Thorn: Remembering Mickey Mantle
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on August 15, 2016:
It seems like only yesterday that we learned Mickey Mantle had lost his last battle. In the days after Mickey’s death on August 13, 1995, his fans left flowers, and a poem, and other modest, heartfelt tributes beneath his plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame Gallery. The Mick was sixty-three when he succumbed to liver cancer–too soon, but not truly an athlete dying young; he had outlived Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson by ten years. We mourned as much for ourselves, for a vital part inside of us that died, as we did for him.
We remember where we were and, more importantly, who we were when “The Commerce Comet” picked up a random bat (a Loren Babe model), strode to the plate at Griffith Stadium one afternoon in 1953, and parked a Chuck Stobbs pitch 565 feet away. We remember his astonishing blend of power, speed, and grace; his dash into left-center field to snare a Gil Hodges line drive and keep Don Larsen’s perfect game alive on October 8, 1956. We remember his chase of the Babe’s record in 1961, when he kept pace with Roger Maris until a September injury forced him to the sideline. We remember his baseball cards, and his Maypo commercial, and that silly movie he and Roger made with Doris Day and Cary Grant. We remember the Copacabana scrape, and the drinking and carousing, and the bad business deals he got into.
We remember the pain he endured, from the bone inflammation that almost cost him his leg as a teenager to the torn-up knee in his rookie year to the wrecked shoulder, and the wounds that the yards of tape could never heal, especially his belief that he, like his father, would die young. “If I’d have known I was going to live this long,” he would say, half jokingly, “I would’ve taken better care of myself.” Yes, we will remember him.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2016/08/15/remembering-mickey-mantle/
Originally published: August 15, 2016. Last Updated: August 15, 2016.