The Last Boy by Jane Leavy Read Free Book Online Page A

ball could have traveled 600 feet—science be damned—given the placement of the diamond among the buildings and athletic fields on campus. But to the day he died, Dedeaux swore he saw Mantle hit two 500-foot home runs on March 26, 1951, one left-handed, one right-handed.
    In the telling and retelling of the events of that day, memory calcified into fact and a myth was born. In the fine print of history, and the vaults of university film, where fact resides, a different version of Mantle’s second home run emerges. According to the box score, Dedeaux used only three pitchers that day; Cesca, the lefty, pitched only the ninth inning, which means that Mantle’s sixth-inning home run had to be an opposite field shot hit left-handed. Ben Epstein’s game story in the Mirror stated: “Mickey obtained all his extra-base shots batting left-handed.” The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner concurred. None of the profuse dispatches filed by New York writers mentioned a home run from each side of the plate, and none of the Trojans recalled it that way, either.
    Proof positive came from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in the form of a two-second film clip in the 1951 Trojan Review. There’s number six, Mickey Mantle, batting left-handed in the top of the sixth. His bat is a blur as he steps into the pitch. Front toe turned inward, back foot liftedoff the ground, he follows the flight of the ball over the left field fence. Everyone is looking that way, the third base coach, ump, runner, and the news photog squatting along the base line; and all the fans clustered behind the chain-link fence in the shade of a eucalyptus tree near the first base dugout. The narrator is solemnly impressed: “Yankee flash, Mickey Mantle, bangs out his second home run to score a pair of teammates.”
    When the game ended, Mantle was hitting .432; DiMaggio was batting under .200, having left the field after two at-bats, a normal spring training accommodation for an aging, aching star. Fans besieged the press box, wanting to know the answer to Carmen Berra’s question: Who is this Mickey Mantle? Coeds swarmed the team bus. By the time the Yankees got back to Phoenix the next morning, autograph hounds were offering two of anybody else’s signature for one of Mantle’s.
    The press of expectations was upon the nineteen-year-old Mickey Mantle. Six days earlier, he had been mere background in a Hollywood flack’s snapshot, happy just to be in the picture. Now he had moved to stage center, where he would remain for the rest of his life. “It becomes doubtful that Casey Stengel will dare to let him out of his sight,” Arch Murray wrote in the New York Post.
    The future was manifest in the March 26 box score: Mantle, 5 AB, 4 H, 2 HR, 1 3B, 1 1B, 7 RBI. More than a decade would pass before he drove in that many runs again. Houk and Berra looked at each other and said, “My God, whadda we got here?”
    Headline writers invoked classical mythology in an effort to convey the epic proportions of the day. “One for the Mantle,” the Los Angeles Times declared. “Yanks Dismantle Troy.”
    A half century later, Justin Dedeaux described the wonder of it all more simply: “This was the day the whole world opened up.”

2
October 5, 1951
When Fates Converge
    A LETTER FROM M ANTLE’S father, Mutt, was waiting for him in Phoenix. His local draft board wanted to reexamine him, and wanted to do so within the next ten days. When the Yankees headed east after another week of exhibition games in Arizona, Mantle wasn’t with them. He detoured to Miami, Oklahoma, and then to Tulsa to have his draft status reviewed. Again, he was declared medically unfit to serve; Stengel lobbied hard to put him in a Yankee uniform instead Mantle expected and wanted to be sent to the class AA team in Beaumont, Texas.
    His fate was still undecided when he boarded a night flight out of Kansas City for New York on Friday, April 13. The Army’s decision generated suspicion distilled with typical