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Triumph
and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball by Stephen Jay
Gould Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Champion The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould loved
baseball almost as much as he loved science. A new collection of his essays
on baseball, Triumph
and Tragedy in Mudville, showcases Gould’s fine writing as well as the
passion that true baseball fans exude. This collection appeals to lovers of
baseball as well as fans of fine writing. This excerpt from Triumph
and Tragedy is his essay from the December 1986 issue of Sport, titled
“Mickey Mantle: The Man Versus the Myth” (pp. 87-96): I
was nine years old when the Yanks brought up Mickey Mantle in 1951.1 hated
him. DiMaggio was my hero, but even I could tell his skills were eroding. I
longed for that centerfield job, and I knew that it would be mine if only
DiMag could hang in there long enough for me to finish high school. But now,
at the brink of realizing this beautiful fantasy, I faced a usurper from
Commerce, Oklahoma. In 1952 I began to change my mind, for even a child
can empathize with the victims of cruel treatment and ill fortune. One day,
as the senseless booing continued to envelop Mantle (he hit .311 with
twenty-three homers in his sophomore year), Yankee emcee Mel Allen broke the
cardinal rule of dramatic performance by forsaking his appointed role and
conversing directly with his audience. As I listened on the radio, Allen
leaned out of his pressbox and accosted a fan in the midst of a raucous Bronx
cheer: "Why are you booing him?" The fan replied, "Because he
ain't as good as DiMaggio"—and Allen, rendered momentarily speechless
(for once) by simple fury, busted a gut. Suddenly
I realized something in a cold sweat. Mickey was actually closer to me in age
(ten years older) than he was to DiMaggio (nearly seventeen years younger).
Before then I had simply lumped all full-sized people into the single,
undifferentiated category "adult." But Mickey was more like me, and
I would have been scared shitless out there in center field. My heart went
out to him—as it had, for the first time, when he caught his spikes on a
drainage spout during the 1951 World Series and almost ended his career with
the first and most serious of many leg injuries. In
1956, his magical year of the triple crown, I came to love Mickey Mantle. I
suspect you had to be a kid growing up on the streets of New York to
appreciate the context in all its glory. The fifties—before the great
betrayal and flight to California by Stoneham and O'Malley—were the greatest
baseball years that any single city ever experienced. I was lucky to be the
right age in the right place. We had three great teams (and seven subway
World Series in the ten years between 1947 and 1956). All Yankee fans hated
either the Giants or Dodgers with blazing passion (we loved individual
players, but the corporate entity was Satan incarnate). Affiliation was no
laughing matter or passing fancy. I received my worst street beating—and
deserved it—when I had the temerity to admit, while playing with a cousin and
his friends in Brooklyn that I was a Yankee fan. Success had smiled on my side. The Yanks had beaten
the Dodgers in all five of their subway series between 1941 and 1953. But
then, in 1955, it happened—the impossible, the soul searching, the unimaginably
painful, the always feared but never really anticipated. The Dodgers won in
seven and the Brooklyn Eagle: featured on its front (not its
sports) page a smiling derelict under a banner headline "Who's a
Bum?" We
waited all year for revenge, through a winter of discontent and into a summer of
Mantle's blooming greatness. We recovered our pride in 1956 (the last subway series), a
victory sweetened to true perfection by Don Larsen's twenty-seven bums up and
twenty-seven bums down. Mantle both won and saved that game for Larsen, first
with a home run off Sal Maglie, and then with a dandy catch on Hodges's
430-foot drive to left-center. His
next year, 1957, was even better, probably the greatest single season
by any player in baseball's modern era. Mantle's achievements in 1957 have
been masked by a conspiracy of circumstances, including comparison with his
showier stats of the year before and the fact that his career-best batting
average of .365 came in second to Ted Williams's .388. In 1957 Mantle had a
career high of 146 walks, with only 75 strikeouts. (In no other year did he
come even close to this nearly two-to-one ratio of walks to strikeouts; in
ten of eighteen seasons with the Yanks, he struck out more often than he
walked.) This cornucopia of walks limited his official at-bats to 474 and
didn't provide enough opportunity for accumulating those (largely misleading)
stats that count absolute numbers rather than percentages—RBIs and home runs
for example. Superficial glances have led to an undervaluing of Mantle's
greatest season. Sabermetrics
(or baseball number crunching) has its limits and cannot substitute for the
day-to-day knowledge of professionals who shared the playing field with
Mantle, yet numerical arguments command our respect when so many different
methods lead to the same conclusion. As Bill James points out in his Historical
Baseball Abstract, all proposed measures of offensive
performance—from his own runs created for outs consumed, to Thomas Boswell's
total average, Barry Codell's base-out percentage, Thomas Cover's offensive
earned run average, and Pete Palmer's overall rating in The Hidden
Game—judge Mantle's 1957 season as unsurpassed during the modern era.
Consider just one daunting statistic. Mantle’s on-base percentage of .512.
Imagine getting on base more often than making an out – especially given the
old saw that, in baseball, even the greatest fail about twice as often as
they succeed. No player since Mantle in 1957 has come close to an on-base
percentage of .500. Willie Mays reached .425 in his best year. In 1958 the Yankees' general manager, George Weiss,
a tough old bastard, had the audacity to offer Mantle a contract with a
$5,000 pay cut, reasoning that 1957 had not matched his triple crown
performance of the year before! In
a nation too young to generate truly mythical figures, Americans have been
forced to press actual, rounded people into service, and to grant these
special folks a dual status as human and legend. When, as with Mickey Mantle,
sports heroes exemplify the cardinal myths of our culture, their conversion
to parable and folklore is all the more rapid and intense. Mantle's
legend is the most powerful and enduring since Babe Ruth's because he mixed
into the circumstances of life and career three of the most potent folk
images of American mythology. First, Mantle was young, handsome, and
bristling with talent. His skills
satisfied both sides of the great nature-nurture debate, for he combined the
struggle of Horatio Alger with the muscles of John Henry. He was big and
strong and could hit a ball 565 feet. His father, an impoverished miner,
lived and breathed for baseball. He
named his son after his favorite catcher, Mickey Cochrane, and made a playing
area (usually against a barn) wherever they lived. Mutt Mantle converted his
son, a natural righty into a switch-hitter by delaying dinner each night
until Mickey had taken enough successful swings from the left side. Second,
Mantle was the gullible and naive farmboy who prevailed by good will and
bodily strength in a tough world. Commerce, Oklahoma, as Mantle
describes it, is a movie theater, a café, four churches, a motel and a lot of
grassroots (or rather slag heaps, in this black mining region) baseball.
Mantle’s father labored in the mines all his brief life, except for a failed
stint at farming. Mantle grew up as an Okie in the depths of the Depression—a
family that stayed while Tom Joad and his compatriots moved westward. Third, his country innocence met the Big Apple.
Mickey hit New York, symbol of immensity, rapacity, and sophistication, at
age nineteen. He was soon bilked by a sleazy agent and victimized in a phony
insurance scheme. His dad was so awed and disoriented on his first visit to
Manhattan that he mistook the monument of Atlas at Rockefeller Center for the
Statue of Liberty. Yet even this conjunction of unparalleled talent
and naivete alone in the big city cannot in itself set an enduring legend.
Mythological heroes need flaws and tragedies, the Achilles' heel that defines
an accessible humanity. Mantle's innocence was tainted by tragedy and dogged
by disappointment. He did it all for (and because of) his father, but Mutt
Mantle lived to see only the dicey beginnings of Mickey's then uncertain
career. After Mickey's injury in the 1951 World Series, Mutt took his son to
Lenox Hill Hospital. As they got out of the cab, a hobbled Mickey put his
weight against his father, and Mutt collapsed on the sidewalk. They ended up
together in a double room—Mickey to recover from torn ligaments, his father
to begin the slow process of dying from Hodgkin's Disease, a form of cancer
now usually curable. Serious injuries continued to plague Mantle. He
never could put together a long string of healthy seasons, and he often
played in pain, wrapped in more bandages than Boris Karloff as lm-Ho-Tep the
Mummy. He had four glorious seasons (1956-1957 and 1961-1962) but also
several distinctly subpar years. Playing hurt in his last season (1968), his
skills prematurely eroded. Mantle batted .237 and watched in frustration as
his lifetime batting average slipped below the magic line to .298. Morever,
Mantle put his heart and life into baseball before the era of great material
reward. His top salary never reached even half of what any utility infielder
might command today. Year after year he was forced into humiliating
negotiation with Weiss, the archetypal skinflint and belittler of men. He
worried continually about finances, and diverted much energy to schemes that
no one in his position would dream of needing today. He moved from Oklahoma
to Dallas in order to run a bowling alley that he hoped would secure his
financial future (though it eventually failed). He established a chain of
country-cooking outlets, also unsuccessful in the long run. The sport that
had been his lifelong obsession did not repay his investment, and he joined
Willie Mays in heartless and senseless exile after commissioner Bowie Kuhn
ruled that no employee of an Atlantic City casino could also represent major
league baseball (a galling judgment since widely revoked by Peter Uberroth). I
do not wish to debunk this legend. It contains enough truth to pass muster,
and, as argued above, Mickey the myth has a different (and legitimate) status
from Mickey the man. Still, the rounded man is so much more interesting than
the cardboard legend. The myth really fails only in one crucial way.
Achilles' heels are blemishes beyond the control of heroes. It was not
Achilles' fault that his mother had to grasp some part of his anatomy when
dunking him in the river Styx. But Mantle's disappointments were not, as the
legend holds, solely the result of congenitally weak legs and an unlucky
series of freak accidents. Though no one ever matched Mantle's fierce
commitment and competitive desire, he did not train properly and actively
disregarded almost all medical advice for rehabilitation from his injuries.
As for the injuries themselves, several were just bad luck, but others
(covered up at the time) were the consequences of foolishness and excessive
drinking. Mantle teetered for years on the edge of a serious problem with
alcohol, and his legendary late nights cannot be called a mere innocent
exuberance of youth, but a pattern that hurt and haunted his career. Mantle's autobiography. The Mick,
presents an honest account of this tension between high jinks and harm.
Mantle told me that, if his book contains any lesson, he hopes that kids with
great talent will understand why they must take better care of their bodies.
As we sat in the press box three hours before a night game with Baltimore,
Mantle looked down on the field and said to me wistfully, "Look, there's
Mattingly, my favorite player. I love the man. He's out there for extra
batting practice with the rookies. He doesn't need to be there; I never
was." Mantle's failure to sustain his full potential is
all the more poignant because he harbors deep regret, and for reasons that
transcend mere ambition and desire for personal fame. He writes in his
autobiography: "When somebody once asked me what I'd want written on my
gravestone, I answered, 'He was a great team player.' " Now I’m not from Commerce, Oklahoma. I’m a
prototypical cynical, streetwise, New York kid. When I read such statements,
upholding values we all mouth but seldom follow, I get suspicious and assume
a bit of dissembling. But I accept Mantle's judgment absolutely. Everything
fits too well. Mantle struggling for his team and not for personal stats is
the man himself, not the myth. I remember so clearly, because I watched the scene
often, how Mantle would circle the bases after a home run—head
down and as fast as he could, as if to shut out the personal adulation and
limit its duration. I asked him about his proudest achievements and
deeper disappointments. He takes greatest pride, he said, not in his triple
crown or his home runs, but in playing more games as a Yankee (2,401) than
any other man. As his worst moments he cited his return to the minors during
his first season in 1951 (not sufficient help to the team) and Bill
Mazeroski's home run that won the 1960 World Series for the weaker Pittsburgh
club ("I cried all the way home in the plane after that")—though
Mantle had played his heart out and harbored no feelings of personal failure.
Above all, he told me, he regretted his "stupidity" (his own word,
and the only one uttered with real vehemence during our interview) in
allowing his prodigious skills to erode more quickly than nature required,
forcing his retirement just before his thirty-seventh birthday, while those
who share Mantle's fire for the game but take better care of themselves, the
Yazes and the Roses, play with grace well into their forties. During my youth nothing so obsessed the
minds of New York fans as the great Mantle-Mays-Snider center-field debate.
We all love the Duke, but men of good conscience must see the real contest as
between Mickey and Willie. Hindsight has usually given the nod to Mays. Mays
was a better fielder (Mantle was also damned good), and Mays sustained his
greatness longer and more consistently. But Mantle at peak value in his four
great seasons, was—by any measure, sabermetric, conventional, or simple
subjective memory—clearly superior to Mays or any player since. The Yanks of the fifties and sixties were probably
the greatest team of all time. Mantle dominated this superlative bunch. He
led the team for nine years in a row in runs scored, five in total hits,
seven in homers, three in RBIs, nine in walks, six in stolen bases, and six
more in a row in slugging average. In 1961 Mantle hit a career-high
fifty-four home runs and might have fractured Ruth’s record along with Roger
Maris if he hadn't visited a quack medico to cure a cold and ended up flat on
his back during the end of this greatest baseball derby. Mantle won the MVP
award for three of his four great seasons (finishing second to Maris in the
year of the asterisk). Mantle played at the acme of the most
one-dimensional style the game has ever known—put men on base and wait around
for someone to hit a long ball. We sometimes forget that Mantle, for all his
size and power, was also the fastest man in baseball, and a great drag bunter
(practically unbeatable when bunting for a hit from the left side). He
maintained a career success rate of 80 percent for stolen bases (compared
with 77 for Mays), but only once was he allowed to swipe more than twenty in
a season. Imagine what Mantle's speed and bunting ability might produce in
our present game, especially with the return of scrappy, one-run baseball. But enough already. You can carry abstract analysis
so far-and although I may be an academic by trade, I write primarily as a
fan, as a man who loved Mickey Mantle and whose childhood was brightened by
his glory. To hell with what might have been. No one can reach personal
perfection in a complex world filled with distraction. Williams had his best
years cut short by World War II and Korea; DiMaggio played in the wrong park;
Shoeless Joe Jackson, acquitted by the courts, was executed by major league
base-ball. What happened is all we
have. By this absolute and irrefragable standard. Mantle was the greatest
ballplayer of his time. Mantle also taught me something very special: the universality of excellence. We intellectuals, in our crass parochialism, often imagine that scholars succeed only by a struggle of long years devoted to study but that athletes triumph by untutored skill—the pain of brain versus the gift of brawn. But if I have learned anything from studying the lives of great ballplayers, Mantle's in particular, I have come to understand the common denominator of human excellence. The potential must be present (and we do not all possess it), but the universal agents of realization are passion to the point of obsession combined with hard, unrelenting work. All achievers are kinsmen in a tough and crowded world. I do not seek moral lessons from my sports heroes.
The thrill of witnessing rare excellence will suffice. My relationship with
Mickey Mantle was forged by a single image. Probably a quarter of a million
people will swear they saw it in the flesh (though Yankee Stadium then held
but a quarter that many), but I was really there. I took a trip to New York a month before my
graduation from college in 1963. On May 22, Mantle, batting lefty, hit a line
drive off Kansas City pitcher Bill Fischer. It rose and rose until it struck
the facade above the third deck in right field—the closest that anyone has
ever come to hitting a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium ("the hardest
ball I ever hit," Mantle told me). It was still rising when it struck the
parapet. I remember particularly the stunned silence before the roar of the
crowd. Six more feet up, and Mantle would have fused himself to my profession
of scientific exploration in more than the abstract character of excellence.
Six more feet up, and that ball would have become a moon of Uranus. As the baseball season comes to a close,
no matter how your team performed, you’ll enjoy reading each of Gould’s
well-written essays in Triumph
and Tragedy in Mudville. Steve Hopkins, September 23, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the October 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Triumph
and Tragedy in Mudville.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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