Mickey Mantle

The Full Biography

Mickey Mantle. Center fielder. The Commerce Comet who made a switch-hitter’s swing into a national weather, then spent the last year telling the country to take better care.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a Yankee in center, number 7, a tape-measure home run that left the park from either side of the plate. The year is usually 1956, or 1961, or any October the Bronx still treats as scripture. What the still cannot show is Mickey Charles Mantle of Spavinaw and Commerce, Oklahoma, a miner’s son named for a catcher, a knee that was never right after a drain cover in 1951, and a man who used his last public months to talk about livers and donor cards instead of the swing.

He was born on October 20, 1931, in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, and raised in Commerce, in the lead and zinc country. His father, Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, worked the mines and would not have a son who hit from only one side. After a shift, Mutt pitched right-handed so the boy would hit left; the grandfather, Charlie, pitched left-handed so the boy would hit right. The name came from Mickey Cochrane, the great Athletic and Tiger catcher. The first pressure was not Yankee Stadium. It was a father who treated switch-hitting as a household rule, and a town where a high-school Friday was the whole weather.

At Commerce High he played baseball, basketball, and football. In 1946, at a football practice, he was kicked in the left shin. Osteomyelitis set in, a bone infection that a few years earlier would have taken the leg. Penicillin, then still a new mercy, saved it. The scare is in the file. So is the speed that survived it. Tom Greenwade, the Yankees scout, signed him in 1949 out of the Oklahoma sandlots. He played at Independence and at Joplin. The majors called in 1951. He was nineteen.

The door was the Bronx in April of that year, a rookie in right field on a club that still belonged to Joe DiMaggio. He hit .267 with thirteen home runs in ninety-six games and reached the World Series against the New York Giants. In Game 2, at Yankee Stadium, Willie Mays lifted a fly to right-center. Mantle and DiMaggio both went. DiMaggio called him off. Mantle tried to stop. His right spike caught an exposed drain cover. The knee tore. He left on a stretcher. He would play the next seventeen seasons on that knee, and on the taping, and on the pain that the stills do not show. In the hospital his father was found to have Hodgkin’s disease. Mutt died on May 7, 1952. He was forty. The son inherited center field the same year. The Commerce Comet was now the Yankees’ center fielder, and already a man who knew that a body can be taken without asking.

The work is a pile the banquet speeches flatten into one swing. He was a switch-hitter with power from both sides and speed that the osteomyelitis and the drain were not supposed to have left him. In 1956 he won the Triple Crown: a .353 average, 52 home runs, 130 runs batted in. He is still the only switch-hitter to have done it. The American League named him Most Valuable Player that year, and again in 1957, and again in 1962. He helped the Yankees to seven World Series titles — 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962 — and hit 18 home runs in the Fall Classic, a record the October nights have not returned. He finished with 536 home runs and a .298 average, twenty times an All-Star, the entire career in one uniform.

In 1961 he and Roger Maris chased Babe Ruth’s 60. Maris hit 61. Mantle hit 54 and then the body stopped him. The country made a meal of the race and of which man it preferred. Mantle was the one the bleachers already loved. Maris was the one who broke the number. Both sentences can sit in the same file. The nights at Yankee Stadium were a climate: the taping in the trainer’s room, Whitey Ford on the mound, Billy Martin in the next stool, the tape-measure shots that sportswriters started measuring in feet as if distance were a moral fact. He was Mick. He was the Commerce Comet. He was, for a stretch, the most complete argument the sport had for what a damaged body could still do if the swing was a gift and the father had been stubborn.

The work between the monument years is a ledger the banquet flattens. In 1953, at Griffith Stadium in Washington, he hit a ball the writers measured at 565 feet; the phrase “tape-measure home run” enters the language from that night. In 1952 he inherited center field and hit .311. In 1957 he hit .365 and took a second MVP. He played in twelve World Series. Eighteen October home runs remain the record. In 1963 he broke a foot on a fence and still tried to hit from one side. In 1964 the Yankees reached the Series again; that was the last title window of the old shop. From 1965 through 1968 the club declined and the knee did not improve. He finished with 536 home runs, 1,509 runs batted in, a .298 average, 2,415 hits, twenty All-Star selections, and the entire career in one uniform. On March 1, 1969, he announced the retirement. On June 8 the club retired number 7. Cooperstown took him on the first ballot in 1974.

The clubhouse around him is the other climate. Whitey Ford on the mound. Yogi Berra and then Elston Howard behind the plate. Billy Martin in the next stool and then in exile and then back. Casey Stengel first, then Ralph Houk. The taping in the trainer’s room was a daily job, not a footnote. He ran as if the osteomyelitis and the drain had not happened, until they had. He hit from both sides because Mutt had made it a household rule, and he kept hitting from both sides when the right knee no longer wanted the load. Sportswriters measured the long ones in feet as if distance were character. The character was a miner’s son who showed up on a taped leg and then drank as if the night were still part of the shift. Both belong in the same locker. Independence and Joplin were the minors. The Bronx was the job. Commerce remained the first room. Seven titles. Three MVPs. One Triple Crown from both sides of the plate. The banquet prefers 1956. The knee prefers 1951. The last year prefers the donor card.

The public monument is 1956 and the seven titles. The turn is easier to miss because it looks like a locker-room habit. He drank. Ford drank. Martin drank. The nights after the nights were part of the job as the clubhouse understood the job. He has said, in the last year, the sentence the country kept.

If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.Mickey Mantle

That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a joke a dying man told. It is not a joke. It is the file he made of his own prime. The swing was a gift. The knee was a drain cover. The bottle was a choice he kept making. He played through 1968 and retired before the 1969 season. The Yankees retired number 7. Cooperstown took him on the first ballot in 1974. The gold plaque is a civic object now, like the 536, and like the 18 October home runs. The plaque does not mention the taping or the bar. The last year of his life would not let him leave them out.

On December 23, 1951, he married Merlyn Johnson, his high-school sweetheart from the Oklahoma years. They had four sons: Mickey Jr., David, Billy, and Danny. Billy, named for Martin, died in 1994, of a heart attack on top of Hodgkin’s, at thirty-six — the same disease that had taken Mutt at forty. The marriage held on paper until the end. They had separated. They did not divorce. The household knew the bottle as a family weather; Merlyn and the boys would, in time, be treated for it too. Friends from the Ford years describe a teammate who was shy in a room of strangers and exact when a fastball was the subject. The Mantle at a memorabilia show in the 1980s was already a man selling the swing he no longer trusted his body to explain.

The later years

Retirement was not a ranch and a clean ledger. He worked in Dallas, lent the name to restaurants, signed bats, told the same stories, and drank as if the trainer’s room were still down the hall. In 1983 the Claridge Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City hired him as a greeter — golf, charity nights, a handshake for a hundred thousand a year. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn told him the job would put him on baseball’s ineligible list. He took the job anyway and called the rule stupid. Willie Mays had already walked the same plank. On March 18, 1985, Peter Ueberroth reinstated both men. In 1988 he opened Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant and Sports Bar on Central Park South. The memorabilia circuit paid. The swing he no longer trusted his body to explain still sold.

The bottle did not clock out when the uniform did. Merlyn and the boys would, in time, be treated for the same weather. On January 7, 1994, he checked into the Betty Ford Center. That same year Billy died, at thirty-six, of a heart attack on top of Hodgkin’s — the disease that had taken Mutt at forty. In 1995 the liver was finished. On June 8, at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, he received a transplant. The surgeons found cancer they could not take with the old organ. He lived long enough to hold a press conference and to put his name on the Mickey Mantle Foundation, a push for organ donation built on the simple fact that a stranger’s liver had given him weeks he used to talk. He asked people to sign the card. He did not dress it up. The famous sentence about taking better care of himself is from those months. It is not a banquet joke. It is the file he made of his own prime.

Friends who sat in the Dallas rooms describe a shy man still exact when a fastball was the subject, and a patient who understood the weeks were borrowed. He used the borrowed weeks as work: cameras, a foundation, a warning delivered without a speechwriter’s polish. Commerce still called. The Bronx still called. He answered both by talking about other people’s second chances instead of the 1956 numbers.

He died at Baylor on August 13, 1995. He was sixty-three. Merlyn was there. David was there. The Yankees, playing Cleveland that day, stopped the night long enough to say his name. The funeral was in Dallas. Commerce still claims the boy. The Bronx still claims the swing. The foundation is the last instruction.

After he was gone

Mickey Jr. died in 2000. Merlyn died in 2009. David and Danny have kept the donor work and the name. Number 7 still hangs in the Bronx. The 536 still sit in the book. Every October broadcast that reaches for a switch-hitter still pays him a tax. The drinking stories are a different industry. They are not this page’s meal, and they are not a secret the page is allowed to clean. The drain, the taping, the 1956 numbers, and the June press conference are the same life.

He came out of Spavinaw, learned both sides of the plate in a miner’s yard, almost lost a leg, tore a knee on a drain, hit 536, won seven titles and a Triple Crown, drank the years he might have had, and used the last weeks to talk about other people’s livers. If you only remember the tape-measure shot, you have the still. If you remember Mutt, the drain, Merlyn, and the donor card, you have him.

Portrait: Unknown author · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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