This Day in Baseball History (Willie Mays Clubs 1st HR)

May 28, 1951—Decisively ending an 0-12 hitless streak that seemed to confirm his initial fears about joining the major leagues, 20-year-old New York Giants rookie Willie Mays hit the first of his 660 career home runs.

In his first at-bat at the team’s home, the Polo Grounds, their newly installed center fielder smacked an offering from star Boston Braves southpaw Warren Spahn over the left-field fence, for what was also his first career hit.

My blog post from 10 years ago briefly reviewed the amazing career of the man that many have proclaimed the best all-around ballplayer of all time. But I think it’s worth spending a little time here on his introduction to the big leagues, as well as how it compared and contrasted with that of rookie and legendary Hall of Famer, Mickey Mantle.

These two were not the only future Hall of Famers to experience difficulties when first exposed to the big leagues. Others, such as Willie Stargell, Brooks Robinson, Pie Traynor, and Roberto Clemente, had relatively subpar campaigns even over their first five seasons, as demonstrated in this 2012 Jim McLennan post on the “AZ Snake Pit” blog.

But the spotlight shone more intensely in New York, the media and sports capital of America—and Mays wasn’t yet over his yips at the plate. He then proceeded to go on another hitless streak: 0-13. At this turning point in his career, as he sat sobbing in front of his locker, he found reassurance from a manager not otherwise known for being soft-hearted: Leo Durocher.

Though he had clashed with Jackie Robinson while managing the Brooklyn Dodgers, Durocher took a gentler approach with this less mature but still immensely talented player now under his wing.

When Mays repeated what he had told him previously while in the Giants’ top minor-league club, the Minneapolis Millers—i.e., that he doubted his ability to hit major-league pitching—Durocher answered, “As long as I’m the manager of the Giants, you are my center fielder. … You are the best center fielder I’ve ever looked at.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, and justifying his manager’s confidence, Mays went on a 14-for-33 tear. He sparked the team’s thrilling pennant run that season, winning Rookie of the Year honors with 20 home runs, 68 RBIs, and a .274 batting average in 121 games—not to mention playing dazzling defense.

There couldn’t have been a more dramatic contrast to another much-heralded outfielder that year, Mantle. Though some veteran New York Yankees like Hank Bauer sought to make him comfortable, the “Commerce [Oklahoma] Comet” was well aware that he was regarded as an interloper and ultimate threat to job security by the Bombers’ proud but fading superstar fixture in center field, Joe DiMaggio.

In contrast to Durocher, Yankee manager Casey Stengel—after successfully overriding the advice of general manager George Weiss that their hot young prospect was not ready for the majors—felt the need to send Mantle back to the minors when his strikeouts began to mount.

It’s now part of Bomber legend how a tough-love visit from Mantle’s father Mutt led his son to surmount his funk and for Stengel to call him back up—as the team’s current rightfielder and centerfielder-in-waiting—in late August. Mantle ended the season hitting .267 with 13 home runs, 65 RBIs, and a .792 OPS.

While Stengel managed Mantle for the first 10 years of his career, Durocher only benefited from having Mays in his lineup for three. (The “Say Hey Kid” served in the Army from May 1952 through March 1954, causing him to miss most of one season and all of another, and his manager was fired after a third-place finish in 1954.)

Nevertheless, that short period of time was enough to make the crusty Durocher speak glowingly about him for the rest of his life, as seen in this passage from his autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last:

“If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better. He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw and field. And he had the other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super Superstar. Charisma. He lit up a room when he came in. He was a joy to be around.”

If Durocher served as a kind of proud surrogate father to his young superstar, Stengel often acted as a demanding, frequently disappointed one to his. Early to see Mantle’s immense gifts, he also frequently grew frustrated with him for not paying attention to constructive construction and for not measuring up to a standard for what he could be.

The dissing of his best player may have reached a nadir in 1959, when Stengel listed Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto as his best players, according to Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood. Pressed by Bauer about this noticeable exclusion, Stengel answered, “You gave 110 percent every time you were in the lineup.”

I couldn’t finish this post without looking at one particular aspect of this landmark game in the career of Mays.

The at-bat against Spahn was not only an indicator of his future greater greatness, but also a sign of his comfort at the plate against the Hall of Fame hurler. In 253 plate appearances against him, Mays hit 18 homers (the most he accumulated against any pitcher), while batting .305. with a .955 OPS.

Since the run he gave up to Mays was his only one in his 4-1 victory, Spahn took the first round-tripper by Mays in stride, joking later, “For the first 60 feet, that was a hell of a pitch."

I suspect that it was harder for him to accept another he yielded in July 1963, when, on the mound for the Milwaukee Braves, he lost his chance at outdueling the (now San Francisco) Giants’ Juan Marichal in the 16^th inning when, after 16 innings and 201 pitches, he watched his chance at a complete-game shutout disappear through  Mays’ solo HR.

Quote of the Day (Casey Stengel, on Handling Sportswriters)

''Let 'em ask you one question, and you keep talking so they won't ask you another one.''—Original New York Mets manager Casey Stengel (1890-1975), advising then-third base coach Whitey Herzog on how to deal with sportswriters, quoted by George Vecsey, “Sports of the Times: Stengel Lives,” The New York Times, Sept. 18, 1987

Quote of the Day (Baseball’s Casey Stengel, on How Leo Durocher Couldn’t Slug With Fists or Bat)

“That fresh boob is lucky I didn’t knock out his few brains with that bat, but nothing like that was necessary. He can’t hit any harder with his fists than he can with a bat.”—Then-Brooklyn Dodger manager (and future New York Yankee skipper) Casey Stengel (pictured), on a May 12, 1936 beneath-the-stands altercation with light-hitting St. Louis Cardinal infielder (and future manager) “Leo the Lip” Durocher, originally in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, quoted by John Swanberg, “Men of Summer,” The New York Times Book Review, Apr. 2, 2017

Think I could let Opening Day go by for the Yankees without genuflecting reverently towards their past?

Well, maybe not so reverently, judging from today’s quote. But a few choice words from Casey Stengel, over a decade before his glory days with the Bronx Bombers, were irresistible.

You can be sure that Leo Durocher gave his side of the story to waiting reporters, and that Stengel didn’t come off anywhere so well as his own account suggested.

But let it also be said that the Ol’ Professor wasn’t the first Yankee employee who took exception to the antics of “Leo the Lip”—nor would he be the last person associated with major league baseball to regard him balefully.

None other than Babe Ruth accused him of stealing his watch. Durocher’s vehement denial might have to be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the telephone-and-bell system he rigged up in Polo Ground offices enabled his New York Giants to storm back against the Dodgers and win the 1951 pennant.

Ultimately, Stengel had the last laugh on his hated rival, being still alive for his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The controversial Durocher wasn’t around to enjoy his own induction in 1994.

Catcher and broadcaster Joe Garagiola wrote a book, Baseball Is a Funny Game. In the case of Stengel and Durocher, it was also a scrappy one.

Play ball!

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.

Casey’s ‘Assistant Manager’: RIP, Yogi

“Why has our pitching been so great? Our catcher, that’s why. He looks cumbersome but he’s quick as a cat." —New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel, quoted in Jeremy Stahl, “Yogi Berra Wasn’t Trying to Be Witty,” Slate, September, 2015

Casey Stengel, who died 40 years ago today, knew a thing or two about how a comical persona can camouflage innate baseball intelligence. One senses, then, a deep affinity between him and his catcher, Yogi Berra, who likewise bridled at the image reporters created of him—until he learned how to play them as much as they played him, in the form of humorous ads (like the Aflac commercials) in his old age..

I wish I could say my noticing the nature of this relationship was unusual, but the marvelous sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, who covered both on a daily basis in their heyday in the 1950s, beat me to it. In one of his last columns before his death in 1972, Cannon observed the difference in style between manager and player (Casey, “excitable and flamboyant”; Berra, “slow and patient”), before shrewdly outlining their similarities:

“Why are they so alike, yet so different? They are both cunning and unafraid. Neither worries much about anything. Their luck holds, too. People couldn't believe it when Stengel was originally brought to the Yankees as their manager.... He was a marvelous entertainer, but they put him down to be a minor league manager. He had no dignity. George Weiss, the great baseball man who then ran the Yankees, understood him. Stengel was sharp with a hick’s stealth which he disguised with his comedian’s routines. Berra and Stengel share the ruthlessness a manager must have. It is the acceptance that failure can’t be tolerated. Neither pampers players. Like all humorists. Stengel has a streak of cruelty in him. He can be devious and savage in his estimates of players. Innocence dilutes Berra’s appraisals, but they can hurt because his candor can be brutal. They are both secretive. But Stengel conceals a private opinion in a cascade of words; Berra merely shuts up.”

Forget all the “Yogi-isms” you read before and after his death last week; probably at least a fifth were invented, either by friends like Joe Garagiola who wanted stories for the chicken-dinner circuit, or by sportswriters who found it easier under deadline simply to invent a good story rather than to verify an existing one.

What was not invented about Berra was his place in the record books. Central to his achievement were his three Most Valuable Player Awards; the three no-hitters he caught (including Don Larsen’s perfect game, the only one ever taught in the World Series); and an unprecedented—and still unmatched--10 World Series rings won as a player.

What gets overlooked about Berra nowadays may be even more important: his field generalship. Only baseball insiders or contemporaries of his could appreciate it. In his 2009 biography, Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, Allen Barra observed that Yogi not only mastered the catching lessons taught by the Bronx Bombers’ brilliant retired backstop, Bill Dickey, but also that, in the wake of Joe DiMaggio’s devastating injury in the first half of 1949, Stengel had relied heavily on the 24-year-old as his stopgap RBI producer until Joltin’ Joe returned to action.

The Yankee manager became famous for his “Stengelese” potpourri of non sequiturs, doubletalk and tomfoolery, but he could speak perfectly plainly when it came to his catcher—or, as he put it, his “assistant manager.” He relied on him to pounce on bunts, “quick as a cat,” and to throw out baserunners; to indicate where players should shift on the field; to get a pitcher through a dangerous opposing lineup when he didn’t have his best stuff; and to distinguish, in a close game, when a pitcher could still get outs and when he was running out of gas.

The “Ol’ Perfessor,” who introduced “instructional school” in training camp, could react sharply if a player didn’t absorb lessons readily enough (the prodigiously talented Mickey Mantle came in for special grief at his hands). But he never had reason to complain about Berra, which he let the press know in a direct fashion highly unusual for him:

“They say Yogi Berra is funny. Well, he has a lovely wife and family, a beautiful home, money in the bank and he plays gold with millionaires. What's funny about that?"

Rest in peace, Yogi.

Quote of the Day (Casey Stengel, on ‘A Time in Every Man's Life’)

“There comes a time in every man's life, at least once, and I've had plenty of them….”—Casey Stengel quoted in Robert W. Creamer, Stengel: His Life and Times (1984)

The New York Yankees’ pursuit of their 28^th World Series championship begins today in Houston, and somewhere in Heaven, the Bronx Bombers’ Clown Prince is smiling….

Quote of the Day (Billy Martin, on Being ‘Baseball’s Bad Boy’)

“I've got the reputation for being baseball's bad boy and I don't deserve it. But I think I'd make a good manager. For one thing, I know how to handle men. That's the secret of managing. For another, I know enough about the game, not fundamentals, but executing. I think I could get the most out of players with common sense and psychology. I'm fiery enough that I'd have their respect. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll ever get the chance and there's nothing in the world that can change that." –Billy Martin, onetime New York Yankees second baseman (and future manager), quoted in Baseball Digest, June 1961

Somehow, I doubt that my maternal grandparents get much eternal rest in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, N.Y. It’s mostly because of two other residents of that final resting place who, if they are anything like what they were in life, are kicking up a ruckus. One was Babe Ruth; the other, Billy Martin, born on this date (as Alfred Manuel Martin) in 1928 in Berkeley, Calif.

Both Yankees had troubled childhoods, growing up almost feral on the streets of their cities, with fathers effectively out of their lives. They managed—barely—not to get into worse trouble as adults because of their talent for baseball. Each, wildly undisciplined off the field, wanted desperately to manage once their playing days were done. Despite fearing that his reputation as “baseball’s bad boy” would get in the way, it was Martin, not the Sultan of Swat, who got the chance to manage—and then some: five times with the Yankees alone.

Martin, unlike Babe Ruth, possessed only average skills as a player, but he raised the level of his game in the post-season. While only batting .257 in 11 big-league seasons, he hit .333 in the World Series. "If liking a kid who will never let you down in the clutch is favoritism, then I plead guilty," Casey Stengel said of his team’s sparkplug. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the one year that the Yankees didn’t make it to the World Series during Martin’s playing days was 1954, when he was serving in the military.)

I have a theory that, in his managerial stints with the Bronx Bombers, Oakland A’s, Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins, Martin was the closest that the modern age has come to the fiery skipper of baseball’s New York Giants, John J. McGraw. The link between the two was Martin’s manager with the Yankees—and the closest he ever came to a father figure--Stengel—who, as a part-time assistant to McGraw, learned much that he would put into practice on his own. 

McGraw loathed what he saw as the change (instigated by the coming of Ruth) toward power hitting and away from the “Scientific Baseball” of pitching and craftiness that he preferred. Even as he installed Reggie Jackson as his cleanup hitter in the last several weeks of the 1977 season (a move that carried the Bombers to the pennant), Martin resented the attention that came the slugger’s way. 

In his autobiography, longtime manager Tony LaRussa described Martin as a baseball genius but tortured soul. On the plus side of the ledger for the on-again-off-again Yankee skipper: his use of pitchers (most notably, of course, in Oakland in 1981, when his entire young staff of righthand starters experienced shortened careers as he relied on them for complete games). When he wasn’t exhausting arms, he was exhausting patience levels. While his teams invariably improved immediately under his tutelage and prodding, at least some players would begin to tune him out—and, before long, fights would break out, and he’d be out of a job.

In Martin’s favor: an ability to outwit opponents, to engage his players and fans in not just exciting, but daring baseball. His clashes with some players--Jackson, Ed Whitson, Dave Boswell--were legendary. Others, however--Rod Carew, Willie Randolph, Thurman Munson, Willie Horton among them--swore by him.

The tempestuous Martin’s life ended characteristically, in a one-vehicle accident following Christmas Day carousing with a friend. He saw so much about himself--his fiery temperament, persuading players to execute the fundamentals--but never learned how to apply "common sense and psychology" to his own case.