The 2007 Old-Timers Day included Whitey Ford (16), Yogi Berra (8), Reggie Jackson (44), Don Mattingly (23), Ron Guidry (49), Moose Skowron (14), Don Larsen (18), Graig Nettles (9), Bobby Murcer (1), Goose Gossage (54), Paul O’Neill (21), Scott Brosius (18), Joe Pepitone (25), and Chris Chambliss (10). (Jerry Coli/Dreamstime)

The original Yankee Stadium, with its majestic triple-deck structure, was impressive. Jerry Coleman, ex-Yankee, World Series MVP winner, and broadcaster, recalled the ballpark with awe: “That stadium … that huge triple deck with the façade up there … my God, it was like going to a cathedral, really.”1 Memorable moments thrilled fans over the years: a seventh-game World Series win, Ruth’s 60th, Maris’ 61st, Mantle’s 500th.

Yankee Stadium, rebuilt in 2009, was a special place for memorable events. One such event was the long-running Old-Timers Day.2

Although the Yankees have maintained the tradition of the old-timers games the longest, John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s historian, noted that the recognition of former players playing exhibition games dated back to 1875. The “Old Duffer” Knickerbockers of the 1840s and 1850s played the “Youngsters” of the 1860s.3

Yankee Stadium Old-Timers Day roots can arguably be traced to two moments that honored dying ballplayers. The first was on July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. On hand were Gehrig’s 1920s teammates, including Mark Koenig, Wally Schang, Herb Pennock, Wally Pipp, Bob Shawkey, Benny Bengough, George Pipgras, Tony Lazzeri, Earle Combs, Joe Dugan, Waite Hoyt, Bob Meusel, Everett Scott, and Babe Ruth. The unforgettable part of that day was Gehrig’s iconic goodbye, his “Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth” speech.4

The second was on April 27, 1947. Babe Ruth Day was proclaimed across professional baseball by Commissioner Happy Chandler to honor The Babe.5 On that day Larry MacPhail, the Yankees general manager, announced that the Yankees would host their first Old-Timers Day on September 28.6 This event would include an exhibition game between former players. Red Patterson, the Yankees’ publicity director, continued the tradition in homage to Ruth.7

Regardless of the day one selects as the origin, the Yankee Old-Timers Day tradition has continued with its pomp, revelry, and circumstance for either 75 or 83 years, with a two-year interruption (2020-21) because of the COVID pandemic. Following are some Old-Timers Day events with significant themes.

RECOGNITION OF THE BABE AND THE FIRST OFFICIAL OLD-TIMERS DAY (1947)

The Yankees had clinched the American League pennant two weeks earlier, but still a crowd of 25,085 attended the Yankees’ final game of the regular season on September 28, 1947. The one-time very familiar Bambino batting stance was not seen this day. A frail, visibly ill Ruth appeared, his camel-hair coat collar turned up and buttoned to his chin.8 Barely able to speak, Ruth waved to the roaring crowd.9 Ruth could not suit up for the game. He posed for pictures with other immortals like Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. Yankee greats there included Frank Baker, Herb Pennock, Bob Meusel, Earle Combs, Waite Hoyt, Lefty Gomez, and Red Ruffing. Philadelphia Athletics owner-manager Connie Mack managed a squad of non-Yankee former stars including Speaker, Al Simmons, George Sisler, Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove, Chief Bender, Cy Young, Ed Walsh, and Ty Cobb. Twenty current or future Hall of Famers played or attended. Combs sealed the win with an inside-the-park home run over Tris Speaker’s head. The quip of the day may have been uttered by Hoyt who, after throwing out Ty Cobb said, “They had been trying to do that for 40 years.”10

All gate receipts were donated to the Babe Ruth Foundation, which had recently been founded to aid underprivileged youth.11 The event reportedly raised about $45,000.12

SILVER ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF THE STADIUM (1948)

Silver Anniversary Day, June 13, 1948, was festive, cast in emotional celebrations: the 25th anniversary of Yankee Stadium, the retirement of Ruth’s number 3, and recognition of some of the most storied players.13 On a bittersweet note, it was Ruth’s last appearance at the Stadium.14

Yankees President Dan Topping presented Ruth with a pocket watch with the inscription “Silver Anniversary 1923-1948, the House That Ruth Built.” Former general manager/club President Ed Barrow, who greeted Ruth at the plate, also received an inscribed pocket watch. Ruth thrilled fans when he assumed his familiar once-feared stance and took a mighty cut.15

American League President Will Harridge accepted the Ruth uniform and proclaimed that “it would never again be worn here or on the road.”16 That Ruth uniform remains on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Before the player introductions, memorial wreaths were placed on the Lou Gehrig, Jacob Ruppert, and Miller Huggins monuments. Bob Shawkey, Huggins’ successor as Yankees manager, placed the wreath on his monument; Barrow, on Ruppert’s; and Bill Dickey, on Gehrig’s.17

Players from the 1923 team squared off against a collection of former Yankees. New York Mayor William O’Dwyer threw out the first pitch; Governor Al Smith had used the same ball for the Stadium’s inaugural toss in 1923.18 Yankees players in the Old-Timers game included Joe Sewell, Tiny Bonham, Hank Borowy,19 Red Rolfe, George Selkirk, Lefty Gomez, Tom Zachary, Bill Dickey, and Mark Koenig. The ’23 team, anchored by Pipp, Meusel, Bullet Joe Bush, Carl Mays, Shawkey, Hoyt, and Dugan, prevailed, 2-0. The Yankees All Stars were managed by Ruth with help from Chuck Dressen. Meusel drove in Dugan and Pipp on a blooper misplayed by Rolfe.20

Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio (center top) and Claire Ruth, the Babe’s widow (center bottom) were frequent Old-Timers Day guests. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

 

DIMAGGIO’S FIRST OLD-TIMERS DAY (1952)

On August 30, 1952, Joe DiMaggio returned for the first time in what would be a very long Old-Timers Day run for him.21 He returned every year until his death before the 1999 season, except for 1988, when he was recovering from abdominal surgery.22 That span of 46 years was the second-longest number of appearances by any Yankees old-timer. Hector Lopez holds the record with 53 appearances (1967-2019).

The Yankees commemorated their 50th year by honoring living members among the greatest Yankees of all time as voted by the baseball writers.23 Joe DiMaggio managed the cast of “All-Timers.” Honorees included Bill Dickey, Phil Rizzuto, Earle Combs, Lefty Gomez, Red Ruffing, Wally Pipp, Frank Crosetti, and Home Run Baker, who managed the “Yankee All Stars.” The All-Timers prevailed, 3-0.

Special recognition was given to Clark Griffith, pitcher and manager of the 1903 team, then known as the Highlanders, by American League President Will Harridge, with a little help from Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, Connie Mack, and Ed Barrow. Others from Highlanders days included Dave Fultz and Elmer Bliss.

The Yankees held a reunion dinner at the Ruppert Brewery.24

SECOND DECADE OF OLD-TIMERS DAYS BEGINS (1957)

On July 27, 1957, 30 former Yankees stars and 25 Detroit Tigers notables compiled this installment of Old-Timers Day. In perhaps an ironic moment, Home Run Baker and Joe DiMaggio were captured giving home run tips to Mickey Mantle. Mantle was the Triple Crown winner in 1956, with 52 homers that year – a mark neither DiMaggio nor Baker ever reached.

Other notable attendees: recent Hall of Fame inductee Wahoo Sam Crawford, Mickey Cochrane, Ty Cobb, and Earle Combs.

DIMAGGIO’S TAINTED AT-BAT (1965)

On July 31, 1965, before a crowd of 42,170, Al Schacht, known as baseball’s Clown Prince and noted for his comedic antics on the diamond, played a big part in the DiMaggio at-bat. Schacht served as a guest umpire, and his generous rules interpretations victimized former Cincinnati Reds star pitcher Bucky Walters. Schacht allowed a DiMaggio at-bat to continue, twice.25 Disappointed fans groaned when Jim Hegan caught the Yankee Clipper’s foul pop. Sighs turned into cheers when Hegan “dropped” the ball. Walters looked in and smiled. DiMaggio hit another popup, near third. Monte Irvin made a backhanded grab. As DiMaggio started to walk away, Schacht ruled the backhanded catch “illegal.” DiMaggio did not disappoint; on the next pitch, he smacked a line drive into the left-field stands.26

NEW AND OLD OLD-TIMERS (1969)

Old-Timers Day on August 9, 1969, was themed the Yankee All-Timers and the opponent All-Timers. For the first time since October 5, 1951 (Game Two of the World Series), Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio played together.27 A fan vote selected the all-timers. The outcome was odd: Two active Yankees were selected as Yankee All-Timers, Mel Stottlemyre and Joe Pepitone. The under- or near 40-year-old contingent included the newly retired Mantle, Whitey Ford, Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, and Bill Skowron. The Yankees roster included Bill Dickey, Joe Dugan, Waite Hoyt, Lefty Gomez, Charlie Keller, and Gil McDougald. Yankees opponents included Carl Furillo, the Bronx-born Rocky Colavito, and Hall of Famers Monte Irvin and Dizzy Dean. The largest ovations went to the newly elected Hall of Fame members Roy Campanella and Stan Musial.28 The game ended in a 0-0 stalemate.

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PENNANT (1971)

On July 10, 1971, the Yankees celebrated the 50th anniversary of their first pennant, in 1921, when the Yankees were tenants in the Polo Grounds. At least one member of all 29 pennant-winning teams was on hand. From the 1921 team were Whitey Witt, the first Yankee to take a turn at the plate in 1923 at Yankee Stadium, and Roger Peckinpaugh, who managed the Yankees for 20 games as a 23-year-old in 1914 and anchored shortstop for the Yankees for nine seasons.29

The two-inning affair was capped off with an unlikely inside-the-park home run by Elston Howard off Ralph Terry. It was the only run of the game.30 Throughout the game there was remarkable fielding, including a leaping grab by Gil McDougald off a hot smash by Tommy Byrne, and a running catch by Charlie Keller on a ball hit to deep left field by Hank Bauer. Pitchers were relieved after nearly every hitter, which enabled nearly all the attendees to participate. Of the 56 players on hand, the lone non-Yankee was a recent Hall of Fame inductee, Satchel Paige. Casey Stengel was the brunt of a press-box joke attacking his wisdom: “He has DiMaggio batting third and [Tommy] Henrich fourth.”31 Tom Tresh was the youngest Old-Timer, at 32.

MICKEY’S FINAL HOMER AT THE OLD YANKEE STADIUM (1973)

Longtime Yankees broadcast Mel Allen, the author of the widely recognized home-run call “It’s going, going, gone!” announced the Yankee Old-Timers Day on August 11, 1973.32 Whitey Ford took the mound. No strange sight for Yankee fans. Into the batter’s box came Mickey Mantle. Ford and Mantle were not only former teammates and close friends, but roommates for a time.

The stadium buzz turned loud. Over 46,000 fans watched this moment unfold, future Hall of Famers and Yankees immortals squaring off.

Ford readied and wasted no time. With the count 1-and-1, Mantle took an awkward cut, topping the pitch foul. With a better swing, he hit the next offering hard, a liner foul. Ford grooved the next pitch. Mantle hit it a long way into the upper deck, but foul. George Selkirk, coaching at third base, encouraged Mantle. Mel Allen gleefully implored, “Straighten it out, Mick.” With those words still hanging in the air, Allen continued, “[The pitch is] down the alley. There it goes; going, going, gone!”33 Mantle had launched a majestic fly that landed about 25 rows back in the lower left-field stands. In his prime, that ball most likely would have reached the upper deck. Fans cheered wildly as Mantle began the familiar head-down trot around the bases. He moved more slowly now with a more pronounced limp. This was Mantle’s final homer at the original Yankee Stadium. Renovation plans had been announced, and for the next two years, the Yankees played in Shea Stadium.

The Old-Timers team was divided between the Stengels and the Houks. The Stengels included Ford, Witt, Rizzuto, Johnny Mize, DiMaggio, Hector Lopez, and Andy Carey. The Houks included Mantle, Nick Etten, Irv Noren, Howard, Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, and Ryne Duren.34

“BILLY MARTIN WILL RETURN” (1978)35

Just five days after “quitting,” Billy Martin was rehired to take the reins again with the start of the 1980 season at Old-Timers Day on July 29, 1978.

The theme of this game was the silver anniversary of the amazing run of five straight World Series championships (1949-1953). According to John Sterling, announcing from the radio booth, this may have been the greatest assemblage of former players. The game marked Roger Maris’s first Yankee Old-Timers event. Joe Pepitone caught fans’ attention with two batting-practice blasts into right field. After the second, he pranced around the bases in his home-run trot. Harmon Killebrew and Elston Howard smashed several batting-practice drives into the left-field seats.

After the announcements like “the crafty chairman of the board” (Ford), “the greatest switch-hitter of the game” (Mantle), and “the greatest living player” (DiMaggio), Yankees’ PA announcer Bob Sheppard, announced that manager Bob Lemon had signed a new five-year contract with the club.36 He would manage through 1979 and then work as general manager through 1983. Fans booed. Sheppard quieted the crowd with his gentle but firm voice as only he could do. “Please, please … managing the Yankees in 1980 and for many more beyond then, number 1 …” 37 Applause erupted, rocked the stadium and continued for seven minutes.38 Billy was coming back.39

ONE RETURNS, TWO REUNITED, SNUBBED EX-PLAYER SATISFIED (1982)

On August 7, 1982, introductions for the great Yankees teams ranged from some lesser-known players like Marius Russo and Ed Wells to legends occupying their customary last and next-to-last spots in the introduction order, DiMaggio and Mantle, respectively.40

There were two notable reunions at the event this year. Joe DiMaggio took the field with his brother Dom, a Boston Red Sox star who had not put on a uniform for an old-timer event since 1971. Dom declined playing in the game due to a medical problem with his eyes. The other, Ray Fisher, the oldest Yankee at the time at 94, was rolled onto the Yankee Stadium field in a wheelchair for the first time. During his career with New York, he played at Hilltop Park and the Polo Grounds, but he was banned from baseball over a contract dispute before the 1921 season. Fisher’s lifetime banishment from baseball was lifted by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1980.41

Reports of the Old-Timers Game in the next day’s newspaper were brief: The American League All-Stars defeated the Yankee Stars, 2-1; Billy Pierce bested Whitey Ford; singles by Bob Allison, Vic Wertz, Steve Whitaker, and Roy Sievers produced the runs for the All-Stars, and the Yankees scored on singles by Irv Noren, Hector Lopez, and Jake Gibbs.42

Jim Bouton, a pitcher with the Yankees from 1962 to 1968, received more press with his reminiscent New York Times piece about his omission from Yankees invitees. The missed invitation stemmed from his controversial 1970 book, Ball Four, which revealed some of the players’ on- and off-the-field antics that previous writers would not dare print.43 In retrospect, Bouton felt he’d laughed last; defying baseball norms about speaking out, he was ahead of his time.

LITTLE RAY AND THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL YANKEE (1998)

For the 52nd Old-Timers Day, on July 25, 1998, Frank Messer, a former Yankees broadcaster who began serving as emcee for Old-Timers Day in 1988, manned the microphone. The game would feature players from the Yankees and Dodgers teams from the 1970s.44 His first two introductions were important. First, he welcomed Little Ray Kelly, who sat in the dugout on April 18, 1923, Yankee Stadium’s Opening Day, and served as Babe Ruth’s mascot until the early 1930s.45 Messer also recognized Jim Ogle, the 25-year director of the Yankees Alumni Association.46

Then, the announcement of the return of the “prodigal Yankee”; Messer welcomed back Jim Bouton, the hat-flying phenom with 21 victories in 1963. He referred to Bouton as an accomplished author. Fans roared. Bouton slyly smiled as he walked out, all the controversy from his book forgotten, thanks to a letter written by Bouton’s son Michael to the New York Times asking that the Yankees forgive his father.47

Dodgers in attendance included Ralph Branca, the pitcher who in 1951 yielded “The Shot Heard Round the World” to Bobby Thomson that gave the rival Giants the pennant. Other Dodgers there were Tommy Lasorda, Willie Davis, Steve Howe, and Tom Niedenfuer.

Mel Allen was posthumously honored as the “forever and legendary voice of the Yankees,” with a plaque in center field.48

Willie Randolph hit a walk-off homer as the Yankee Old-Timers bested the Dodgers again.

CELEBRATING A RUBY JUBILEE (2001)

On July 21, 2001, while Billy Crystal collected autographs in the dugout, the familiar voice of Bob Sheppard set the stage for the 55th Old-Timers Day celebration. He introduced the co-emcees, radio broadcasters John Sterling and Michael Kay. Sterling referred to Yankee accomplishments as magical and somewhat mythological, saying, [S]everal of the greatest moments in baseball history have been right here on this sacred field.” Michael Kay reminded the crowd that the Yankees had won four out of the last five World Series and were currently atop the AL East, meaning the fans should expect great Old-Timers Days in the future.49

Specific historical mention went to Ron Blomberg (baseball’s first designated hitter) and Rick Cerone, who was in the unenviable situation of following Thurman Munson behind the plate in the 1980 season.

After a pause to recognize the passing of former Yankees since the previous Old-Timers Day, accolades were given to Don Larsen for his 1956 World Series perfect game and to Hank Bauer, record holder for the World Series consecutive-game hitting streak (17). Then members of the 1961 Yankees were introduced. Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford received the loudest ovations. Posthumous honors were paid to Elston Howard, the first African American to play for the Yankees; and Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, by their sons Kevin Maris and David Mantle. Mantle and Maris combined for 115 homers in 1961 in the pursuit of Ruth’s record of 60. Acgor Billy Crystal, creator of the movie 61*, described Mantle and Maris as humble but the heart and soul of the ’61 team. He imagined what Mantle would respond: “Aw shucks, Whitey won 25 games, our catchers hit 64 home runs and we had the best defensive infield in baseball. We had a pretty good year.”50

The last introductions were Reggie Jackson51 and player/broadcaster Phil Rizzuto.

POMP, COMMEMORATION, AND IMAGE (2004)

For the 58th Old-Timers Day event, on July 10, 2004, former players once again gathered from an array of eras. Player ages ranged from the not very old to the aged.

Old-Timers Day by this time had become the Yankees’ most elaborate promotional event. And with it came the need for extensive and careful planning.52 The emphasis on an Old-Timers game had lessened.

Debbie Tymon, who in 2022 was the Yankees’ senior vice president of marketing and had been with the organization for nearly four decades, has headed this effort for much of that time. She and the team spend several months on a list of tasks, including deciding the invitees and that year’s commemorations, as well as travel and accommodations, the pre-event dinner, and the post-event wrap party.

There were two honorees in 2004. Honoring Red Ruffing, a plaque was added in center field’s Monument Park. Ruffing holds the Yankee record for complete games (261).53 Ruffing had allowed the most hits as a Yankee pitcher, 2,995. Catcher Thurman Munson was also honored; August 2 marked 25 years since his death.

The Yankees provide every Old-Timer in attendance with a new uniform. “I don’t want to hear at 12:30 that day that someone has forgotten their uniforms,” explained Tymon as to why players did not bring their own.54 As of 2004, each player also received a commemorative Louisville Slugger for his participation.

Every aspect of Old-Timers Day is well-orchestrated right down to the introduction order of invitees. By 2004, Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto, the senior statesmen, were fully entrenched in DiMaggio’s former closing spot in the roll call. Rizzuto even mimicked DiMaggio’s over the head two-handed salute to the crowd.

On this day other Yankee greats on hand included Reggie Jackson, Don Mattingly, Bill Skowron, and Hank Bauer. Luis Sojo hammered a walk-off home run off Ron Guidry. Sojo performed his best Reggie Jackson imitation – Jackson was recovering from knee surgery and didn’t play – as he rounded the bases.55

OLD-TIMERS BID FAREWELL TO THE ORIGINAL CATHEDRAL (2008)

On Saturday, August 2, 2008, the largest contingent, more than 70 Old-Timers, including 18 for the very first time, were at the original Yankee Stadium for its final Old-Timers Day celebration. The doors to the new Yankees home opened on April 3, 2009, on the north side of 161st Street and River Avenue.56

Each of the last 16 Yankees World Series championship teams since 1947 was represented at the 2008 event by at least one player. Yankees alumni in uniform included Hall of Fame members Yogi Berra, Wade Boggs, Whitey Ford, Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, and 2008 inductee Rich “Goose” Gossage.57 Baseball’s all-time stolen-base leader Rickey Henderson made his first Yankee Stadium Old-Timers Day appearance. The loudest and longest welcome of the afternoon went to Willie Randolph, unceremoniously dumped as Mets manager in June.58 The standing ovation lasted several minutes.59 Lesser-known players were also on hand. One such player who had experienced a magical season in pinstripes was Aaron Small. He compiled a remarkable 10-0 record for the 2005 AL East champions. Prior to that, he had won 15 games in seven seasons. Perhaps the least-recognized player there was Mickey Klutts, a Yankees veteran of eight games from 1976-78.

The 1996 World Series winners were well represented. Tino Martinez (then a special assistant to the general manager), Pat Kelly, Jimmy Key, Graeme Lloyd, Ramiro Mendoza, Jeff Nelson, and Tim Raines were all on hand, as were other Yankees including Mike Stanley, David Wells, current pitching coach Dave Eiland, former manager Buck Showalter, and former coach Jeff Torborg. First-time attendees included Don Baylor, Tony Fernandez, Wayne Tolleson, and YES Network broadcaster Al Leiter.

The widows of five legendary Yankees were also present – Arlene Howard, widow of Elston Howard; Helen Hunter, widow of Jim “Catfish” Hunter; Jill Martin, widow of Billy Martin; Diana Munson, widow of Thurman Munson; and Cora Rizzuto, widow of Phil Rizzuto.

The greats and the ordinary gathered in uniform, each with their memories and sentiments, and said goodbye to the great stadium in the Bronx.

RALPH PELUSO was born in New York City and remains a loyal Yankees fan. Since becoming a member of SABR in 2009, he has been a contributing member of the Overlooked Legends committee. Ralph holds an MBA in finance from Bernard Baruch College and is now retired after 45 years in corporate finance and management consulting. His book 512, a fictional re-imagination based on Babe Ruth, was published in 2014. His latest work, a psychological thriller titled Back Stories, was released in November 2022. Several of Ralph’s short stories are published. He began contributing to SABR projects in 2018. Ralph trekked to Mount Everest base camp in April 2019. He serves as the literary editor for the Zebra Press, a monthly newspaper serving Northern Virginia and the DC Metro area, and writes the “Book of the Month” series. Ralph and his spouse, Janet, enjoy retirement in an active 55+ community near the Delaware beaches.

NOTES

1 Associated Press, “Yankee Stadium: Remembering a Baseball Cathedral,” ESPN.​com, July 3, 2008. h​ttp:/​/www.​espn.​com/e​spn/w​ire/_​/sect​ion/m​lb/id​/3472​343. Accessed December 14, 2022.

2 A great deal of information regarding Old-Timers Days at Yankee Stadium may be found at this site: h​ttp:/​/www.​ultim​ateya​nkees​.com/​oldti​mersd​ay.​htm. Date accessed October 31, 2022.

3 John Thorn, ht​tps:/​/twit​ter.c​om/th​orn_j​ohn/s​tatus​/1567​88631​74841​303​05. Accessed October 31, 2022.

4 John Drebinger, “61,808 Fans Roar Tribute to Gehrig,” New York Times, July 5, 1939: 1.

5 Robert W. Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 418-419.

6 Jane Leavy, The Big Fella (New York: Harper, 2018), 444.

7 Leonard Koppett, “Yankee Old Timer Fans Get a Run for the Money,” New York Times, July 11, 1971: S 1. Red Patterson was the first publicity director for a major-league baseball team, joining the Yankees in 1946. Patterson is credited with many innovations promoting fan interest during his 45-year career in professional baseball. See Ross Newhan, “Red Paterson Dies of Cancer,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1992: C2.

8 Sports Century: Babe Ruth Sports Century: ESPN Classic, available at h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=5GkZ​Rw2​1kho. Accessed October 31, 2022.

9 Hy Turkin, “Ruth Whispers His Gratitude to Cheering Fans,” New York Daily News, April 28, 1947: 3.

10 Jim McCulley, “Ancients Turn Back Clock – 2 Inns,” New York Daily News, September 29, 1947: 43.

11 “Babe Ruth Foundation Set Up to Aid Underprivileged Youth; Famous Player Makes Initial Gift to the Organization,” New York Times, May 9, 1947: 27.

12 McCulley.

13 “25 Years of Glorious Deeds in Stadium Revived by Babe Ruth and Host of Other Yankee Stars,” New York Times, June 14, 1948: 26.

14 Joe Trimble, “Number 3 Brings Down House That Ruth Built,” New York Daily News, June 14, 1948: C17.

15 Babe Ruth’s Last Appearance at Yankee Stadium, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=nmcj​CQNGz​DY. Accessed November 4, 2022.

16 Trimble.

17 Trimble.

18 “25 Years of Glorious Deeds in Stadium Revived by Babe Ruth and Host of Other Yankee Stars.”

19 Bonham and Borowy were still active players at the time.

20 “25 Years of Glorious Deeds in Stadium Revived by Babe Ruth and Host of Other Yankee Stars.”

21 “Old Timers Day Today at Stadium,” New York Times, August 30, 1952: S 7.

22 Dave Anderson, “Reggie a No-Show; Billy Draws Cheers,” New York Times, July 17, 1988: S3.

23 “Old Timers Day Today at Stadium.”

24 “Old Timers Day Today at Stadium.” See also “Yankee Stars Through 50 Years Thrill 41,558 at Stadium,” New York Times, August 31, 1952: S 1, 2.

25 Mark Leepson, “Of Al Schacht and a Cracker Jack Afternoon,” New York Times, October 21, 1984: S2.

26 “DiMaggio Hits One for Auld Lang Syne at Yankee Stadium,” New York Times, August 1, 1965: S1.

27 John Drebinger, “Yanks Win, 3 to 1, Tie Series; Lopat Holds Giants to 5 Hits.” New York Times, October 6, 1951: 1.

28 “New Old Timers Steal the Show,” New York Times, August 10, 1969: Sports S1.

29 “74,200 See Yankees Open New Stadium: Ruth Hits Home Run,” New York Times, April 19, 1923: 1, 15.

30 Leonard Koppett, “Yankee Old Timer Fans Get a Run for the Money,” New York Times, July 11, 1971: S 1.

31 “Yankee Old Timer Fans Get a Run for the Money.”

32 Mickey Mantle 1973 – His Last Home Run in Yankee Stadium, OTD, 8/11/1973, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=I9fN​cMLaW​_A. Accessed October 15, 2022.

33 Mickey Mantle 1973 – His Last Home Run in Yankee Stadium, OTD, 8/11/1973.

34 Gerald Eskenazi, “Old Yankees Visit Their Past,” New York Times, August 12, 1973: Sports 1.

35 New York Daily News front-page headline, July 30, 1978.

36 On DiMaggio, see “Baseball’s Centennial ‘Greatest Players Ever’ Poll,” n​ation​alpas​timem​useum​.com, September 12, 2019, h​ttps:​//www​.then​ation​alpas​timem​useum​.com/​artic​le/ba​sebal​ls-ce​ntenn​ial-g​reate​st-pl​ayers​-ever​-poll. Accessed December 14, 2022.

37 Bob Sheppard 1978 – Billy Martin to Return as Manager Speech, 7/29/1978, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=KQf2​BYjnk​Rw. Accessed December 6, 2022.

38 Murray Chass, “Martin Will Rejoin Yanks as Club’s Manager in 1980,” New York Times, July 30, 1978: S5 1, 3.

39 Martin never managed the Yankees in 1980. On June 18, 1979, the Yankees fired Bob Lemon after the club got off to a slow start. Martin rejoined the Yankees then. On October 29, 1979, Martin was once again fired for a fight in Minneapolis. The Martin saga continued, with Martin ultimately hired and fired five times as Yankees manager before his death in 1989.

40 1982 New York Yankees Old Timers Game (revised), YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=LPkW​AUEhV​yc. Accessed December 4, 2022.

41 Jacob Pomrenke, “A Rose by Another Name; Ray Fisher’s Ban from Baseball,” the n​ation​alast​imemu​suem.​org. January 4, 2020. h​ttps:​//www​.then​ation​alpas​timem​useum​.com/​artic​le/ro​se-an​other​-name​-ray-​fishe​rs-ba​n-bas​eball​-0. Accessed December 14, 2022.

42 Murray Chass, “Trading Dent for Mazzilli,” New York Times, August 8, 1982: S5 1, 5.

43 Jim Bouton, “Outside Looking In: An Uninvited Guest Gets Last Laugh,” New York Times, August 8, 1982: Sports 2.

44 1998-07-25: New York Yankees Old Timers Day, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=lvGy​JT_​D5​nI. Accessed December 4, 2022.

45 Richard Goldstein, “Ray Kelly, 83, Babe Ruth’s Little Pal, Dies,” New York Times, November 14, 2001: A25.

46 1998-07-25: New York Yankees Old Timers Day.

47 Dave Anderson, “Return of the Prodigal Yankee Old-Timer,” New York Times, July 26, 1998: Sports 1.

48 1998-07-25: New York Yankees Old Timers Day.

49 2001-07-21: Old Timer’s Day – Tribute to the 1961 New York Yankees, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=BGfu​g-​RkN​xE. Accessed December 1, 2022.

50 2001-07-21: Old Timer’s Day – Tribute to the 1961 New York Yankees.

51 Reggie Jackson becomes Mr. October during the 1977 World Series | Yankees-Dodgers: An Uncivil War, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=DzEa​vV_Q2​9U. Accessed December 1, 2022.

52 Richard Sandomir, “Sports Business: Yankees Plan to Make Old-Timers Look New,” New York Times, July 9, 2004: D 6.

53 Andrew Marchand, “Yanks Honor Ruffing,” New York Post, July 11, 2004.

54 Sandomir.

55 Sojo Wins 2004 Old Timers’ Day with a Walk-Off Homer, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=DH8j​4iWM​SOE. Accessed December 1, 2022.

56 Tyler Kepner, “Amenities and Expectations at Yankee Stadium Opening,” New York Times, April 4, 2009: S 1.

57 Reggie Jackson, recovering from knee surgery, did not play in the Old-Timers Day game.

58 Billy Altman, “Yankee Greats, and Not-So-Greats, Celebrate the End of Many Eras,” New York Times, August 3, 2008. Digital Access December 1, 2022.

59 Yankees Old Timers Day 2008 Willie Randolph, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=7Qft​ffraz​T8. Accessed December 1, 2022.

After their on-field exploits of 1961, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were sought by film producer Tom Naud for a Hollywood feature. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

Occasionally, baseball films spotlight sequences or storylines that are Florida-centric. Not surprisingly, they primarily are linked to spring training—and some even have real-world connections. Slide, Kelly, Slide (1927), for example, features the New York Yankees working out in Delano—and highlights guest appearances by Mike Donlin, Bob Meusel, Irish Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri. Big Leaguer (1953), starring Edward G. Robinson as ballplayer-turned-talent evaluator John B. “Hans” Lobert, is set in a New York Giants tryout camp in Melbourne. In Fear Strikes Out (1957), Boston Red Sox rookie Jimmy Piersall (Anthony Perkins) heads for spring training in Sarasota.

Others are fictional. Kill the Umpire (1950) stars William Bendix as an ex-ballplayer, loudmouth, and die-hard fan who resides with his family in St. Petersburg, where he sneaks off to Grapefruit League contests between the New York and St. Louis nines. Strategic Air Command (1955) toplines James Stewart as a B-29 bomber pilot-turned St. Louis Cardinals all-star third sacker who trains in St. Petersburg; in the film’s first shot, a car pulls up outside Al Lang Field, the designated “Winter Home (of the) St. Louis Cardinals.” In Major League (1989), a menagerie of has-been and never-were ballplayers shows up for Cleveland Indians’ spring training (albeit in Arizona, rather than Florida). But there is a Sunshine State connection: The snooty ex-showgirl who has just taken over team ownership schemes to move the Tribe to Florida. The city of Miami has promised her a new stadium, a Boca Raton mansion, and a Palm Beach Polo and Country Club membership. So how can she refuse?

In Fever Pitch (2005), the following dialogue is spoken between Ben (Jimmy Fallon), a Boston Red Sox fanatic, and Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), his new girlfriend:

Ben: “… every year during Easter vacation … uh, me and my friends, we go down to Florida.”

Lindsey: “You and your buddies go down to Florida for spring break? At your age?”

Ben: “No, no, no, not spring break. Spring training with the Red Sox.”

Lindsey: “Oh, you get to train with the Red Sox? Are you allowed to do that?”

Ben: “Well, we don’t actually. … We watch the games.”

Lindsey: “Aren’t those just practice games?”

Ben: “Yeah, yeah, but there’s more to it than that. We scout the players. We … we say which players they should keep … which they should get rid of.”

Lindsey: “And the Red Sox ask your opinion?”

Ben: “Well, not yet …”

Ben heads south and, later on, Lindsey tells him: “I saw you on ESPN.” He responds: “Oh! We looked like morons, didn’t we?” And his excuse: “Well, it’s very hot, you know, it’s Florida.”

Of all baseball films with Sunshine State/spring training connections, however, the one that most typifies the Grapefruit League world is not one of the first-division sports yarns. Far from it. For indeed, the best that can be said about Safe at Home! is that it is an innocuous kiddie film—and despite its spotlight on the New York Yankees, one need not wrap oneself up in pinstripe pride to savor it. The film (which was released in 1962) is a must-see if only because it stars the M&M boys themselves, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. The previous season, of course, Maris had whacked 61 dingers to top Babe Ruth’s single-season record, while Mantle chimed in with 54 round-trippers. Unlike Slide, Kelly, Slide and countless other films which feature real-life ballplayers in cameo appearances, these genuine American heroes not only shag flies and smash fastballs but also are called upon to act.

Safe at Home! is the saga of Hutch Lawton (Bryan Russell), a motherless, baseball-mad ten-year-old Little Leaguer who has moved to Palms, Florida, with his father, Ken (Don Collier), a struggling charter boat operator. Henry, a fellow Little Leaguer and patronizing banker’s son, harasses Hutch because the elder Lawton is immersed in his work and unable to watch the team practice. Hutch responds by bragging that his dad not only is more baseball-savvy than any other parent but is best buddies with New York Yankees players—and specifically Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. The youngster even claims that Ken Lawton is “Roger Maris’s best friend in the whole South.”

Hutch of course is dumbfounded upon being pressured to bring the ballplayers to a league dinner. What will he do? “I’m gonna go see ’em,” he declares. “That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna ask ’em to help. They just gotta say yes.” So the youngster sneaks off to Fort Lauderdale, then the Yankees’ spring training home, by hiding in the back of a fish truck operated by a friend’s father. Upon his arrival, he sneaks into the Mick’s hotel room and Fort Lauderdale Stadium; showers in the same stall where the ballplayers clean up; falls asleep in the team’s locker room while garbed in Maris’s jersey and employing Mantle’s as a blanket; and is confronted by Bill Turner (William Frawley), a quick-tempered yet sympathetic Yankees coach. As any young fan might, Hutch imagines himself a flychaser who is cheered on as he smacks base hits and makes circus catches. Plus, he endlessly sighs, “Mickey Mantle…Roger Maris…Gosh…Gee….” In the tradition of happy-ever-after Hollywood finales, Hutch realizes that fibbing is bad business, Ken learns that his son requires attention and understanding, and Hutch and his teammates get to visit Fort Lauderdale and spend quality time with Mantle, Maris, and their teammates.

Robert Creamer, writing in Sports Illustrated, observed that Safe at Home! “was designed for cheap, quick filming, a [spring training 1962] release date and a fast buck.” The previous summer, as Mantle and Maris were smashing dingers, Tom Naud, the film’s eventual producer and story co-author, conjured up the idea of starring them onscreen. He contacted Frank Scott, the ballplayers’ agent, and a deal quickly was struck. In the original storyline, Mantle and Maris were to play deaf-and-dumb siblings—perhaps because they could not read lines believably—but the concept was nixed by Scott. What then emerged was the scenario that was used in the film and, by November 1961, all was in place for the spring shooting schedule.1 The New York Times added that Safe at Home! was produced by Columbia Pictures “on a comparatively modest budget” of “about $1,000,000,” with Mantle and Maris “dividing a guaranty of $50,000.”2

On February 7, 1962, the Times reported that the duo was “heading for Fort Lauderdale … but not for baseball. For the next few weeks they will be here strictly as actors, appearing in the Columbia picture ‘Safe At Home!’ Scenes will be shot at the ball park and at the club’s quarters in the Yankee Clipper Hotel.”3 A week later, it was announced that star hurler Whitey Ford and skipper Ralph Houk had been added to the cast. The paper also noted a bit of off-camera drama: “…during the filming of the preliminary shots at near-by Pompano Lake, there was quite a to-do when one of the camera men, Irving Lippman, lost, or thought he had lost, a valuable ring. Mantle sailed right in and spent some fifteen minutes trying to find it in the loose dirt. When the cameraman returned to his hotel, he found the ring on top of his dresser. He was all apologies but Mickey assured him he should ‘think nothing of it. The exercise did me good.’”4

On February 15, the Times ran a feature on the production. “The Yankees went Hollywood today, and for more than four hours, Manager Ralph Houk’s well-regulated training camp became a merry shambles,” wrote John Drebinger. The scribe noted that the otherwise “obliging” Houk, certainly a novice at moviemaking protocol, gave the film’s director, Walter Doniger, full control of the ball park. However, “by the time the field was well-cluttered with sound trucks, cameras, ladders, wires and whatnot, Houk felt he had obliged enough.” The manager also was ill-prepared for the presence of the make-up artist, who was to groom him for his on-camera emoting. “For the Major is still a rugged military man,” noted Drebinger, “and the rouge and powder made him squirm. Especially when he found himself in the center of the astonished stares of the players.” Adding to Houk’s frustration was that his few lines with Bill Frawley had to be re-shot eight times.5

Ten days later, Drebinger penned another piece on the progress of the shooting. He observed that, according to Doniger and Tom Naud, Mantle and Maris “are not performing as actors but as themselves. Their lines are what they would say as ballplayers.” Drebinger was quick to disagree, however, given that “the jargon of the dugout could be a trifle rough.” But he added: “Mantle and Maris are doing well, so far. Mantle, in particular, seems to be enjoying himself. He laughs easily and takes everything in stride. Asked whether he preferred being an actor to a ballplayer he replied: ‘Why, this life is a breeze. Shucks, in this business when you make a mistake you do it over and over and over until you do it right. Around the ball field when you misjudge a fly ball or let a third strike whiz by they don’t give you another crack at it.’”6

Drebinger reported that Doniger “insists that Mantle, Maris and the other Yanks in the picture, including coach Johnny Neun and some twenty rookies who provide background, have been a most agreeable surprise. ‘They’ve really amazed me,’ he says, ‘by their poise and the relaxed manner in which they handle themselves, especially in the outdoor scenes with spectators gaping at them from all sides. Even professional actors sometimes feel a bit self-conscious working under such conditions. But ballplayers, I guess from the nature of their business, are so accustomed to playing before a crowd that it doesn’t bother them in the least’.” (Drebinger also noted that one of the junior ballplayers in the cast was none other than “freckle-faced David Mantle, Mickey’s 6-year-old son.”)7

In retrospect, it is no surprise that Mantle and particularly Maris do not give Oscar-caliber performances in Safe at Home! What matters is who they are: clean-cut all-American champions being marketed as models for young American boys. And they are not the sole Yankees spouting dialogue. Whitey Ford speaks a line: “Hey Rog, Mickey. Houk wants to see you right away.” Ralph Houk has several interchanges: “Hey, Bill, can I see you for a minute. … What’s that youngster doing on the bench? … Keep on running. Run harder than that …” (For sure, the Safe at Home! screenplay was not penned by Ernest Hemingway.) And as the Yankees train, the names “Tom” and “Phil” are detectable. Could they be “Tresh” and “Linz”? When somebody cries “Pepi,” he has to be citing Joe Pepitone.

Actor William Frawley, far left, is shown in this publicity still with various members of the cast and crew of Safe at Home, including Mantle and Maris.

Also of note in Safe at Home! is the presence of Frawley, a lifelong baseball fan whose Coach Bill is a variation of the crabby but endearing characters he played on I Love Lucy and My Three Sons, his hit TV series. In one scene, the coach and Mantle and Maris pass the hours away from spring practice by playing Scrabble in a hotel room—and M&M gently tease him on his ineptitude at spelling. “Who says so?” Bill growls. “Webster,” is Mantle’s answer. “What club’s he with?” the coach responds. At one point, Bill dubs Mantle and Maris (who then were as celebrated as any big leaguer) a “bunch of mangy rookies.”

Less than two months after its filming, Safe at Home! was released theatrically to coincide with the start of the 1962 season. Its premiere was no star-studded Hollywood event; the film opened on a double bill with Chubby Checker’s Don’t Knock the Twist, another Hollywood product attempting to cash in on the era’s zeitgeist. Both were combined in their advertising copy, which was headlined: “2 GREAT HITS ON ONE GRAND SLAM TWISTIN’ PROGRAM,” with Safe at Home! featuring “The great M&M playing themselves! Big Buddies to the luckiest kid in the world!” Given Frawley’s popularity, he was spotlighted for playing “the tough, gruff, lovable coach.”

Unsurprisingly, the film’s reviews were at best tepid. New York Times critic Eugene Archer summarized the majority opinion by declaring: “Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris came up to bat in unfamiliar surroundings yesterday and went down swinging,” adding that Safe at Home! was “a whimsical little children’s film” and “minor league production.”8 Additionally, in order to be cast in Safe at Home! Mantle and Maris were afforded membership in the Screen Actors Guild, which made them eligible to garner Best Actor Academy Award nominations. But they were not members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which barred them from voting in the Oscar race. “They must achieve distinction as actors,” explained an unnamed Academy expert, adding: “It is not felt that their distinction is in the field of acting.”9

Almost four decades after the release of Safe at Home!, I interviewed a number of the film’s participants while researching Meet the Mertzes, a double biography of William Frawley and Vivian Vance, his I Love Lucy co-star. One was Tom Naud, who explained that Frawley “loved being cast in (the film). He loved calling Ralph, Mickey, Roger, and Whitey by their first names.” At the same time, Frawley only palled around with the stars. “I wouldn’t have been invited to talk baseball with him,” recalled Jim Bouton, then a Yankees rookie, who was one of the extras. “That was for Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and the big guys, like Whitey Ford. I was just happy to be asked to be an extra in the movie, for which I got paid the munificent sum of $50.”10 (According to the New York Times, the rookies “had [each] received $100 for romping on the field.”)11

As for Mantle and Maris, Walter Doniger offered a take on the ballplayers that was far-removed from what he told the press during the shoot. Doniger described them as “pretty arrogant and ego-driven.” To convince them to respond to his directorial cues, he determined that “the best thing I could do would be to pretend total ignorance of baseball, and not know who they were. One time, I said to them, ‘I’d like in this scene for you to run not counterclockwise but clockwise around the bases. ‘They looked at me and said, ‘You can’t do that in baseball.’” Doniger added: “I would deliberately get their names reversed, so that they kept trying to prove to me that they were important. I thought the best thing to do would be to make them ordinary people to me, and not big league stars and world heroes. So I did that, and it seemed to work.’”12

Whether the M&M boys were model citizens during the shoot, or haughty superstars, or something in between, what matters today is that Safe at Home!, while no Pride of the Yankees or 61*, does offer a nostalgic snapshot of a moment in time. (And speaking of 61*, wouldn’t Billy Crystal—famed Yankees fan who celebrated his sixtieth birthday by DH-ing in a 2008 spring training game in Tampa—have made a perfect Hutch Lawton?)

ROB EDELMAN teaches film history courses at the University at Albany. He is the author of Great Baseball Films and Baseball on the Web, and is co-author (with his wife, Audrey Kupferberg) of Meet the Mertzes, a double biography of I Love Lucy ’s Vivian Vance and famed baseball fan William Frawley, and Matthau: A Life. He is a film commentator on WAMC (Northeast) Public Radio and a contributing editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. He is a frequent contributor to Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game and has written for Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond, Total Baseball, Baseball in the Classroom, Memories and Dreams, and NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. His essay on early baseball films appears on the DVD Reel Baseball: Baseball Films from the Silent Era, 1899–1926, and he is an interviewee on the director’s cut DVD of The Natural.

SAFE AT HOME!
CREDITS

DIRECTOR: Walter Doniger.
PRODUCER: Tom Naud.
SCREENPLAY: Robert Dillion, based on a story by Naud and Steve Ritch.
MUSIC: Van Alexander.
A NAUD-HAMILBURG PRODUCTION.
CAST: Mickey Mantle (Himself); Roger Maris (Himself); William Frawley (Bill Turner); Patricia Barry (Johanna Price);
Don Collier (Ken Lawton); Eugene Iglesias (Mr. Torres); Flip Mark (Henry); Bryan Russell (Hutch Lawton); Scott Lane (Mike Torres); Charles G. Martin (Henry’s Father); Ralph Houk (Himself); Whitey Ford (Himself).

NOTE: Approximately twenty Yankee rookies and other team personnel appear unbilled. Cast as one of the young ballplayers, also unbilled, is David Mantle, Mickey’s son.

Notes

1. Robert Creamer, “Mantle and Maris in the Movies.” Sports Illustrated, April 2, 1962, 96–108.

2. John Drebinger, “Teamwork on the Citrus Circuit.” New York Times, February 25, 1962, X7.

3. John Drebinger, “Toothpick Bat: Weighty Topic in Yanks’ Camp.” New York Times, February 7, 1962, 59.

4. John Drebinger, “Two Infielders Figure in Plans.” New York Times, February 14, 1962, 29.

5. John Drebinger, “Houk Gets Some Coaching, Hollywood Style.” New York Times, February 15, 1962, 32.

6. John Drebinger, “Teamwork on the Citrus Circuit.” New York Times, February 25, 1962, X7.

7. Drebinger, “Teamwork on the Citrus Circuit.”

8. Eugene Archer, “Double Bill at Neighborhood Theatres.” New York Times, April 14, 1962, 14.

9. Murray Schumach, “Mantle, Maris in Oscar Race.” New York Times, February 16, 1963, 5

10. Rob Edelman, Audrey Kupferberg. Meet the Mertzes (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 204–205.

11. John Drebinger, “Houk Gets Some Coaching, Hollywood Style.” New York Times, February 15, 1962, 32.

12. Rob Edelman, Audrey Kupferberg. Meet the Mertzes. (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999, 204–205.)

For decades, baseball fans have debated who was the better center fielder, Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were both born in 1931 and reached the majors almost simultaneously in 1951, competing against each other as rookies in the World Series. Together with Duke Snider, they appeared in 11 World Series between 1951 and 1956, and arguments about their relative ability raged throughout the city of New York and beyond. The older Snider faded from the National League’s leaderboards after that, but Mantle and Mays continued to dominate their leagues and start every All-Star Game in center field well into the 1960s. Until Henry Aaron’s successful pursuit of Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record captured the nation’s imagination, they remained unquestionably the most famous and the highest-praised players of their generation.

Who was better – and in particular, who was the better player at his peak? In his first Historical Baseball Abstract in 1988, Bill James, the founder of modern sabermetrics, argued very strongly for Mantle. “Mickey Mantle was, at his peak in 1956-57 and again in 1961-62, clearly a greater player than Willie Mays – and it is not a close or difficult decision,” James wrote. Identifying Mantle’s three best seasons as 1957, 1958, and 1961, and Mays’ as 1954, 1955, and 1958, he used his runs created formula to measure offensive performance, and claimed that Mantle had created about 35 more runs per season in his best years than Mays had in his.

Turning to baserunning, which was not part of the runs created formula, James pointed out that Mickey’s stolen-base percentage (although not his stolen-base total) was higher than Willie’s, and that he grounded into far fewer double plays (obviously because he batted left-handed for the great majority of his at-bats). Then, without using any statistical method, James argued that while Mays was probably the greater center fielder, Mantle was “a very good center fielder,” and that the difference between them in the field could not possibly make up for Mantle’s superiority at the plate.1 By the time he brought out a revised edition of the Abstract in 2001, James had developed Win Shares, his single measurement of a player’s offensive and defensive value. Based on win shares, he now identified Mantle’s best seasons as 1957-58 and 1961 and Mays’ best as 1965. He did not assert Mantle’s superiority so dramatically, but he still claimed that those three seasons of Mantle’s were all better than Mays’ 1965 season.2 He also acknowledged that Mays had been by far the better player over the course of their entire careers.

Roger Maris, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle gave fits to big-league pitchers. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

In 2011 Michael Humphreys published Wizardry, a new study of fielding statistics, which longtime sabermetrician Richard Cramer has described as “the greatest single intellectual accomplishment in the history of sabermetrics.”3 Humphreys used a new method, Defensive Regression Analysis or DRA, to measure the fielding ability of a player at any position against the league average at that position. By his measurements, Humphreys ranked Mays as the second-best defensive center fielder of all time (between Andruw Jones, first, and Tris Speaker, third), and wrote that Mantle’s defensive performance was only significantly above average in two of his 14 seasons in center field –1952 and 1959 – and was -41 runs worse than average over his whole career.4 Those numbers led me to reevaluate the question of whether Mantle’s best seasons really were significantly better than Mays’ based on the method I developed for my own book, Baseball Greatness.5

That method combines offensive data from the website baseball-reference.com with Humphreys’ fielding data to compute a single number for Wins Above Average. As I explained in this book, I used Wins Above Average (WAA) rather than Wins Above Replacement (WAR) because average performance can be computed much more accurately than replacement performance, and because WAA gives a much clearer indication of a player’s value to his team.6 I eventually defined a superstar season as 4 WAA or more and found 1,803 such player-seasons in the major leagues from 1901 through 2019. We shall see in a moment that Mays’ and Mantle’s best seasons were more than twice as good as that.

My calculations showed that Mantle’s best seasons (in order of highest WAA) were 1957, 1956, and 1961, while Mays had four seasons at a comparable level, 1954, 1958, 1964, and 1965. Rbat represents runs above average generated by hitting, Rbaser is baserunning runs, Rdp represents runs gained or lost via frequency of grounding into double plays, and Rfield is runs saved in the field according to DRA.

Before going any further, we must understand exactly how extraordinary these seasons were. Each man had one season with more than 9 WAA – and in the whole history of baseball there have been only 39 seasons that good. They also had five of the 59 seasons between 8.0 and 8.9 WAA. This table confirms that Mantle’s best offensive seasons were indeed superior to Mays’, mainly because Mantle walked so much more frequently. His batting runs above average (Rbat) substantially exceed Mays’ in every one of these years. In addition, Mantle was indeed very marginally superior as a baserunner because he grounded into fewer double plays, although Willie earned an extra run or two on the bases in other ways. Above all, however, Humphreys’ fielding data shows that Mantle, in two of these three seasons, was essentially average, while Mays ranged from significantly above average to the fielding stratosphere in 1954. And that is why, in place of the substantial overall superiority that James ascribed to Mantle, we find that he had only a marginal superiority comparing their best three seasons, and that only Mantle’s best season was superior to Mays’ best, which turns out to be 1954 because of his fielding. Mantle’s superiority in peak value earned the Yankees less than one extra win per season.

We must also look at one other adjustment. WAA measures an individual’s performance against league average performance, and by the mid-1960s the National League was significantly stronger than the American League because it was more integrated and included far more outstanding Black players. Comparing Willie’s and Mickey’s best seasons, we find that Black players earned only 60 WAA in the 1957 American League, while earning 143 WAA in the 1954 National League. Black players in the AL in 1956 and 1961 – Mickey’s two other best seasons – earned 99 and 138 WAA, whereas in the NL in 1958, 1964, and 1965 – Willie’s other greatest seasons – they earned 251, 560, and 645 WAA. Using a rough calculation, I attempted to estimate how much the additional Black players in the National League added to league average performance by “replacing” them, theoretically, with average players. The results of the adjustment are shown below.

Yankee fans, take heart. Mantle’s three best seasons are still superior to Willie’s – by the microscopic total of 0.1 WAA, equivalent to about one run created per season. While Mantle’s offensive contribution was bigger, Mays balanced that out with his almost unparalleled work in center field. Meanwhile, their joint dominance of their leagues for a 13-year period was extraordinary. Mantle led all American League hitters (and usually all AL players) in WAA six times: in 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1961, and 1962. Mays led all NL hitters (and usually all NL players) 10 times, in 1954-58, 1960 (when he tied with Henry Aaron), 1962, and 1964-66. While Mantle won three MVP Awards and Mays two, both of them arguably deserved a lot more. And at their peaks they performed at an extraordinarily similar level.

DAVID KAISER first experienced Willie Mays on television during the 1954 World Series, at the age of 7, when he saw Willie’s famous catch in the first game. A historian, he taught for 37 years at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College. He is the author of two baseball books, Epic Season, the 1948 American League Pennant Race, and Baseball Greatness: The Best Players and Teams According to Wins Above Average. He has given numerous presentations at local SABR chapters and at a number of national conventions. He lives with his wife, Patti Cassidy, in Watertown, Massachusetts.

NOTES

1  Bill James, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Villard Books, 1988), 403-406.

2  Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Abstract (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 728. James has never explained exactly how he incorporated fielding measurements into Win Shares.

3  Richard D. Cramer, When Big Data Was Small (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 54.

4  Michael Humphreys, Wizardry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 286, 308-13.

5  David Kaiser, Baseball Greatness: The Best Players and Teams According to Wins Above Average (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017).

6  I also dropped baseball-reference.com’s practice of adding points for players at more demanding defensive positions and taking points away from those at easier positions, for reasons that I explained therein.

Mickey Mantle’s wife, Merlyn, and eldest son Mickey, Jr. attended the first Mickey Mantle Day on September 18, 1965. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

The movie 42 brought us the story of Jackie Robinson’s debut in the major leagues, complete with the recreations of much-told stories in Robinson lore: the boycott initiated by southern-bred players on the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey’s “turn the other cheek” meeting with Robinson, and the vicious bench jockeying by Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman. When compared to historical accounts, 42 portrays these scenes with accuracy. For example, after a Phillies-Dodgers game, Chapman explains that his racially charged verbal abuse of Robinson is nothing new by comparing it to other instances that, in his paradigm, are part of the game.

The Chapman scene parallels the description in Wait Till Next Year by Carl Rowan and Jackie Robinson: “You fellows want Robinson to become a real big leaguer, I suppose. Well, so do we, and we’re treating him just the same as we do any other player on a rival club. When we’re playing exhibitions with the Yanks, DiMaggio is always ‘The Wop,’ and when we meet the Cards, Whitey Kurowsky (sic) is ‘The Polack.’ The phils [sic] ball club rides the devil out of every team it meets. That’s our style of baseball. We hand it out and we expect to take it too.”[fn]Carl T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson, Wait Till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson (New York: Random House, 1960), 183.[/fn]

The climactic scene in 42 deviates from history, using dramatic license to amplify the story’s tension. In the movie’s climactic scene, Robinson faces Pittsburgh’s Fritz Ostermueller in a game that could clinch the National League pennant for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Although Robinson did hit a game-winning home run off Ostermueller on September 17, it was not the clinching game; the win merely reduced the Dodgers’ magic number to two.[fn]www.baseball-almanac.com/teamstats/schedule.php?y=1947&t=SLN[/fn]

Early in the film, Ostermueller beans Robinson, another exaggeration: Ostermueller hit Robinson with a pitch at a Pirates home game on May 17, 1947, but the ball struck Robinson’s arm, not head.[fn]Richard “Pete” Peterson, “The Next Page: Fritz Ostermueller, beaned by Hollywood,” www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2014/08/03/The-Next-Page-Beaned-by-Hollywood-by-Richard-Pete-Peterson-Fritz-Ostermueller-Pirates-pitcher-unfairly-cast-as-a-racist-in-the-movie-42/stories/201408030088, August 3, 2014.[/fn] (However, Robinson may have prevented a beaning by throwing up his arm.)

Ostermueller is a setup-payoff device in 42, setting up a scene where the hero is defeated, so that a payoff occurs later in the story when he overcomes the opponent. The payoff is Robinson hitting a home run off Ostermuller. Here, the scene not only deviates from history, but from Robinson’s business-as-usual approach to baseball, by depicting Robinson standing in the batter’s box after the climactic home run. This deviation from baseball’s unwritten rules of conduct rankled Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, who wrote, “But nowhere in my extensive readings covering six decades of sports fandom do I recall hearing about him clinching the 1947 pennant for the Dodgers with a home run in Pittsburgh. I must have skipped those pages, because that’s what Mr. Helgeland has him doing…. And get this: He has Jackie watching the home run from the batter’s box. In 1947? Unimaginable.”[fn]Bob Ryan, “Hollywood committed some errors in ’42,’ www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/05/11/hollywood-errors-aside-tells-important-story/U4ZeZ9OTmGH0X9v8SNDYeJ/story.html, May 12, 2013.[/fn]

In addition, for baseball purists, Ostermueller was left-handed while 42 shows him as right-handed.

Jackie Robinson also features in Soul of the Game, a 1996 HBO television movie focusing on Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Jackie Robinson as baseball stands on the verge of integration. In this recreation, the first meeting between Rickey and Robinson at the headquarters of the Brooklyn Dodgers includes a short, portly fellow named Pete, depicted as a Dodgers scout familiar with Robinson’s playing ability but who doesn’t know Robinson personally. Rickey introduces Pete to Robinson, who knows the scout only as a white man in the stands at Negro League games with a stopwatch in his hands.

In the real version of events, Rickey dispatched scouts Tom Greenwade and Clyde Sukeforth to scout Robinson at different times. Both were tall, lanky men, and Sukeforth introduced Robinson to Rickey at the meeting. Sukeforth met Robinson in Chicago, persuaded him to travel to Brooklyn, and recalled the events at a meeting with Rickey in 1950. “You said ‘In Chicago next Friday night, Kansas City Monarchs play in Comiskey Park. I want you to see that game and especially do I want you to see a shortstop named Robinson. I would like for you to see Robinson before the game. There is some doubt as to whether he has a really good arm. I would like for you to speak to Robinson before the game and ask him if he will throw the ball overhand from the hole, his right, in the practice.’

“You told me you had good reports on the fellow. You said you understood he was quite a ball player and if I liked him and if his schedule would permit. You told me that you wanted him to get away from his team and see you without anybody knowing anything about it. There was to be great secrecy, in that I was to avoid any publicity if possible, but if asked was to give my own name.”[fn]Memorandum of Conversation Between Mr. Rickey and Mr. Sukeforth, Monday, January 16, 1950, Arthur Mann Papers, Subject File, Memorandum of Conversation Between Branch Rickey and Mr. Sukerforth, 1950 Jan. 16, Library of Congress.[/fn]

Another HBO production, the TV movie *61 showcases the 1961 chase of Babe Ruth’s home run record by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, including the impact of the chase on Mantle and Maris, the Yankees, and the press. Some events, though, are tightened to move the story. For example, Bob Cerv appears as a Yankee from the beginning of the story, when he was actually peripatetic: on the Kansas City Athletics and the New York Yankees for the 1960 season, drafted by the Los Angeles Angels in the 1961 expansion draft, then returned to the Yankees in a May 1961 trade.

The story culminates with Maris hitting his 61st home run off Tracy Stallard of the Boston Red Sox while Cerv and Mantle, both injured, watch on television from a hospital room. Though they both suffered injuries that sidelined them during Maris’s historic moment—Cerv had knee surgery and Mantle had an abscessed hip—they did not watch the game together. In a 2001 Hartford Courant article, Cerv said this of the film: “You believed that? I knew Mick was there, but we had private rooms. They had to be a little artistic. They had to make a story. But I’d say 70 percent of the stuff really happened.”[fn]Jeff Jacobs, “For Cerv, ’44 Was The Real Drama,” http://articles.courant.com/2001-07-22/sports/0107221977_1_roger-maris-mickey-mantle-yankee-stadium, July 22, 2001.[/fn]

Babe Ruth’s legend suffered a couple of changes to his biography in The Babe Ruth Story starring William Bendix. Wayne Stewart, a Ruth biographer, writes in Babe Ruth, “For instance, it shows Ruth receiving a $5,000 fine and suspension for missing a game because he took a child’s injured dog to a hospital for an operation—this is sheer fiction. The film even portrayed the home run Ruth dedicated for Johnny Sylvester in 1926 as the ‘Called Shot’ of 1932. In the maudlin death scene, Ruth is operated on by the same surgeon who saved the life of the dog years earlier, and, Ruth, who had a notoriously poor memory, recalls the doctor’s face from almost sixteen years before. The film also inaccurately shows Ruth retiring on the spot just moments after hitting his final three home runs in Pittsburgh, the last of which is actually shown landing in the stands at Yankee Stadium.”[fn]Wayne Stewart, Babe Ruth (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 150.[/fn]

Major League sacrifices verisimilitude in its portrayal of a fictional Cleveland Indians team winning the American League East pennant in a one-game showdown against the New York Yankees. Using a classic storyline of misfits banding together to defeat a common foe, Major League is entertaining, funny, and uplifting with the championship decided in true Hollywood fashion in the bottom of the ninth inning. There’s one problem. The scenes depicting Indians home games, including the one-game playoff, take place at Milwaukee’s County Stadium. Sharp-eyed Major League fans will note the logo for Milwaukee television station WTMJ on the scoreboard. There is, however, an overhead shot of a standing room only crowd at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium to give the audience a dramatic jolt.[fn]Major League, Written by David S. Ward, Directed by David S. Ward, Morgan Creek Productions / Mirage Enterprises, 1989.[/fn] In Major League II, Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards substitutes for Municipal Stadium.[fn]Major League II, Written by R.J. Stewart, Story by R.J. Stewart, Tom S. Parker & Jim Jennewein, Based on characters created by David S. Ward, Warner Brothers / Morgan Creek Productions, 1994.[/fn]

On July 4, 1939, the New York Yankees held Lou Gehrig Day to honor the “Iron Horse” after he was sidelined by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, the disease that would kill him two years later. Gary Cooper re-creates Gehrig’s speech in The Pride of the Yankees with some refinements here and there. The Cooper version begins, “I have been walking onto ballfields for 16 years, and I’ve never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. I have had the great honor to have played with these great veteran ballplayers on my left—Murderers Row, our championship team of 1927. I have had the further honor living and playing with these men on my right—the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of today.”[fn]The Pride of the Yankees, Written by Jo Swerling and Herman J. Mankiewicz, Original Story by Paul Gallico, Prologue by Damon Runyon, Directed by Sam Wood, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1939.[/fn]

Gehrig never mentioned the phrases “Bronx Bombers” or “Murderers Row” in his speech. Further, the Cooper version takes liberties by excluding two men who were mentioned by Gehrig: Jacob Ruppert, the Yankees owner who had died six months earlier, and Ed Barrow, “the builder of baseball’s greatest empire,” according to Gehrig.[fn]Full text of Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech, www.si.com/mlb/2009/07/04/gehrig-text.[/fn]

One of the best-known lines in film history is Cooper’s last line of the speech, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.” The line is lifted verbatim from Gehrig’s speech, where it’s the second sentence. Later in the speech, Gehrig says, “Sure I’m lucky” before mentioning Ruppert, Barrow, and Yankees managers Huggins and McCarthy. Then, he repeats the phrase as he thanks the New York Giants for their gifts and his family for their support.[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Based on the eponymous book by Eliot Asinof, the film Eight Men Out shows the events, controversy, and consequences of the 1919 Chicago White Sox allegedly throwing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds for financial gain. Though acquitted of “conspiracy to defraud the public” in court, eight players suffered a lifetime ban from major league baseball—Eddie Cicotte, Oscar “Happy” Felsch, Arnold “Chick” Gandil, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Fred McMullin, Charles “Swede” Risberg, George “Buck” Weaver, Claude “Lefty” Williams were banned by dint of the omnipotence of the new baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis: “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”[fn]“Baseball Leaders Won’t Let White Sox Return to the Game,” New York Times, August 4, 1921.[/fn]

“Shoeless” Joe Jackson hit .375 in the 1919 World Series and .356 in his career. After the “Black Sox” scandal, Jackson played on semi-pro teams. At the end of Eight Men Out, some fans debate whether Jackson is one of the players on the field. Wearing a Hoboken jersey, Jackson runs around the field like a gazelle in a game against Hackensack. Playing the outfield, he snares a ball destined for extra bases, then hits a stand-up triple in his next at-bat.[fn]Eight Men Out, Written by John Sayles, Based on the book Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof, Directed by John Sayles, Orion Pictures, 1988.[/fn]

Hoboken and Hackensack did not have semipro baseball teams.

In For Love of the Game, Kevin Costner plays Billy Chapel, a forty-ish pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. On the cusp of pitching a perfect game against the New York Yankees, Chapel reviews his life with his girlfriend, Jane, as she prepares to leap across the pond known as the Atlantic Ocean for a job in London. The day after the game, Billy goes to the airport so he can catch a flight to London only to find that Jane delayed her trip because the perfect game consumed her attention.[fn]For Love of the Game, Written by Dana Stevens, Based on the book by Michael Shaara, Directed by Sam Raimi, Universal Pictures, 1999.[/fn]

In this fictional Tigerverse, the audience quickly learns Billy Chapel’s former pitching prowess; a newspaper headline praises his dominance in Game 1 of the 1984 World Series, though Jack Morris was the real hero of Game 1. Also, to the lament of Tigers fans, no Tigers pitcher has ever pitched a perfect game. (Armando Galarraga came close in 2010, but umpire Jim Joyce ruled that Indians batter Jason Donald beat out a ground ball for an infield hit.)

Bernie Mac stars as Stan Ross in Mr. 3000, the title stemming from Ross ending his career after his 3000th hit so he can use the “Mr. 3000” moniker as a marketing device. Playing for the Milwaukee Brewers, Ross is a fan favorite. His former teammates, however, view him as selfish because he retired during the middle of a playoff race. When the Brewers retire Ross’s number, former teammates Robin Yount and Paul Molitor opt to not attend the ceremony.

The Baseball Hall of Fame realizes that statisticians double counted three hits, thereby leaving Ross with 2997 hits. So, to maintain his marketing power as “Mr. 3000,” Ross returns to the Brewers. After getting two hits, Ross has a chance to achieve the gloried 3000 number for a “second time,” but lays down a sacrifice bunt so the Brewers can get a victory.

IMDB.com points out some continuity flaws, including Ross stating that he played a game against the Houston Astros. During the time referenced, interleague play did not exist during the regular season. There is no evidence to suggest that Ross meant to qualify the game as occurring during spring training. Also, when Ross achieved what was thought to be his 3000th hit, he did it in 1995 at Miller Park. He might have used a time machine because Miller Park opened in 2001.

Though filmmakers take creative license to tighten a storyline, dramatize a moment, or enhance a character, their films are no less appealing for baseball fans. Whether it’s Billy Chapel pitching a perfect game, Gary Cooper embodying the spirit of Lou Gehrig, or Brad Pitt showing Billy Beane defying baseball’s entrenched modus operandi, baseball films show all sides of a sport that has moments of drama and comedy, pathos and joy, and milestones and surprises.

DAVID KRELL is a SABR member who has spoken at SABR’s Annual Convention, Frederick Ivor-Campbell Nineteenth Century Baseball Conference, and Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference. He has also spoken at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, Queens Baseball Convention, and the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention. David writes for thesportspost.com and the New York State Bar Association’s “Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Journal.” In addition, he co-edited the NYSBA’s sports law book “In the Arena.” David is writing a book about the Brooklyn Dodgers that will be published by McFarland in 2015.

Mickey Mantle was turned into a switch hitter when he was “barely old enough to walk.” He remains the only switch-hitter in the history of the game to earn Triple Crown honors. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

The literature on the New York Yankees is presumably indicative of baseball literature generally, except’ of course, that Yankee literature, like Yankee tradition, Yankee Stadium, Yankee uniforms and Yankee hot dogs, has a pinch or two of special interest, the Yankees being the Yankees. 

It is a literature driven by a robust market, not only in New York and surrounding geography but across the continent and around the world. Yankee fans are everywhere. Ian Smith of Glasgow, Scotland, a SABR member, described himself in correspondence with me as “a Yankee fanatic.” 

But there is another component of the market that is big, too-the Yankee hater component. A book entitled The Bronx Zoo is transparently beamed at Yankeephobes as well as Yankeephiles. A Yankee hater buys The Bronx Zoo to see what the low-life pinstripers may be up to now, for the title appeals to all the attitudes and prejudices that make the Yankee hater what he is. 

By Yankee literature I mean not only books but also newspaper writings, which inNew York can be something special. I don’t happen to know what literature in the narrow sense means exactly, but I know that words blowing in the gutter the day after they’re written are no less for the transience of their medium. However, here, I concentrate on books. 

What has happened to Yankee writings over the decades? They have grown better, much better, more adult, and there’s more of them-much more of them, although, it should be said, there is a down side to the recent literature, too. 

You may have seen one of those old ballpark photos where the crowd looks almost comic in its homogeneity-white men sitting stiffly, side by side, in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and strawhats. Scissored male figures. The women were home doing what the day called for, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, baking on Wednesday. The kids were reading inspirational sports books, learning how to become fit members of a principled adult society. 

Things have changed. The ballpark crowd is more representative of all elements of society. Kids know the score; sophisticated youth can weed out the fake heroes from the real ones better than their counterparts of yesteryear, who were sheltered by the journalistic mores of the day, which tended to gloss up player images. Fans are more casual-you might not see one man in a suit and tie on a trip to the ballpark-but they demand more honesty. By and large the Yankee literature is more honest and more adult, and that is good. 

My own Yankee collection begins, in terms of age, with a book that quite possibly owes its value to a source of inside information. No doubt about it, Yankee literature, any literature in part involving reportage, leans heavily on those capable of reliable disclosure. It was with the help of wonderful insider Waite Hoyt that Frank Graham wrote a history of the club at the 40.year mark, a book which sketches the beginning of the big Yankees picture. 

I found Graham’s The New York Yankees: An Informal History, first released in 1943, a solid and candid book. Hoyt, the great Yankees pitcher who had become club historian of sorts, doubtless was instrumental in making this book what it is. 

Graham didn’t stir controversy, and neither did he duck it. But what was controversy then and what is controversy now-and remember, we’re talking Yankee-are two different creatures. 

Graham wrote that Earle “Doc” Painter, longtime Yankee trainer, was let go after the Yankees loss in the 1942 World Series because Manager Joe McCarthy never liked him and used the loss, the Yanks Only defeat in eight Series appearances under McCarthy, as a convenient hook on which to hang the firing. 

Good, honest speculation, and why not? Marse Joe wouldn’t give Painter or anyone else an explanation for the firing. However, it wasn’t exactly Thurman-hates-Reggie/Reggie-hates-Billy/Billy-hates-George stuff. It lacked the palpable passion of the ’80s. 

Graham included a special page of appreciation to Hall of Famer Hoyt who was with the rollicking Yankees of 1921-1930. Through Hoyt, Graham probably got more anecdotal material on the Yankees of the ’20s than he could ever hope to get from the lid-clamping, news-managing Yankees of the ’30s. 

The thing about Hoyt was that besides being articulate, intelligent and witty, he was reliable. He liked to tell it the way it was. 

He had helped several authors with their books. I corresponded with him in 1978 about a Yankee book I was attempting. He replied, “l have assisted in so many books I truly am shy of participating in any others.” But being the grand gentleman that he was, he did offer assistance, and on more than one occasion, too. 

Graham did another book, a laudatory biography of John J. McGraw, and still another biography that was issued a year before his informal Yankee history, this one called Lou Gehrig: A Quiet Hero. 

I have heard tell that the Gehrig bio was written for kids and I am not surprised. Anyway, this Graham book, in retrospect, is disappointing. The dialogue is unconvincing— Graham couldn’t possibly have gotten all of that down so perfectly. And too much time is spent with Lou Gehrig, a decent man, in his final days; human empathy is one thing, but an endless dwelling on Lou’s final hours is maudlin. 

But what rankles me is the way Graham either missed or glossed over the Gehrig-John McGraw relationship. Lou had a football scholarship to Columbia. He also played some for the Columbia baseball team, and; in an exhibition game against Hartford, hit a couple of attention-attracting homers. The Hartford papers later announced his signing by the Hartford club. 

However, as Norton W. Chellgren pointed out in the 1975 Baseball Research Journal, the next day the new man was called Lou Lewis. Two weeks later Lewis was gone without explanation; the folks at Columbia got him out of Hartford. Lou sustained a suspension but his amateur status was intact. 

Veteran sportswriter Fred Lieb, one of Gehrig’s best friends, has related that McGraw told Gehrig he could play pro ball and college football, too. “Oh, you can do both,” McGraw is said to have told Lou. “You’ll play in Hartford (preparing for the Giants) under the name of Lewis. Nobody will know that Lewis of Hartford is the same guy as Lou Gehrig of Columbia.” 

Gehrig became a football star at Columbia and later signed with the Yankees. He remained bitter toward McGraw. “In 1921 McGraw was a sophisticated, experienced baseball man and I was a dumb, innocent kid,” Gehrig told Lieb. “Yet he was willing to let me throw away a scholarship as though it was a bundle of trash.” 

Lieb reported this in his 1977 memoirs, Baseball As I Have Known it. The way Graham told the story 35 years earlier, the story that misled SABR member Fred Stein and me in our preparation of a book manuscript on the market competition between the Giants and Yankees, the Hartford manager, one of McGraw’s many birddog scouts, took Lou to the Polo Grounds for a tryout, but McGraw wasn’t interested. The manager, one Arthur Irwin, then signed the strapping youngster to a Hartford contract. McGraw is clean, according to this version. 

Gehrig was partly to blame for his situation. He should have confided in his Columbia coach before signing anything. But he was a kid; McGraw and Irwin were big boys, and Graham exonerated the former by implication and rationalized the latter’s jeopardizing of Lou’s amateur status as the work of “a hearty and pleasant old chap who merely did as any other scout would have done in the circumstances.” 

Graham portrayed Gehrig as a strong silent type — the type that America would have as its hero. Heroes, heroes, heroes. The sports sections of the papers were chock-full of them. Sports journalism for decades was peachy-cream stuff. Veteran reporters covering the Yankees got close to the Yankees so they could write upbeat stories about them. 

Then came the Chipmunks. Born of the ’50s, the ‘Munks didn’t enter the realm of reality until they had a name, and that didn’t happen until the ’60s. One version has it that they got their name when a newsman of the old school saw some of them in animated discussion and grunted scoffingly, “They look like a bunch of chipmunks.” And so the name and the reality. The Chipmunks could indeed get into their work. They were inquiring and, above all, irreverent, and they were headquartered in New York where the Yankees are headquartered. 

Jack Mann explained Chipmunkery in his excellent 1967 book, The Decline and Fall of The New York Yankees. Mann portrayed himself, Stan Isaacs, Phil Pepe, Maury Allen, George Vecsey, Steve Jacobsen, Leonard Koppett and others as ‘Munkers — guys who wanted to have some fun in their day-to-day reporting and to be able to occasionally go beyond day-to-day reportage.

“If they made no attempt to relate the billion-dollar industry of show sport to the society in which it exists, they wouldn’t be doing anything but writing stories about games,” was the way Mann put it. 

Chipmunks covering the Yankees had a friend for a time in Yankee President Mike Burke, who occupied the pinstriped throne for a relatively brief time, but Burke aside, they were faced with a long, deeply instilled Yankee tradition of nondisclosure. 

Nondisclosure stemmed in part from Joe McCarthy’s insistence on a certain demeanor for the Yankees collectively and for Yankees as individuals, a demeanor that signaled a quiet and efficient “class. ” It owed first and foremost, however, to wonderful Edward Grant Barrow who came to the Yankees as business manager in 1920 and left as club president in 1945. 

Barrow ran an iron-fisted show and kept in the background. “The spotlight,” he wrote in his 1951 autobiography, My Fifty Years in Baseball, written with James M. Kahn when Barrow was 83, “should be reserved for the players and the players alone.” Nothing was necessary to promote the game, not even night baseball. (Yankee Stadium didn’t acquire lights until after Barrow’s departure.) The game was enough — “Baseball doesn’t need a carnival or sideshow,” Barrow declared. 

With Barrow as your general manager, if you weren’t lucky enough to count a Babe Ruth among your personnel, you weren’t going to have a helluva lot of color. Wit, maybe — the wit of a Gomez, perhaps — but swashbuckling color, no, not even a whole lot of human interest. 

When Barrow, who himself had a most colorful past that began on a wagon train bound for Nebraska, became teamed with rulebook Joe McCarthy, who joined the club in 1931, there was no limit to the Yankees’ discreet decorum. Rule breakers were unwelcome, especially those Southern boys. 

McCarthy had a prejudice — no, a conviction rather than a prejudice, according to Barrow, “because he had reasoned things out in his own way,” against Southern ballplayers. Barrow wrote that McCarthy “thought they were too hot tempered and defeated themselves.” 

In another Barrow passage, he wrote Joe thought that players who came from the hill country of the South were particularly onerous.

“They’re all moonshiners back there,” Joe once said, “and they’re just naturally against the law. They resent any kind of rules or discipline.” 

Barrow gave a couple of examples of talented, temperamental players traded away by McCarthy for the good of the team. But Barrow didn’t say how McCarthy’s views affected his opinion of Bill Dickey, born in Louisiana and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Barrow also revealed Tony Lazzeri’s epilepsy in terms decidedly insensitive by today’s standards. Barrow, who believed Lazzeri was “one of the greatest ballplayers I have ever known,” said other clubs passed over the Pacific Coast League star because he “took fits. ” But after an elaborate check into Lazzeri’s background, Barrow decided to take a chance and purchase his contract. “As long as he doesn’t take fits between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, that’s good enough for me,” Barrow said at the time. 

There was a stigma attached to epilepsy. Barrow always feared that Lazzeri would have a seizure on the field, but, to Ed’s relief, Tony’s attacks were confined to the clubhouse or a railroad car. The Lazzeri story could have been a great inspiration to other epileptics, but views on epilepsy were not as enlightened as they are now, and the story was covered up. “l don’t believe the public ever knew this about him (Lazzeri),” wrote Barrow. “Certainly we took every precaution we could to see that the public never did, and in this the sportswriters traveling with the club were likewise as considerate of Tony’s feelings and welfare.” 

So the writers sat on the story. It is doubtful that the same story could ever be covered up today, which is probably the way things should be. But in the ’20s and ’30s, when Lazzeri played, a player’s faults, and, unfortunately, epilepsy was seen as a fault, often went unreported. The clubs and writers scratched each others’ backs. Contrast that with today’s headlines of drug and alcohol problems. If you appreciate an open society, you’ve got to say that today’s situation is healthier. 

The Chipmunks weren’t about to toe the company line. They wouldn’t even use the word “we,” as in “who are we going to pitch tomorrow, Skipper?”, a typical question from the old-school writer. A Chipmunk was a reporter, not a booster. 

The Chipmunks not only changed the press’s day.to-day approach, but they changed the book literature, too. A case in point is Mann’s own The Decline and Fall of the New York Yankees. It not only details why the Yankee Dynasty toppled, but it delves into the chinks in the Yankee armor back in their perfectionist glory days. 

The Yankees were far from being the most accessible baseball team to the press. The traditional pattern was that Yankee management would issue only the information that served its purposes — injuries would be covered up, for one thing — and the old-school writers would settle for what they got. The Chipmunks would not. To Yankee management, Chipmunkery threatened management’s ability to control the news. 

Yankee players resisted the Chipmunks, too. Around the locker room, a Chipmunk was a reporter who asked too many damn questions, including questions about players not as playing but as human beings. A good writer, to a player, was one who didn’t probe, one who stuck to whatever happened on the field. A bad writer was a “ripper.” A ripper sometimes did no more than tell the truth.

The Yankees collapsed in 1965, then fell to the cellar in 1966. Mike Burke took over as Yankee president and pledged a new era of openness around the club. He even went to the New York Baseball Writers annual outing — something Dan Topping, his predecessor, had never done — played for the Chipmunks in the softball game and was awarded a Chipmunk sweatshirt. The Chipmunks liked Burke for his openness, but Burke’s Yankees didn’t win, and it wasn’t long before Burke was gone and George Steinbrenner was the big cheese in the South Bronx. 

The first earthshaking Chipmunk influence in the book literature appeared in 1970, three years after Decline and Fall. It created a sensation. Ball Four, by Jim Bouton (with Leonard Shecter) blew the lid off clubhouse secrecy. 

Bouton wasn’t a Chipmunk — he was a Yankee pitcher of the 1960s who won 21 games in 1963 — but Shecter was. They violated the rule of the clubhouse that says “all that is said here and is seen here stays here.” What Bouton did was expose some Yankee debauchery. 

Shecter had already taken the halo off sports heroes with his 1969 book, The Jock. In this book he rips into the hypocrisy surrounding the sports world, from the magnates to the stars, sparing no one, including his own profession of journalism. It is such a biting book that the numbed reader can’t discern Shecter’s legitimate points from his bitter tirades. 

The Yankees, for example, a club Shecter covered for the New York Post, and the team’s individual players, are a special target for his slings and arrows. To Shecter, Joe DiMaggio had become vain and lonely. Yogi Berra’s 1961 autobiography, Yogi, was “a terrible book, cheap and phony and transparent.” Mickey Mantle had only himself to blame for his leg problems because he didn’t do his offseason exercises. 

Shecter was not well-liked in the Yankee clubhouse. He was seen as a ripper, the No. 1 ripper in the eyes of Roger Maris, whom Shecter portrays as “a griper.” But Shecter says he liked Maris, or rather his accessibility, when Roger joined the Yanks in 1960, and even felt that Roger handled his next, 61-homer season reasonably well. He even wrote a paperback on Maris, Home Run Hero. When Maris encountered all his problems with the fans in 1962, however, Shecter wrote a Post story saying, basically, that Maris was at fault for reactions that were causing the fans to intensify their abuse. According to Shecter, Maris cursed him for the story and they never talked again. 

Shecter argues that ballplayers don’t understand the job reporters have to do. “The last thing a ballplayer cares about are the precepts by which a newspaperman is supposed to live,” wrote Shecter. 

He explains how in 1963 Yankee pitcher Bill Stafford was going bad — Stafford’s career was in jeopardy, in fact — and after another bad performance, Stafford told Shecter he didn’t want to talk. Shecter persisted, in the correct opinion that if a player could talk reams when winning, he should find the grace to talk when losing. But what Shecter failed to understand, or at least acknowledge, was the tremendous pressure building up inside Stafford. My God, this young man was watching his professional career slip away. But Shecter left him alone only after a mouthful of fist became a distinct possibility. Respect is another one of those two-way streets. 

Shecter’s favorite was Casey Stengel — “the only great man I ever knew.” He was especially grateful to Stengel for overlooking a mess Shecter got into in 1958 when he reported a brief cigar-jamming scuffle between pitcher Ryne Duren and coach Ralph Houk that a rewrite man over-amplified. The rest of the Yankees shunned Shecter, but Stengel, recognizing the nature of Lenny’s profession, bought Shecter a drink. 

Stengel won a lot of points like that with reporters, who doted on him. But while Shecter revealed some of the cruel things Casey said about his players — of the slumping Moose Skowron, who played despite serious injuries, Casey said, “The way he’s going I’d be better off if he was hurt” — it didn’t seem to bother him much. Stengel had Shecter’s loyalty, much the way the “house men” writers Shecter so loathed were in the clutches of the club they covered. 

As Bouton and Shecter turned the clubhouse inside out, Geoffrey Stokes in his excellent 1984 book, Pinstripe Pandemonium, explored the Yankee psyche. Perhaps only a book on the scrutinized Yankees could include a chapter on the psychology of the Yankees. 

Stokes examines the 1983 Yankees, maintaining that these Yankees, runners-up to Baltimore in the American League East, were without effective leadership. The team had been leaderless since the death of Thurman Munson in 1979. And the pine-tar fiasco, throwing the team into disarray, was a situation that demanded leadership. No one stepped forward, wrote Stokes. 

Graig Nettles was the senior Yankee and team captain in 1983. He was the unquestioned leader on the field, smart, alert and tough in the clutch, but he wasn’t a dominant presence in the clubhouse. He didn’t understand, or it was never explained to him, what his captaincy meant. For example, when Steve Kemp was benched and his spirits fell, Nettles made no move to pick him up. Don Baylor tried, but like Kemp, he too was a first-year Yankee who was still feeling his way around. 

Dave Winfield certainly possessed a physical presence. But Winfield, too, showed Stokes a limited concept of leadership, calling himself “an influential peer.” He resisted anything rah-rah — good for him — but he also resisted taking command. He felt it enough to lead with bat and glove

Ironically, quiet Willie Randolph, the least likely leader at first glance, a player whose injuries were sometimes questioned, was serving a key function of leadership. The younger Yankees volunteered to Stokes that it was Randolph who made them feel welcome on the team. Randolph revealed that Munson had put him at ease when he joined the club in 1976, and Willie was making a conscious effort to do the same for others. 

The real probers and derobers of the Yankes, however, have been members or former members of the family. Joe Pepitone, the Yankee first baseman of the ’60s, was one of the first of the Yankees to come out with his own book after Ball Four. Pepitone had told Peter Golenbock in Dynasty how upset he was over Bouton’s writing unflattering things about Mickey Mantle in Ball Four, such as how Mantle would duck kids asking for autographs. “Kids grew up with a lot of good images about Mickey Mantle,” Pepitone told Golenbock. “They felt good just thinking about him, and the next thing you know they’re depressed because of what Jim wrote. Why should Jim give a shit? He’s not going to see the kids faces, see the way they feel.” 

So what did Pepitone do? He wrote a book in which he told a couple of stories that could have really hurt Mickey’s image with kids, although to my way of thinking, the stories made Mantle more human and appealing than ever. Joe’s book, Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, written with Barry Stainback and published in 1975 by Playboy Press, shouldn’t be read by kids, anyway. Pepi, an original, dared to tell, just as he dared to be different in his playing days. 

One story has All-American-boy Mantle getting stoned smoking marijuana with Joe before a game and not only losing all of his fabulous coordination at the plate but also passively accepting a strikeout when he normally exploded in anger. Pepi stressed that this was Mantle’s first and only experiment with pot. All the same, the Mick would probably have voted not to have the story told. 

The other story, more in keeping with the Mantle legend, had Mantle and Pepitone oversleeping after a night on the town and, having missed the team bus, taking a limousine to West Point for an exhibition game. Loaded on vodka, they made quite a scene when the limo arrived right on the playing field. Mantle, in The Mick, never addressed the marijuana tale but made a point of saying that Pepitone exaggerated the details of the West Point story. 

Pepi was soon joined by a long pinstriped line of authors. 

However great the World Champion 1977-1978 Yankees may have been with bat and glove, they were veritable giants with the pen. No less than eight Yankees of 1977-1978, including manager Billy Martin, joined with collaborators to write books on their days with the Yankees

The books include Thurmon Munson, by Munson with Martin Appel (1978); The Bronx Zoo, by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock (1979); Guidry, by Ron Guidry and Golenbock (1980); Number 1, by Billy Martin and Golenbock (1980); Yankee Stranger, by Ed Figueroa and Dorothy Harshman (1982); Balls, by Graig Nettles and Golenbock (1984); Reggie, by Reggie Jackson with Mike Lupica (1984); and Sweet Lou, by Lou Piniella and Maury Allen (1986). 

All of these Yankees were, or are, big stars, with the exception of Figueroa, who maybe should have been. Figgy was the unsung hero of the 1976-1978 campaigns, winning 19, 16 and 20 games over those three pennant-winning seasons. But he wasn’t great. He wasn’t colorful. He wasn’t even personable. What was he trying to do with his Yankee Stranger? 

He was telling us from the very title that he was an outsider (who happened to be from Puerto Rico) and that we had in store an outsider’s fresh perspective. But Figgy only reveals that he has a thin skin and he supplies no more than overkilled stories and inanity, telling us, for example, that Bill Lee is funny, Nolan Ryan throws hard, and Carl Yastrzemski is always “a tough guy for me to face. “Thanks, Figgy.” 

Figgy is not exactly alone. There is a certain inanity in all of these books. Worse, in at least some, there is a certain grub-for-the-buck “candor.” One wonders and worries. Is it better to get it from a writer type, or an historian type, or to place one’s faith in firsthand accounts from jocks either exorcising past torments or joining in the spirit of squeezing bucks from the printing press, or both? 

Reservations aside, by and large, the player books make for good reading. They’ve got the necessary color and off-color and they’re free of much of the phoniness that used to plague us in baseball literature. My favorite is Munson’s. No big rips, fair treatment for friend and foe alike. 

I became a little upset when, on April 24, L984, the New York Daily News, the paper of sports columnist Mike Lupica, Reggie’s co-author, ran the blaring headline: REGGIE BLASTS RACIST YANKEES. Racism, of course, was just one of several slaps Jackson laid on his former club in this scoop by Paul Needell from Jackson’s yet-to-be released book. 

But that isn’t what made me angry. The Jackson story was old stuff really. What ticked me off, and amused me a little, too, was something on the inside pages of the Daily News, a column by Lupica, whom I consider without peer as a witty sportswriter. (Lupica has, however, allowed his intense dislike for George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin to warp his objectivity when writing about the Yankees.) Lupica was cheering an exciting April of sports in New York. “There had been too many Aprils around here in which the only racy sports news came when Boss Steinbrenner blew his nose or had his hairspray back up, but this time it is different,” he wrote. “For now Boss Steinbrenner and his Yankees have to fight it out in headlineland with fine hockey, and basketball . . . and a vastly interesting young baseball team known as the New York Mets.” 

I thought that Lupica was trying to have it both ways. After all, he was a party to Jackson’s revelations exploiting controversy that on that very day were monopolizing the headlines of his paper. I said so in a letter that the Daily News was kind enough to print. 

There is nothing wrong with controversy. It sells books. The problem is that the public has to be wary; is it honest controversy that sheds light, or trumped-up controversy to sell books? Take former Colt Bubba Smith, who in his book declared that the 1969 Super Bowl, which the Colts lost to the Jets, was fixed. Presumably, the allegation sold a few more books; it did not trigger any investigations to my knowledge. And it didn’t get me to buy the book. (Bubba, who is great in his TV beer commercials with Dick Butkus, stands a better chance of getting me to buy the beer. ) 

Of the greatest Yankee ballplayers — Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle — the Mick has been the most prolific author. Gehrig never got to write a book before his tragic and early death. DiMaggio in 1947 wrote Lucky to be a Yankee, and Ruth a year later wrote The Babe Ruth Story. Mantle, besides his 1964 work, The Quality of Courage, was involved in four books about his life story, playing career, or both. These were The Mickey Mantle Story, by Mantle as told to Ben Epstein (1953); The Education of a Baseball Player, by Mantle with Bob Smith (1967); Whitey and Mickey, by Ford, Mantle and Joseph Durso (1977); and The Mick, by Mantle with Herb Gluck (1985).

The tones of the latter two were drastically different from the gee-and-goshisms of the first two which portrayed Mickey as the All American boy, meaning countryside boy. In The Mickey Mantle Story, Mantle said: “I’m loaded with hayseed and aim to stay that way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the city way of life. But those big city apartments and townhouses always struck me as foolishly paying your money to eat and sleep in a jail.” 

Part of Mantle’s charm is that fame never really changed him. But one doesn’t spend 18 baseball seasons in New York without acquiring a certain amount of sophistication. Mantle acquired a great deal. 

The Mick is one of the best baseball books  ever published. Though Mickey is known to clam up rather than cut someone down, he is very honest about his opinions in this book and about his own weaknesses, too. He said of Duke Snider: “I loved the Duke. In fact, I would have loved to have been the Duke. Listen, you could practically fit Ebbets Field right inside Yankee Stadium.” Mickey speculates he might have hit 15 more homers a year playing in Brooklyn. 

I have read that Pete Rose considers himself — wrongly, in my opinion — the greatest switch-hitter of all time. Perhaps Mickey read it, too, because he had a pretty good zinger for Rose. “The world’s greatest singles hitter,” Mantle called him. “He chokes the bat, protects the plate, and concentrates on getting a piece of the ball. It’s his thing. And I have a world of admiration for him. However, if I had played my career hitting singles like Pete, I’d wear a dress.” 

Books on the Yankees have changed in focus over the three decades from Joe DiMaggio’s Lucky to be a Yankee to Sparky Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo in 1977, as their titles imply. 

There have been histories, pictorial histories, anthologies, encyclopedias, date books, diaries, quiz books and individual biographies. There have even been books catering to Yankee haters, like the 1981 book, Diary of a Yankee Hater by Bob Marshall and the 1982 The Official New York Yankees Haters Handbook by William B. Mead. I accepted the latter with a chuckle and even kidded with Bill about it at a SABR meeting, telling him I was offended that none of my books was listed among his sappiest books about the Yankees. (Bill replied that he wasn’t aware of them. Huh?) 

But Bill’s book is troubled with little inaccuracies. Bill blames Yankee General Manager George Weiss for firing broadcasters Mel Allen and Red Barber, when, actually, Weiss himself was canned after the 1960 season, while Allen lasted through 1964 and Barber through 1966. Oh well, I have mistakes in print, too, and Bill would probably say it didn’t matter; they were all fired by some heartless Yankee executive.

On the serious side, Dynasty, the 1975 book by Peter Golenbock that chronicled the great Yankee teams of 1949 through 1964, did a great service for Yankee fans. Golenbock got behind the scenes of those fabulous teams with a series of illuminating interviews. Each interview made a statement about the interviewee. For example, Gil McDougald came across as a tremendously warm human being, something that could have been overlooked when McDougald played for the Yankees and the players were often seen as interchangeable and replaceable parts in a distant, smooth-running machine. 

Golenbock’s interviews also exposed some fabrications, such as Mickey Mantle’s mysterious ailment in 1957, known at the time as “shin splints.” Nobody knew exactly how Mickey came up with this ailment — all the official explanations didn’t ring true — but what was obvious was that Mantle had a huge cut in his shin, keeping him from running well and ruining what might have been an unprecedented second straight Triple Crown season. 

Tom Sturdivant told Golenbock the true story. According to the Yankee pitcher, he and Mantle were coming off the golf course when Mickey, upset over developments in his friendly bet with Tom, but really more annoyed with Sturdivant’s high-pitched giggle, swung his putter at a tree limb overhead. The putter either missed the limb or snapped it in two; whatever, it ended up stuck in Mickey’s leg. Shin splints. Mantle confirmed the basic story in The Mick. 

Dick Lally penned Pinstriped Summers, a great 1985 book that picked up the Yankees where Dynasty left off in 1965. He addresses the problems the press had with the Yankees, and wrote of how the 1967 arrival of the Mets in New York, a National League stronghold, didn’t ease those problems. 

New York reporters like Bob Lipsyte, George Vecsey, and Lenny Shecter made the infant Mets fun. They wrote hip stories about a losing team and hip fans celebrated losing. Vic Ziegel, who started covering the Yankees in 1964, in the days of smug success, told Lally there were a “lot of flatout house men” in those days-writers who toed the company line. These writers overidentified with the Yankees. “You know, when the team started to lose, those guys were much harsher on the club than the younger writers,” Ziegel told Lally. “The reason they came down so hard was because they were bitterly disappointed. They were crushed. They had to cover games all year, and the team wasn’t good anymore. It made them furious.” 

Possibly the best baseball biography ever written was Babe, the 1974 Ruth biography by Robert W. Creamer. Almost incredibly, the field was wide open; Babe was the first objective, adult, full-length biography of America’s greatest sports hero. (Marshall Smelser followed in 1975 with another excellent book on Ruth, The House that Ruth Built, that unfortunately was released on the heels of the Creamer work.)

Creamer set up his book brilliantly. Ruth was bigger than life, everyone’s hero — his here — but Creamer, in his words, wanted “to go beyond the gentle inaccuracies and omissions of the earlier accounts and produce a total biography, one that, hopefully, would present all the facts and myths, the statistical details and personal exuberance, the obvious and subtle things that combined to make the man born George Ruth a unique figure in the social history of the United States.” 

Creamer held true. He told the Ruth story as completely as it can be told. He put the pieces together of Ruth’s life, in part, through an exhaustive series of interviews. Listen to what Waite Hoyt wrote to Creamer: “I am almost convinced that you will never learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with Joe Dugan. He was a good friend of Babe’s. But he will see Ruth in a different light than I did. Dugan’s own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruth’s crudities, and so on. While I can easily recognize all of this and admit it freely, yet there was buried in Ruth humanitarianism beyond belief, an intelligence he was never given credit for, a childish desire to be over-virile, living up to credits given his home-run record and yet a need for intimate affection and respect, and a feverish desire to play baseball, perform, act and live a life he didn’t and couldn’t take time to understand.” 

A few years ago I stopped in at the Babe Ruth Museum, birthplace home of the Babe, in Baltimore. The best thing there was Creamer’s Babe manuscript. It was inspiring. Especially considering the disillusionment this Yankee fan felt when he discovered that the Babe Ruth birthplace was an ill-disguised excuse for an Orioles’ shrine. Upstairs, in the Ruth bedroom, where the Creamer manuscript was kept, a few people poked in their heads for a polite look-see. Next door, though, was where the real action was, Baltimoreans milling around various tributes to the local club. Somehow, the whole setup seemed as phony as the Babe was genuine. 

Anyone wanting to gain an historical perspective on the Yankees could achieve his or her purposes nicely by reading just three books. These are The New York Yankees: An Informal History, (the version I have was updated through 1950); Dynasty, covering the years 1949 through 1964; and Pinstriped Summer, covering a period that begins with 1965 and runs up to recent times. 

No doubt there will be a fourth book addressed to the final decade and a half of the 20th century. If this newcomer proves deserving, the Yankees will enter the 21st century well documented. Which is good, because once that century line is crossed, the events of the dislodged century will tend to dim; having them tacked down on paper will serve posterity.

One has to be a hard-core baseball fan to recognize Greenwade’s name, but you will recognize some of the ballplayers this scout has signed-Bill Virdon, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, George Kell, Hank Bauer, Tom Sturdivant, Elston Howard, Clete Boyer, Ralph Terry, Bobby Murcer, and Mickey Mantle. Yet the ballplayer he was probably most proud of recommending, but is least known for being associated with, is Jackie Robinson. Before telling the story behind this scout’s search for Mr. Robinson, you need to hear about the first “colored” player the Dodgers tried to sign.

Silvio Garcia: Their First Choice

His name is Silvio Garcia, and when the Dodgers tried to sign this Cuban shortstop in 1943 he was playing in Mexico, which is one reason why Branch Rickey sent his top scout there in May 1943. Rickey was intent on keeping this scouting effort top-secret, so his first conver­sation with Greenwade was in person, prior to the April 24th memo. The two arranged to meet at the Biltmore Hotel in Kansas City, but Greenwade had trouble locating his boss because Rickey signed in at the hotel registry as Greenwade, not wanting the locals to know the Dodger president was in town and start asking why.

The why included a request to check out “colored” ballplayers in Mexico, and in particular Garcia, whom Dodger manager Leo Durocher had seen play in the Mexican League. The Brooklyn skipper claimed that Joe DiMaggio couldn’t carry Garcia’s glove. I’m assuming someone asked Leo if Garcia could carry DiMaggio’s bat. In a December 3, 1953, newspaper article, Greenwade described how their hotel meeting went. “All that secrecy had me buffaloed. And I got more curious after he sat and talked to me about things that had happened in his life. He told me one story about the time a hotel refused to allow the catcher of his Ohio Wesleyan team to have a room. The catcher was a Negro, and I began to get the idea.”

Tom only had two problems with this trip. One, he didn’t want to keep it a secret from his wife, Florence, and two, he didn’t speak Spanish. True to form, Rickey quickly solved both by suggesting that he take his wife, and he provided a translator. Florence made it to Mexico, but the translator did not. It seems he went on a drinking binge in San Antonio and was left behind.

Where Did the Documents Come From?

I’m not your typical SABR researcher. If it isn’t right underneath my nose, I’m not going to find it. It took a few subtle suggestions from editor Jim Charlton for me to finally pull the shovel out and start digging. A portion of the information for this article was handed to me by the Greenwade family. That was the easy part-no shovel required. While I was working on an earlier article about Greenwade’s scouting career, I asked his son and daugh­ter for copies of any documents that would add to the piece. What I received were confidential memos from Branch Rickey directing his number one scout to begin a clandestine search for ballplayers in Mexico in early 1943. I saved these gems for this article.

It’s been widely assumed that the Brooklyn Dodgers’ scouting of the first black major league ballplayer of the 20th century did not seriously begin until the spring of 1945. Jackie Robinson was signed by Rickey in October of that year to a Montreal Royals contract, and in 1947 became the man that “broke the color barrier.” The Robinson signing in 1945 coincided with the death of baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a man many assumed to be against baseball integration, in the minor leagues as well as the majors. But was he?

Landis Wasn’t the Entire Reason

According to David Pietrusza’s well-written book on Landis, Judge and Jury, we shouldn’t lump all the blame on the Judge for the lack of “colored” ballplayers in the majors. The remainder goes to the Jury (Major League Baseball and America). Quoting Pietrusza from page 406,

What share of the responsibility for baseball’s Jim Crow status did Landis bear? What were his attitudes on race and how did he handle racial matters—both as arbiter of baseball and on the federal bench? The answers may never be really known, but the picture of Landis as an “openly biased” individual who almost single-hand­edly blocked baseball’s integration clearly distorts the actual events, America’s racial attitudes, and perhaps even the man himself. Landis certainly bears some re­sponsibility for baseball’s segregation. However, to imply that it was he—and he alone—who created or prolonged the situation whitewashes the attitudes and actions of much, if not most, of baseball’s establishment.

Quoting Richard Dozer’s 1983 Baseball Digest article on Leo Durocher and a meeting Durocher had with Commissioner Landis at his office,

Durocher recalled that he mentioned having played in an exhibition against Josh Gibson, the great Negro League catcher, and observed that even though Gibson had great talent he apparently was not welcome in the major leagues. “Landis looked down at me with that glare of his and said ‘Bring me the man who says you can’t have a colored player in the big leagues, and I’ll take care of him real quick.’ I believe to this day that

Landis would have accepted the black player if an owner had signed one, Leo said.

So why was Rickey so secretive? My guess is he assumed that if Landis wouldn’t balk at the signing of a black ballplayer, the owners would. That’s one secret Branch took with him to his grave.

The Search Begins

John Thom and Jules Tygiel wrote an excellent piece on the Jackie Robinson signing, but could only find documentation on the search that went back to April 1945 when a handwritten memo uncovered in the Rickey Papers gives instructions to Dodger scouts to “Cover Negro teams for possible major league talent.” The memo was signed “Chas. D. Clark.” No one knows who this man was. It could have been a fictitious name. We now have proof that the date the Dodgers’ search began was on April 24, 1943, in the form of an inter-club communication from Rickey’s office in Brooklyn to Tom Greenwade at his home in Willard, MO. It’s titled,

PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.

Dear Tom:

I am enclosing some very confidential material. In the newspaper you will see averages. I don’t believe you can afford to show these to Tuero. You will have to work them out for yourself.”

Tuero is possibly Oscar Tuero, a Cuban pitcher who had played with the St Louis Cardinals from 1918-1920.

In a follow-up memo dated April 29, 1943, Rickey mentions that,

I am very sure that his (Tuero’s) services will not be required more than two to four weeks and not that long if you find that you can get along very nicely without him. Of course, at no time now or in the future will he know anything about part of the objective of your trip…

He later added,

Tuero is not at all above chiseling. He was a chiseler as a ball player, so far as that is concerned, and if he shows very decided tendencies to do the chiseling act with us, I am inclined to have you go on down on your health seeking job without him As a matter of fact, I don’t trust him…

Rickey also gives some advice regarding Tom’s upcoming scouting trip to Mexico. In the same note, the Dodger president mentions that he is “hoping that we will be able to get several of them signed to Durham or Olean contracts, or even Montreal if we can find one good enough.” Of course, when Jackie Robinson was signed, he was sent to their top minor league club in Montreal. Notice he never mentions “colored” ball­ players, only referring to them as “them.” That’s because he’d already conveyed his intent during their Kansas City hotel meeting, and he didn’t want to risk someone besides Greenwade reading the memos. Tom knew he was to focus on “colored” ballplayers.

By May 10, 1943, Tom Greenwade was receiving transmittals in Mexico City from Rickey in Brooklyn. You can feel his anticipation as he wrote:

Dear Tom,

I am enclosing some information herewith. Write me fully airmail and mark it personal and confidential on the outside of your envelope and give me all the dope on players. We can certainly use some good Mexican boys right now at both Durham and Olean. The Durham Club is terrible. I don’t believe you should try to sign any boys until you get a full report on everybody and know exactly what you want to do with everybody before you start to work on anybody. I hope you will be able to work quietly without any newspaper publicity whatever.

If you run into anything especially good I will send help to you or I might even come myself.

Greenwade also received detailed information prior to leaving his home on Silvio Garcia who was playing in Mexico at that time, and was considered the best ballplayer from his country. The two attached photos of Garcia that accompanied the report definitely would qualify him as a “colored ballplayer.”

Silvio Garcia: The Attempted Signing

In an April 14, 1958, Los Angeles Times article written by Braven Dyer on Walter O’Malley, I found some interesting information on our subject. “O’Malley (and not Rickey) almost became the man to sign the first Negro for Major League Baseball. Early in his affiliation with the Dodgers O’Malley went to Havana, Cuba, to sign a Negro shortstop named Silvio Garcia. On arrival he discovered Garcia with 49 other Cuban Army conscripts in a pup tent encampment.

“As a big sports hero, Garcia was the first man tapped by the military. Not hankering to tangle with the whole Cuban army, O’Malley staged a strategic retreat and Garcia never appeared in a major league line-up.”

According to Murray Polner’s well-written 1982 biography on Branch Rickey, “Walter O’Malley…went to Cuba in 1944 with a letter of credit for $25,000 with instructions from Rickey to sign Silvio Garcia, a black player, only to learn that Garcia had been drafted into the Cuban army.” I spoke to Polner and he recounted the O’Malley interview. The author could find no other living source in the early 1980s who could corroborate O’Malley’s story, yet portions are backed up by the Dodgers scouting report on Garcia, which mentions that he might be redrafted soon into the Cuban army.

The only thing that bothers me about O’Malley’s statement is the year-1944. All the secret documents from the Greenwade family are from 1943, and yet in a December 3, 1953, newspaper article given to me by the Greenwades there is mention of Tom discussing his trip to Mexico to scout Silvio Garcia in 1944. One of three things happened: both Greenwade and O’Malley were either telling the truth, they were covering up the actual date, or, they both forgot the correct date/year.

I’m convinced they both simply forgot what year it was when telling their story. I’ m certain that O’Malley made the offer in 1943, not 1944, because Garcia would have been back in the army by 1944. The clincher is the fact that Rickey was anxious to sign someone in 1943, as is evident by his tone in the Greenwade memos. Garcia was 28 at the time, two years older than Robinson was when signed by the Dodgers.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to take O’Malley’s story and add our report on Garcia to con­ clude that the Dodgers made an attempt to sign him in Cuba after the end of the 1943 season. Yet, based on the 1958 Los Angeles Times article, O’Malley never actually approached Silvio with the offer, thus allowing their search to remain a secret.

In an October 3, 1956, article in The Sporting News on our scout, this item came up. “On Greenwade’s say­ so, the Dodgers steered away from Garcia .. .”  Quoting Greenwade in this piece, “He couldn’t pull the ball. He was a right handed hitter-everything went to right field.” My conclusion: Greenwade wasn’t high on Garcia, but Rickey was, based on Durocher’s recommen­dation, and when the Cuban army stepped in and blocked the move, Tom convinced the Dodger brass to drop any future pursuit of the shortstop.

In Roberto Echevarria’s book, The Pride of Havana, the author mentions the Dodgers’ attempt at signing Silvio.

Legend has it that Silvio Garcia was seriously consid­ered by Branch Rickey to be the man to break the color barrier in the United States, but that when asked what he would do if a rival hurled racial slurs at him, the Cuban answered: “I would kill him.” This ended his chances.

Unfortunately, Silvio Garcia passed away in 1978, so there is no way we can substantiate this story. When Roberto Echevarria mentioned to me that Garcia has a son living in Miami but did not know what his first name was, I realized my time playing detective Colombo on the Silvio Garcia story was over. The ballplayer thought to be one of the best shortstops in Cuban baseball history won two Mexican League batting titles and was consid­ered a superb fielder, so he had the talent to possibly play in the major leagues. Unfortunately, the closest he came was when he spent time in the USA playing in the Negro Leagues.

On a side note, there was some success in that Mexico trip. A 21-year-old catcher with the Monterrey club caught Greenwade’s eye, and a reco1mnendation was forwarded to the home office. A few years later the Dodgers signed him: Roy Campanella.

The Scouting of Jackie Robinson

In The Sporting News article of 1956, author Harold Rosenthal states, “He [Greenwade] was the only scout used on the Jackie Robinson job,” a statement repeated by Tom’s son and daughter to me. Quoting Greenwade from this article,

I saw Jackie play about 20 times… but I never spoke to him once. When I finally did speak to him he had already made the Dodgers and I was scouting for the Yankees. John Griffin, the Brooklyn clubhouse man, introduced us in St Louis.

Tom Greenwade scouted for the Dodgers until December 1945, when he signed on with the Yankees. He conferred with his boss, Mr. Rickey, prior to making the decision to leave, and Rickey chose not to hold him back, knowing the Yankees would make Tom the highest-paid scout in baseball, which they did. His annual salary jumped from $3,600 to over $11,000 (including an annual bonus).

What we can’ t answer with certainty is why the Dodgers president waited two years after the attempted signing of Silvio Garcia before making the second attempt — with Jackie Robinson. Again, did he fear a back­ lash from Landis and the owners? My guess is, yes, he got cold feet until Landis passed away and our country was in a state of euphoria after winning the Second World War.

Greenwade described the task of following Robinson’s 1945 Kansas City Monarch ball club in The Sporting News piece. “The war was still on, there wasn’t much transportation available, and the Monarchs got around by bus. Most of the time I chased them. … When I scouted Robinson, I told Mr. Rickey that he didn’t have a short­ stop’s arm. It wasn’t strong and he needed to dance a step and a half before cutting loose. Maybe he’d make a first baseman or second baseman, but never a shortstop.”

To stress his singular effort one more time, “I want to make it very clear that I was the only scout used on Robinson. The only time Clyde Sukeforth went to see him it rained and they didn’t play.” My impression of Tom Greenwade, formed via research on this piece, was that he was a very modest man, did not go around bragging about his exploits, but wanted to keep the facts straight. Keep in mind that if his recommendation of Robinson had resulted in a bust, Greenwade’s reputation would have been scarred. He had quite a bit riding on this and therefore should receive due credit.

Clyde Sukeforth’s Robinson Recommendation

Clyde Sukeforth is credited by some as the scout who recommended Jackie Robinson, yet we now know he was used as a checker by the Dodgers to confirm Tom Greenwade’s recommendation. In a November 28, 1993, phone interview, Clyde describes that day.

I didn’t see him play before we signed him. He [Rickey] knew a lot about Robinson. He just sent me down there to check out his mm. He [Robinson] naturally couldn’t un­derstand [why Clyde was there], was very interested in why Rickey was interested in his arm, and he developed that he had fallen on his shoulder the night before and was out of the lineup for a couple of days, maybe more.

So I asked him to meet me down at my hotel, and he did. He kept asking me [why], and I just told him, “I just work here. I can’t tell you anything but I do know there is a lot of interest in you.” There was a colored club in Brooklyn not affiliated with the Dodgers but you had a right to assume that it was. So I told him, “Mr. Rickey can answer your questions, why don’t you come on back to Brooklyn with me?”

And the rest was history.

The Next Bob Feller

Tom Greenwade was not always perfect when project­ing a player’s future. Our scout’s biggest disappointment in his talent-hunting career was the hard-throwing, hard­ luck Dodger pitcher Rex Barney, who tossed a no-hitter and had a 15-win season with Brooklyn. Tom thought he was the second coming of Bob Feller, but Rex’s control problems ended his short career.

Only Two Were Humming “Where Have You Gone, Mr. Robinson…”

The only two Dodgers that were in on the Jackie Robinson signing were Branch Rickey and Tom Greenwade. It was obvious Rickey wanted to keep things close to his vest, and he did so by only including his best scout. And his best scout was the best that ever scouted. Greenwade’s major league ballplayers (over 40 of them) would agree with this. When Mickey Mantle was sent down to the Kansas City club in 1951, he didn’t imme­diately call his father, Mutt Mantle. His first phone call was to his trusted friend and scout Tom Greenwade. The scout was close to all of his players, as should be his plaque in Cooperstown.

Where would the Dodgers and Yankees of the late 1940s to the mid 1960s be without the man that signed a majority of their stars? Probably watching the World Series from the stands.

In 1964, Tom Greenwade left the Yankees and his scouting career to live out the rest of his life in his home­ town of Willard, MO. He passed away in 1986 at the age of 81.

JIM KREUZ was introduced to SABR by former ML pitcher Tim McNamara, whose high school catcher was a kid named Gabby Hartnett, his shortstop at Fordham was Frankie Frisch, and his best friend on the Boston Braves was an outfielder named Casey Stengel.

The survey, conducted because of the increased emphasis on switch hitters in recent years, also included selection of an all-time all-star team of switch hitters. Mantle was a near unanimous choice (missing on one ballot) for one of the outfield positions. The others were filled by Max Carey and Reggie Smith. Going around the infield, the winners were James “Ripper” Collins, first base; his former manager and teammate on the Cardinals, Frank Frisch, second base; Rose (who also received 63 votes for the outfield), third base; and Maury Wills, shortstop. The catcher was Ted Simmons, and the pitcher, Early Wynn. A detailed summary of this survey will follow later in the article.

Rose and Frisch, both aggressive, talented players who hit for a higher average than Mantle, lost out to the Yankee star because of the latter’s great slugging ability. Mantle revolutionized the art of switch hitting by belting 536 home runs in his career. This was a quantum jump over the 135 hit by Collins in his career. Mantle shattered all assumptions that no player could hit that hard from both sides of the plate.

Since Mantle retired, Reggie Smith has moved in as the leading long ball hitter among those who bat both ways. At the start of the 1979 campaign, he had 270 roundtrippers, the great majority of which were hit from the left side. Other switch hitters now active who are hitting with considerable power include Ted Simmons, Ken Singleton, and Eddie Murray.

Prior to Mantle’s time, switch hitters made little contribution in the home run, slugging, and RBI departments. In 1942, for example, the leading home run hitter among switch hitters was Roy Cullenbine with 6. In 1920, at the start of the lively ball era when Ruth hit 54 home runs, Frisch and Wally Schang led the switch hitters with 4 each. Schang, incidentally, was one of the first batters known to have hit two homers in one game, one right and one left. Playing with the Athletics in a game against the Yankees at Shibe Park on September 8, 1916, Schang hit a grand slam homer into the rightfield stands off right-hander Allan Russell in the first inning, and then hit a solo shot to the scoreboard in center in the second off southpaw Slim Love. The incident was not publicized at the time because of an unusual circumstance So much rain fell that day that reporters, assuming that the game could not possibly be played, did not go to the park. For schedule reasons, Connie Mack insisted that the game be played, and it was, late in the afternoon, in a sea of water and in front of fewer than 100 people.

Switch hitters made their primary contribution as players getting on base and then scoring runs. Rose, Frisch, and Carey were among those who did it by getting hits; Tommy Tucker, who was a pretty fair hitter, had an extra talent in getting hit by pitches (more than 200 times in his career). A large number had an unusual talent for receiving bases on balls.  This included, not only Mantle, who was a great threat with the bat, but little Miller Huggins, who led the NL four times in walks, and Donie Bush, who led the AL five times. Others who led or who had outstanding walk totals included Lu Blue, Roy Culienbine, Augie Galan, Jim Gilliam, Ken Singleton, and Roy White, the only former teammate of Mantle still with the Yankees. In 1947, when Cullenbine was with the Tigers and accumulated a team record of 137 walks, he had a stretch of 22 consecutive games, from July 2 through July 22, where he received one or more bases on balls. This is a major league record.

It is also a switch hitter who holds the career record for fewest times grounding into double plays. Don Buford hit into only 33 double plays in 4553 at bats or once every 138 times at the plate. His frequency rate is lower than that of all left-hand batters, such as Lou Brock, Joe Morgan, and Richie Ashburn, who have that extra step advantage. Augie Galan, another ambidextrous batter, played the full schedule for the Cubs in 1935 and never grounded into a double play.

While acknowledging that switch swinging has no bearing on stolen bases, we feel compelled to point out that those who bat both ways seem to excel on the basepaths far beyond their limited numbers. Take, for example, such aggressive base runners as Max Carey, Frank Frisch, George Davis, Bob Bescher, Donie Bush, Walter Wilmot, Miller Huggins, Augie Galan, Jim Gilliam, Don Buford, Sandy Alomar, and Maury and Bump Wills.

Switch hitters also seem to strike out less; that is, with the exception of Mantle. Of the more than 60 major leaguers who have fanned more than 900 times in their careers, only one (Mantle) is a switch hitter. Only two switch batters led their leagues in season strikeout totals: Mantle in the AL, and Bob Bescher in the NL.

Ten years ago, to call attention to the increased use of switch hitters, we would recall the 1965 Los Angeles Dodgers’ infield of Wes Parker, first base; Jim Lefebvre, second base, Jim Gilliam, third base; and Maury Wills, shortstop. The most recent example to illustrate the emphasis on switch hitting is the 1977 batting race in the National League. Dave Parker won the crown, but of the top 11 batters in the league, five were switch hitters: Garry Templeton .322, Simmons .318, Rose .311, Reggie Smith .307, and Lenny Randle .304. Competing against these five were three left-hand swingers and three right-hand hitters. Ironically, these five switch swingers were outhit by another, Ken Singleton in the American League, who hit .328. Also emerging from this group is one of the great triple hitters in modern times. This is Garry Templeton, who led with 18 in 1977, the highest total in many years, and 13 in 1978, and has a good chance to repeat in 1979. No NL batter has ever led three years in a row in this category.

The top season records for switch hitters are carried below:

On the career leaders in the various batting departments, the totals are as of the end of the 1978 season. Note that since the start of the 1979 season, Rose has passed Mantle for leadership in runs scored and total bases.  Asterisks indicate active player totals.

Who was the first switch hitter in the majors? Based on available information, it was Will White, who began his pitching career with Boston in  1877 and moved on to Cincinnati the next season.

Ironically, he also was the first player to wear glasses. Was there a connection?

RESULTS OF SABR SURVEY ON SWITCH HITTERS

(Those Receiving Two or More Votes)

First Base

Collins, 206
Parker, 31 1/2
Blue, 27 1/2
Anderson, 12
Tucker, 12
LaChance, 3
McGann, 3
Holke, 2

Second Base

Frisch, 277
Schoendienst, 20
Gilliam, 5

Third Base

Rose, 228
Weaver, 39
Gilliam, 25
Austin, 4
Frisch, 4

Shortstop

Wills, 141
Bowa, 54 1/2
Bancroft, 50 1/2
Davis, 43
Bush, 5
Kessinger, 4
Rogell, 2

Outfield

Mantle, 301
Carey, 228
Smith, 204
Rose, 63
Galan, 33 1/2
Singleton, 26
White, 20 1/2
Philley, 6
Tresh, 5
Bescher, 4
Buford, 4
Anderson, 3

Catcher

Simmons, 253
Schang, 40
Farrell, 5
Hargrave, 3

Pitcher

Wynn, 87 1/2
Roberts, 68 1/2
Nichols, 59
Lyons, 54
Mullane, 16
Tannehill, 11

Outstanding Switch Hitter

Mantle, 215 1st-place votes / 780 1/2 points

Rose, 53 / 519 1/2

Frisch, 31 / 398

Carey, 1 / 26

Smith, 0 / 18

Wills, 0 / 13 1/2

Simmons, 0 / 8

Collins, 0 / 7

Schoendienst, 0 / 5

Roberts, 0 / 4

Bancroft, 0 / 3

Gilliam, 0 /3

Nichols, 0 / 3

Parker, 1 / 3

Weaver, 0 / 3

Davis, 0 / 2