The way this day has started, I can already tell it’s going to be struggle to get to the weekend. Therefore, in an attempt to lighten the mood, we have more jokes!
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A couple of Yogi Berra’s teammates on the Yankees ball club swear that one night the stocky catcher was horrified to see a baby toppling off the roof of a cottage across the way from him. Yogi dashed over and made a miraculous catch – but then force of habit proved too much for him. He straightened up and threw the baby to second base.
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A Spaniard name Jose came to Miami and wanted to attend a big league game. To his dismay he found that all the seats were sold out. However, the management gave him a high seat by the flagpole. When he returned to his home country his friends asked him, “What kind of people are those Americans?” He said, “Fine people, they gave me a special seat at the ball game and just before the game started that all stood up and sang ‘Jose can you see.'”
*
One Day the Devil challenged the Lord to a baseball game. Smiling the Lord proclaimed, “You don’t have a chance, I have Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and all the greatest players up here”. “Yes”, snickered the devil, “but I have all the umpires.”
On November 7, 1963, Elston Howard was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player, making him the first black player to ever receive the honor in the AL. He also became the third consecutive Yankee to receive the honor, after Roger Maris (1960 and 1961) and Mickey Mantle (1962).
Mickey Mantle hit his 500th career home run on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1967. In doing so, Mantle fulfilled a promise made to his wife, Merlyn, regarding the timing of the blast. The round trip was hit into the lower deck of the right field corner of the lower deck at Yankee Stadium and made Mantle the sixth player in Major League history to reach the milestone.
On March 1, 1969, Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle announced his retirement from baseball. After years of being plagued by injury, Mantle cited his inability to “hit when I need to” as part of his reason for leaving the game. During his eighteen-year career, the Mick had a .298 batting average and hit 536 home runs, which – at the time – put him third on the all-time home run list behind Babe Ruth and Willie Mays.
On December 13, 1961, Mickey Mantle signed a contract for the 1962 season with the Yankees for $82,000. Up to this point, only Joe DiMaggio had ever been paid more by the New York club.
Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1974, Mickey Mantle had an eighteen-year career with the New York Yankees. As a switch hitter during my high school softball years, I can’t help but hold a spot in my heart for Mantle. His speech is cut off in the video, but from what I can see in the bit that is there, his personality is about what I had envisioned (even if a bit subdued, given the atmosphere of the event).
Howard Johnson and Darryl Strawberry of the New York Mets both made history on September 21, 1987. As the Mets won 7-1 over the Chicago Cubs, Strawberry stole two bases to make himself and Johnson the first set of teammates to hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases in the same season.
Johnson, meanwhile, slammed his 36th homer of the season to break a 53-year-old National League record of most single season home runs by a switch hitter. The previous record had been set by Cardinals’ first baseman Ripper Collins in 1934, but the Major League record was still held by Mickey Mantle, who hit 54 homers in 1961.
On September 3, 1961, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle of the Yankees became the first set of teammates to hit 50 homers in a season. In a game against the Tigers, Mickey Mantle launched one in the bottom of the ninth to tie the score at 5-5, en route to a 8-5 victory.
On the recommendation of–well–several sources, I finally sat down and read Ball Four. Written by former Major League pitcher Jim Bouton, Ball Four shook the sports world upon its publication in 1970. Not only did it expose the not-so-admirable underbelly of the world of Major League Baseball, it revealed to fans of the game that professional ballplayers are far from perfect or superhuman.
Written in a diary format, the book details Bouton’s thoughts and observations as he journeyed through the 1969 season. And he doesn’t hold back. Through Bouton’s eyes, we discover the licentious nature of many ballplayers, the contrived nature of integration between black and white players at the time, the less-than-amiable relationships between players and managers, and the fickleness of a club’s attitudes on player performance. We learn about the anxiety players feel over the possibility of being traded, sent to the minors, or released. We also get to peer into a world of drug use, heavy drinking (particularly embodied by Bouton’s depiction of Mickey Mantle), and the condescending treatment of players by owners before the time of free agency.
In exploring the baseball world through his eyes, we learn a lot about Bouton himself as well. He discusses his mentality as a pitcher, particularly as a knuckleball pitcher, and his own personal takes on a variety of people and situations. Furthermore, we learn about Bouton’s personal life: about his marriage, his children, and his concerns about life after baseball.
All in all, I can see how this book created waves throughout the world of sports, and particularly in baseball. Up to this point, the idea of baseball as a “gentleman’s game” had been largely maintained, even in spite of events such as the Black Sox scandal in 1919. Mickey Mantle’s drinking had never received exposure in the press prior to Ball Four’s publication, and team management had always managed to protect its reputation as taking care of its players. Not only did Bouton expose the truth behind such things, he changed the rules regarding what a writer could and could not write about the game. Suddenly, virtually everything became fair game to a sports writer.
I must confess, at various points, while reading the book, I found myself thinking, “Okay, I get the point. How many more pages do I have?” It only takes a few chapters to get a “feel” for the book and the types of things that made it shocking. In retrospect, it’s easy for me, more than forty years later, to have this attitude about a book that really seems quite tame by today’s standards. Had I read it in the early 1970s, however, I have no doubt that my perception would have been drastically different. Like most fans who read it in the 1970s, I would have held onto every word, amazed by the secrets revealed in the book’s pages. One might even argue that Ball Four’s very existence made it possible for me to experience this kind of insensitivity to its more radical contents in the first place. In that sense, even today, we continue to experience the impact of this narrative on our views of the game.
