mrs. Robinson” reached Number 1 on the Billboard pop chart in June 1968, where it stayed for three weeks. The single by Simon and Garfunkel expanded—and, in many ways, fundamentally recast—the lyrics used in a shorter version in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Starting as a fragmentary salute to a former First Lady, it had undergone a metamorphosis into a wistful reflection on the loss of American values and role models.

According to Peter Ames Carlin’s 2016 biography of Simon, Homeward Bound, Nichols had seen Simon and Garfunkel’s last LP, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, as reflective of the same sort of malaise afflicting the emotionally confused protagonist of his film. Nichols’ pitch to the duo had an additional element that must have surely appealed to their ambition: creating a score that, unusually for this period, would be rock ‘n’ roll based.

But Paul Simon did not have an easy time of it. Not only was he mired in a bad case of writer’s block, but he also had to deal initially with rejection. After turning down “Punky’s Dilemma” and “Overs,” Nichols asked Simon what else he had. The songwriter, perhaps feeling slightly chagrined over Nichols' coolness toward his initial original efforts, said he just had a few chords, nothing else.

It was Art Garfunkel who later divulged to the director that there was at least somewhat more. It had a catchy “de-de-de-de-de” section, and even an opening line: “Here’s to you, Mrs. Roosevelt.”

Nichols, initially struck by the surname so similar to the seductress in his film, urged the duo to develop what they had quickly so he could sneak it into the movie, now in its late production stage. It would be the final piece in a soundtrack that, without being plot-specific, fit the sense of malaise and alienation besetting title character Benjamin Braddock: “Scarborough Fair,” “April, Come She Will” and “The Sound of Silence.”

While able to complete the music for the song, Simon could only manage to finish one verse, a shortfall that Nichols bridged by having the duo sing that de-de-de-de-de as the connective tissue across several scenes toward the end. That sparse version appeared in the film and the bestselling soundtrack that capitalized on it, but Simon was not through with it.

The lines that Simon came up with, for the duo’s LP Bookends, while striking, are also something of a satiric collage, reflecting his working method. He tended to obsess over songs, tinkering with words and chord changes, before returning to his notebook to pull out a line here or there that he could slip in somewhere.

The version of “Mrs. Robinson” that appeared as a single and on Bookends feels less like a direct commentary on the character than a speculation on her life, before and after the events of the film.

“We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files” is the kind of seemingly innocent statement that the administrators of a mental health or substance-abuse facility might make to a new entrant. “We’d like to help you learn to help yourself,” continuing in the same vein, sounds even more sinister, a way to anesthetize the pain of the bored, cynical woman with little interesting to think of besides revenging herself on her husband with his business partner’s son. Alcohol abuse and a loveless marriage have combined to bring her to a bad pass—most likely after Ben and daughter Elaine have contrived to run away,  

Thus, “going to the candidates’ debate” had nothing to do with any plot point in the film. Mrs. Robinson doesn’t evince the slightest interest even in voting, let alone listening to politicians hash over issues.

So, why this reference? It might be a leftover from the inspiration for the song, Mrs. Roosevelt, who sat through all kinds of debates during her life. But 1968 was an election year, and a few months after the release of Bookends occurred a very important debate between Democratic Presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, which would play a pivotal role in the California primary.

In what way can “Mrs. Robinson” be thought of as the theme for The Graduate? Leave aside the title and it becomes trickier. The closest the song comes in the second verse, referring to a period before Benjamin may even be born: “Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes/Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes.”

What is being hidden could be a liquor bottle, or what The Rolling Stones called “Mother’s Little Helper”: a pill to calm her down when she gets to feel “What a drag it is getting old.”

Mrs. Robinson has more than a few reasons to feel this way. As a result of an affair, she became pregnant, then was forced to leave college and enter a loveless marriage. It is not merely “a little secret, just a Robinson affair,” but a relationship leaving vast wreckage, big enough so she feels the need to “hide it from the kids.”

In a year marked by social cleavage among Americans, it was not surprising that even the sports world was affected. The most significant sign of this was the greater division within sports itself, with Muhammad Ali, for instance, exciting controversy with his defiance of the draft because he had “no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

Through his father, Paul Simon had been raised as a diehard Yankee fan and especially franchise cornerstone Joe DiMaggio. By the time he came to write “Mrs. Robinson,” however, the cultural landscape that had once cheered the 56-game hitting streak of “The Yankee Clipper” as a momentary release from a world engulfed by war had changed utterly.

Casting about for a hero in a simpler time, Simon thought of childhood idol Joe DiMaggio. The reference that incorporated this—“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”—attracted an unusual amount of attention, perhaps surpassed only by Jimmy Webb’s startling image in “MacArthur Park”: “Someone left the cake out in the rain.”

Actually, only one person was really discombobulated by Simon’s lyric: DiMaggio himself. “‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’” the slugger remarked plaintively to friends, quoting the song’s line before remarking, in a tone as puzzled as it was annoyed: “But I never went away.”

But many other listeners knew instinctively what Simon meant because of the line that immediately followed: “A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” An earlier verse had asked Mrs. Robinson to contemplate the “sympathetic eyes” all around her.

Intentionally or not, with that subtle change of an adjective, Simon had captured the sense that America was now losing traction. The mood by the late Sixties had shifted under the pressure of events—violence, changing sexual mores, and the campus unrest that leads Ben to be briefly but ludicrously suspected of radicalism. By this time, Americans felt that time is out of joint, with the middle-aged wondering what had ever happened to their hope of happiness and the young feeling confused about a future whose promise consists of a single word: “plastics.”

Some time after the song’s release, Simon and DiMaggio ran into each other in a restaurant, and the aging Hall of Famer finally got to vent about his consternation about the reference to himself. Simon responded, “I don't mean it that way...I meant, where are these great heroes now?” Hearing this, DiMaggio “was flattered once he understood that it was meant to be flattering," Simon recalled years later.

The baseball legend must have been very flattered indeed. In 1999, to honor this player so used to obeisance that he would only be introduced last at Old Timers Day as “the greatest living Yankee,” the organization prevailed on Simon to play “Mrs. Robinson” as part of a tribute on “Joe DiMaggio Day,” the last time the ailing hero would hear the roar of the crowd.

This Day in Yankee History (Joe DiMaggio, Best—and Loneliest—Player of His Time, Born)

November 25, 1914—Joe DiMaggio—the first “five-tool” baseball player, the first to sign a $100,000 contract, a figure celebrated in popular culture as perhaps no contemporary was—was born the eighth of nine children to Italian immigrant parents in Martinez, Calif.

In his short 1952 novel The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway has his simple but brave Cuban fisherman reflect on the New York Yankee. "I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing, the old man said. They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand."

Would he ever. The slugger knew the life of a fisherman, all right, and the smell of dead fish on his father’s boat convinced him that the family business would not be his. Poverty not only left him without riches but without formal education or any of the polite social graces. What it did give him was a goad to extraordinary achievement.

"A ball player has to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer,” DiMaggio told a reporter from The New York Times in 1961, 10 years after his retirement. “That's why no boy from a rich family has ever made the big leagues."

That hunger is usually forgotten whenever baseball fans try to make sense of DiMaggio’s assets. As much as the next person, I’m in awe of the grace and uncoiled, explosive power of the swing that led Boston Red Sox infielder Bobby Doerr to point out that his American League rival “hit balls like rockets, with top-spin, that exploded past third basemen. It always seemed as if he hit the ball hard. Every at bat."

Surely other players, then and now, possess astonishing physical gifts. But DiMaggio’s were welded to an all-consuming competitiveness. When brother Dom, a centerfielder for the Red Sox, made a set of acrobatic catches that deprived him of as many as eight runs batted in that day, he could scarcely speak to his sibling when they dined that night. At the height of his 56-game consecutive hitting streak in 1941 (a record still unsurpassed), he was wound tight—caffeine- and cigarette-addicted, sleepless.

DiMaggio’s obsession with getting the best out of himself so that he could lead his team to victory—a quest that not only won him three Most Valuable Player awards, but the Yankees 10 pennants and nine World Series titles—was all-consuming. It left him little if any interior life outside the game itself. His two marriages (including, most famously, to Marilyn Monroe) terminated in divorce; he ended up estranged from his only son; and even the teammates who knew he was their meal ticket regarded him as a loner who “led the league in room service.”

As time went on, money not only became DiMaggio’s means of ascent but also his armor and validation. His failed holdout for more money after his second successful season led—incredibly—to booing by fans upon his return—and a resolve that he would not lose the upper hand in negotiations with management again.

After his career, DiMaggio became even more grasping. His lawyer, Morris Engelberg, won him lucrative advertising contracts and memorabilia-signing appearances, but they never seemed enough. On the cable show Arli$$ three years after the Hall of Famer's death in 1999, James Coburn, in his last TV appearance, played "Slaughterhouse Sid" Pirelli, a surly, greedy slugger uncomfortably close, to many who knew him in his final years, to the Yankee Clipper.

In "Mrs. Robinson," Simon and Garfunkel famously sang, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" It was a lament for the disappearance of American heroes. In the case of the man who inspired the line, it was probably just as well that the public kept its vision confined to the ballpark where "baseball's greatest living player" had reigned supreme--a tendency that the notoriously private slugger would have preferred anyway.

Quote of the Day (Gay Talese, on an Earlier Yankee Hero and His Fans)

“The banners had been held by hundreds of young boys whose dreams had been fulfilled so often by [Mickey] Mantle, but also seated in the grandstands were older men, paunchy and balding, in whose middle-aged minds [Joe] DiMaggio was still vivid and invincible, and some of them remembered how one month before, during a pregame exhibition at Old-timers' Day in Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio had hit a pitch into the left-field seats, and suddenly thousands of people had jumped wildly to their feet, joyously screaming—the great DiMaggio had returned, they were young again, it was yesterday.”—Gay Talese, " 'Joe,' Said Marilyn Monroe, Just Back from Korea, 'You Never Heard Such Cheering.' 'Yes I Have,' Joe DiMaggio Answered," Esquire, July 1966

This Day in Baseball History (DiMag Begins 56-Game Hitting Streak)

May 15, 1941—When he punched a single off southpaw Eddie Smith in the first inning, all Joe DiMaggio wanted was some kind of a spark, either for himself or his team. That lone hit that day, in the midst of a 13-1 drubbing at the hands of the Chicago White Sox, didn’t seem to lift either his fortunes or the New York Yankees.

Little did anyone know that this was exactly what he was seeking, as he began a 56-game hitting streak that not only remains the most difficult of batting records to equal or surpass (proved yet again this season by Andre Ethier’s, which stopped at a mere 30) but that also lifted the Bronx Bombers from an early-season funk to another World Series triumph.

I have written several prior posts on the Yankee Clipper, with perhaps my favorite—how he returned from a devastating injury to pulverize the Boston Red Sox—here. But the streak (in baseball, really, is there any other?) might be his one individual achievement that remains unassailable.

So remarkable was this record that it upstaged another offensive milestone that season: Ted Williams’ .406 batting average, the last time that the .400 mark has been achieved.

For a long time, I wondered why the Yankee Clipper—whose batting average in this magical season, .357, was still only third that year, behind Williams’ and the Washington Senators’ Cecil Travis—was named Most Valuable Player instead of the Splendid Splinter. In essence, I think it came down to two reasons: a) DiMaggio’s unsurpassed all-around offensive and defensive excellence; and b) his importance to a team that, once again, won it all.

It sure wasn’t shaping up that way through the first several weeks of the season. When DiMaggio dug in against Smith, his average was only .306—not bad for almost anyone else, but a real falloff for a two-time batting champion. And that doesn’t even begin to convey the level of futility to which he sank early on: .194 after 20 games.

With DiMaggio, in effect, catching a cold at the plate, the Yankees were coming down with the flu: losers, at the time of the White Sox matchup, of four games in a row, seven out of their last nine—leaving them 5 ½ games out of first and falling fast.

Even for a few weeks after the streak began, people were more likely to notice this graceful outfielder’s uncharacteristic miscues (four errors in a Memorial Day doubleheader against the hated Red Sox) than his quiet assault on the record books. Indeed, the streak didn’t gain its irresistible amount—its sheer magnitude—until DiMaggio’s return to the team after attending Lou Gehrig’s funeral. The offensive display he mounted then—three hits that day, three homers and a double in a double-header the next—almost seemed to announce: The Captain might be dead, but now I’ll carry you.

And carry them he did, as America, watching the anxiety-inducing news from abroad, began to pay rapt attention to a hero it badly needed. By the time the streak ended against the Cleveland Indians, DiMaggio had batted .408 over this remarkable span with 91 hits (including 16 doubles, four triples and 15 homeruns); scored 56 runs; driven in 55 runs; and achieved 160 total bases. Especially crucial to these statistics was his ability simply to put the ball into play: this great power hitter only struck out seven times.

In the process, DiMaggio lifted the team, as he would again eight years later in his dramatic midseason return from injury against the Bosox. The Yankees vaulted into first place in ’41, finishing 17 games ahead of the Red Sox. His team knew exactly what he meant to them: after the streak ended, they threw a surprise hotel party in which they presented him with a cigar humidor (courtesy of Tiffany’s) with the engraved autographs of all his teammates.

Long before Hemingway's Santiago confided this piece of wisdom to a young boy in The Old Man and the Sea, the Yankees already knew the truth of his saying: "Trust in the great DiMaggio."

The streak played an enormous part in making DiMaggio an American legend, but it also underscored the contradictions at the heart of this deeply complicated human being. On the one hand, it attracted so many autograph seekers that he once said he wouldn’t have wanted the record if he had known it would lead to this.

On the other hand, when a friend visiting the dying Hall of Famer told him that someone he met claimed to have seen the 58-game streak, the proud DiMaggio mustered the last reserves of strength from a body that had slugged the ball at will nearly six decades before, pulled his friend by the sleeve, and whispered: “It’s 56.”

Today, the blog Bleacher Report begins a "real-time" series in which it tracks each day of the streak set by the Yankee Clipper. What a great way to spotlight a great record that, even in the age of steroids, managed to be impervious to serious challenge. (It might be tougher to achieve than even a .400 season; while you can count on a great day to compensate for a bad one to achieve the stellar batting average, to match DiMaggio's record you simply cannot have an off day.)

This Day in Yankee History (Mickey Mantle Dies)

August 13, 1995—Hall of Fame centerfielder Mickey Mantle, a hero to thousands but a disappointment to himself, died of liver cancer at age 63, after a public admission of alcoholism and attempt to redeem the little time he had left.

Long into retirement, but before he sought help for his alcohol problem, Mantle related a continuing nightmare he had: He had come to Yankee Stadium in his uniform, ready to play, even hearing his name on the loudspeaker. But unable to go through the gate, or even squeeze through a hole in the fence, he could not get through to teammates waiting on the other side.

The dream spoke volumes about the problems of adjusting to life when his old career—and youth—had passed, but also to the camaraderie and sense of responsibility he felt to teammates as run producer throughout his career. He was the Achilles of the New York Yankees, a figure of breathtaking physical strength and inner resolution who continually led his team into the autumn World Series wars--but suffering, like the mythological hero, from a weakness in the lower part of his body.

The known stories about Mantle’s alcoholism are many; the ones that have not seen the light of day might well be legion. At the end of his life, Mantle felt like a failure: to his estranged wife, to his family, even to his talent, which, he believed, he might have been brought to its ultimate fulfillment had he taken better care of himself.

I think he was harder on himself than he deserved. Those of us who have known alcoholics in our own lives are all too keenly aware that, for all the damage they might have caused themselves and those in their orbits, so much worthy of love still exists inside them. In this regard, Mantle was no different.

In choosing an image for this post, I thought at first of one from his last months, showing the exhaustion brought on by the slugger's medical struggles. In the end, I picked this one, of Mantle with his long-suffering wife Merlyn, the woman who for years endured the consequences of his self-destructive behavior.

The photo not only shows the vibrancy that drew so many to this young couple, but also restores to them something of the dignity they might have felt had melted away in the cauldron of fame and self-doubt.

One of the formative books I read as a child was Mantle’s The Quality of Courage (1965), ghostwritten by the fine future Babe Ruth biographer Robert Creamer. It had a simple but ingenious device: taking a cue from the recently deceased President Kennedy, it offered, in effect, profiles in courage of 19 baseball players, including Jackie Robinson, Jimmy Piersall, and Ted Williams.

In our revisionist age, the rage is all for debunking heroes. But imperfection is not an argument against their existence. In fact, I’d say, it’s part of the definition of the term. As far as you can get from godlike, heroes are those who face the demons and carry the burdens, day in and day out.

In October 1964, David Halberstam observed that Mantle might have been more of a hero to his teammates, who could see, right in the locker room, the ferocious effort it took him to suit up, than to fans. But, as his physical frailty increased, those in the stands, too, began to embrace him in greater numbers, as they came to understand the staggering weight of expectations on the back of the limping Yankee giant.

Still later, understanding grew of the double shadow lurking behind the fleet young slugger with the impossibly sunny smile: not just the burden of following Joe DiMaggio (who had treated him coldly in his first season) in center field, but also the haunting fear that he was fated to die young from Hodgkin’s Disease, the medical condition that claimed the lives of Mantle's father, grandfather, two uncles, and son.

Several years after his death, Mantle’s family revealed, in A Hero All His Life, an additional psychic burden he had carried his whole life: he had suffered child sexual abuse at the hands of a half-sister. Recent decades have amply revealed the emotional damage such abuse inflicts, including the alcoholism from which Mantle suffered.

Given all this, it is remarkable that Mantle carried on—indeed, that he achieved so much. Here, for instance, are Allen Barra and Allen St. John, assessing him in the December 4, 1998 issue of The Wall Street Journal:

“At peak value - five or six top seasons - Mantle was better than any postwar player. ... Not only was Mantle the greatest power hitter between Ruth and McGwire in terms of home runs per at bat, he hit for spectacular averages and drew a staggering number of walks. ... His on-base average was only ten points lower than that of Ty Cobb. ... The Mick was a Gold Glove-calibre centerfielder who could switch hit and bunt. His base-stealing percentage is virtually even with Ricky Henderson."

It was the Yankee Clipper rather than The Mick who was lucky enough to count a Nobel Prize-winning laureate as a friend. Nevertheless, for all of “the great DiMaggio’s” sterling qualities as a player, I think it was Mantle rather than the other Yankee centerfield legend who best epitomizes Santiago’s observation in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”