Infinite Inning 345: In Which Babe Ruth Marries a Man and Mickey Mantle Feels Poorly

Babe Ruth backs the attack as Babe Ruth gets married, but to a guy named H.C., not a former model named Claire. Cal Raleigh goes on a rampage and Mickey Mantle finishes 1961 quietly, but why did the latter happen and what can we learn from the way he and Billy Martin lived their lives?

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out? 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Earlier this week, as I was trying to figure out
what it was we were going to talk about, what
we were going to share together today, I had an
urge to see if Babe Ruth had registered any comments
on the occasion the day that he bought one hundred
thousand dollars of war bonds in support of his government,
the American government after the start of World War two.

(00:24):
He might say, it's not necessary for you to specify.
After the start of World War two. He wasn't around
for the Korean War. It must have been World War two,
but now it could have been World War One. I
don't think he had the do at that point. He
was just starting out to buy one hundred grand in
war bonds, and so it doesn't hurt to be specific.
To be honest, I'm not sure what point I intended
to make what story larger story I was going to

(00:46):
tie that into. I almost feel like I'm having ag
I misplaced my keys. They were here a moment ago
kind of episode, but it turns out not to be important.
The thing to know is that I've always gotten that
story a little bit wrong. I think I'd to it
on the show a number of times as a kind
of cause and effect thing. Who laughs last the Babe does.

(01:07):
He had heard that when American boys were out in
the Pacific fighting in close combat with the Japanese, that
they had shouted to hell with here a hitto in
the same way that later generations of Americans would go
to Darryl Strawberry's road games and chant daol or everyone boudeirod,
and that the Japanese, to get back at their American counterparts,

(01:31):
had shouted back to hell with Babe Ruth and George
Herman being very much alive kicking, was hurt, offended. He
was a sensitive man and a patriot, and so he
ponied up a whole lot of cash for what would
have been about nineteen forty two and put it into
the defeat of the Japanese. I suppose the implication is

(01:52):
that if they had picked someone else to jeer, he
would have set this one out. He would have just
stayed out of it. Now, some of that is true
and some of that is not true. But what I
feel obligated to suggest to the Babe, though he is
not here right now to hear me, or is he Ooh,
Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth wherever you're at, send me a
sign with the crack of a bat. Nothing right now.

(02:15):
Perhaps we'll try again later as the show gets nearer
the witching hour. Sorry, I got carried away. He really
should have been flattered. They didn't say to hell with Fdr.
The President at the time, or to hell with Washington

(02:37):
or Lincoln or Chester A. Arthur, although that would have
been pretty funny because the soldiers would have had to
stop fighting long enough to look up who the hell
they were talking about. To hell with Roscoe conflict what No,
they reached for an American who was not only larger
than life witch in Japan. They knew by first hand
experience he had gone to Japan and wowed them and
given that they were human beings just like us, and

(02:58):
no doubt had with the exception of their almost religious
reverence for the emperor, who had cultivated a reputation as
being a divine figure, which was good for his endurance
in the job. It's much harder to convince a sizable
number of people to overthrow God, or even a god.
They probably had the same ambivalent relationship with their political
leaders as we do, which is to say that even

(03:20):
the ones you love you don't really love, and so
they reached for someone who would have more sentimental meaning
to Americans than any politician, or at least any living one.
To hell with James G. Blaine, No, we have to
workshop that a bit more. To hell with Davy Crockett.
Closer to hell with Davy Davy Crockett fighting for save

(03:40):
very well? That one get me a copyright infringement notice
from YouTube. Your guess is as good as mine. These
are the sorts of things I have to worry about
here in my old age. I don't know that I
believe in all of this coordinated. To hell with here
a Hido, To hell with Babe Ruth Ruth, here a
Hido Ruth, here a Hido Ruth hero Ruth Hero Ruth here.
Fighting in the Pacific was brutal, and soldiers on both

(04:03):
sides were general not that fighting in Europe was like
a picnic, But I mean, how dumb is it for
me to say fighting in the Pacific was brutal. It
was a very gentle war. They fought with cupcakes. You
have one Christmas truce in the First World War, and
everybody thinks that war can be gentle. No, they were
very busy trying to hurt each other and trying not

(04:23):
to be hurt. Therefore, it seems unlikely that they would
pause all that often to hurl pithy slogans at one another.
And while we're on the subject, you know that Grover
Cleveland was a big guy, but he had a libido
and he had some success. It wasn't entirely sublimated by eating.
He would go out and look for the ladies, and

(04:44):
the ladies liked him back. Well. Not only that, but
sometimes he paid cash. It will be a surprise to some,
but you can say this sort of thing about an
American president. They said it in eighteen eighty four. Very
advanced civilization in eighteen eighty four, at least in terms
of what you could and could not say about a president. Well,
Grover and his libido and his wallet had six kids,

(05:05):
and the score was five to one, which is to say,
five with his wife, who came along late in the story,
and one outside of marriage maybe. While running for the
presidency in the aforementioned year of eighteen eighty four on
the Democratic Party ticket, his opponent was the aforementioned mister Blaine,
former senator from Maine, former Secretary of State, former Speaker

(05:26):
of the House. You can't fault the guy for his resume.
Grover's resume had him, in addition to being one of
the most popular monsters on Sesame Street, the sheriff of
Erie County, New York, the mayor of Buffalo, and the
governor of the Empire State of New York. The Republicans
didn't just contest him on his lack of experience compared
to their guy, but attempted to respond to attacks on

(05:49):
the Northern Light whiff of corruption around mister Blaine. The
New York Post accused him of having wallowed in spoils
like a rhinoceros in a pool, hitting Cleveland with a
sex out of wedlock story that of a thirty somethingter
witter woman and shopgirl. That's what she did, seduced, abandoned,

(06:09):
and left with a fatherless baby boy who she named Oscar,
clearly a reference to Grover's Sesame Street cast made and
well known close personal friend, not to mention Studio fifty
four coke connection. This was characterized as an epic depravity
such as no city in Christendom has ever witnessed. Thus,

(06:30):
the eighteen eighty four version of Lock Her up was
another chant, ma, Ma, where's my pa. Personally, I would
have gone with block that kick, block that kick. I
believe that they did that. But when I was taught
this back in junior high or high school or yesterday,
the lesson included the Democratic counter chat gotten to the

(06:50):
White House ha ha. The amount of coordination for this
to have really happened for the election of eighteen eighty
four to have turned into one of those old taste
great less filling Miller lte ads is just nuts and requires,
in addition, the kind of mass political rallies that I
don't think really happened in the eighteen eighties, when front
porch campaigning was still a thing. At the very least,

(07:12):
it had to come after because Grover hadn't gone to
the White House ha ha ha or otherwise yet. And
the election was close too, and Grover, despite the monster
at the end of this book being up there with
Moby Dick in American literature, won the popular vote by
about half a percentage point and just barely took his

(07:32):
home state of New York by about a thousand votes.
And the rest, which is not relevant to what we're
doing here today, is the story of two terms split
over twelve years one which we're living now. But it's
kind of like a remake that no one asked for. Well,
someone clearly asked for it. I don't know if the
child born as I said, Oscar Fulsome Cleveland but adopted

(07:54):
out as James Edward King Junior was really Grover's are not?
And I don't know that he exactly, but he did
pay some support and was involved in the child being
adopted because either there was a non zero possibility that
he was the daddy or as the name Oscar Fulsome suggests,

(08:16):
he might have been the offspring of Oscar Fulsom, who
was his late friend and law partner and whose daughter
was his ward and later his wife. Pronouns are awkward.
Oscar did not make his daughter his ward and later
marry her. That's gross. I mean that after Oscar's death
his daughter became Grover's ward. When she was of age
and Grover was president, they got married and yeah, it

(08:39):
was a different time. It's a pretty sad story, actually,
not the Francis Fulsome part, but that the mom in question,
one Maria Halpin, seems to have been either an alcoholic
or mentally unstable, or both and as the adoption suggests,
she lost custody of her boy. The genetic line ends there.
There were obviously no siblings by Cleveland with Halpin and

(09:03):
James King Junior had no children that I'm aware of,
so I don't think there are going to be any
Jefferson slash Hemings style genetic testing to establish this if
anyone cares. At this late date, it doesn't have quite
the same importance as the Jefferson Hemings thing. In Alynn
Brodsky's two thousand biography of Cleveland, he quotes a dissident
Republican Party member as saying, of this scandal, we are

(09:26):
told that mister Blaine has been delinquent in office but
blameless in private life, while mister Cleveland has been a
model of official integrity but culpable in his personal relations.
We should therefore elect mister Cleveland to the public office,
which he is so well qualified to phil and remand
mister Blaine to the private station, which he is admirably

(09:46):
fitted to adorn. Today we say, delinquent in office and
culpable in personal relations, Let's have both. The point is
I don't think that there were competing choruses of Blaine
and Cleveland voters, and they're most likely weren't bullfrog like
symphonies of to hell with Hirato and to hello with
Babe Ruth. And that's not what moved the Babe to
buy those war bonds. Anyway, it seems to me that

(10:09):
American and Japanese ground troops wouldn't have had enough contact
as of the time that he did it, and it
seems unlikely anyone was shouting it down from planes or
up from aircraft carriers. The Babe bought his war bonds
in two tranches, beginning less than two weeks after Pearl Harbor.
He couldn't buy all one hundred thousand at once because
there was a rule that limited single purchases to fifty

(10:32):
thousand dollars, so he had to come back again just
after New Year's Now, perhaps American soldiers had faced off
with Japanese soldiers in the Philippines by then, so Babe
it could have happened, But Ruth didn't cite that at all.
In fact, he didn't make very much of a statement.
He wasn't shaking his fist and saying I'm doing this
because they mocked me and sollied my good name, and

(10:53):
I was really nice to them when I was over
there in thirty four, so ungrateful, and I ate all
the raw fish he gave me. I had no idea
what was going on. I was just trying to be
polite and they said try it. It's a delicacy. And
I didn't want to insult them and cause an international
incident because I'm the babe and anything I do is
going to be blown way out of purport. No, he
was asked, in what was apparently a tongue in cheek way,

(11:17):
do you think your investment is safe? In other words,
we're going to win, right, And I think they were
trying to tee him up to say something like, of
course it's safe. Uncle Sam is going to win this
one going away. It's going to be a blowout, I
tell you, folks, Uncle Sam is going to score eleven
runs against fascism and the top of the first These
dictators have no fastball. But he didn't register that. I

(11:40):
don't think, and he replied, it isn't a question of safety,
but they're safe enough. We've got to knock those guys Hitler,
Mussolini and the Japanese out of the box. He didn't
say Japanese, but the shorter version of that that is
sort of a slur, so I'm going to leave it out.
There was also a more pr oriented quote didn't include

(12:00):
the question about safety. It sounds like maybe it came
from a press release. The Babe said, the safe and
sure way of knocking the other boys out of the
league is to buy defense bonds, wear out for one thing. Victory.
Sounds like there should be more, doesn't it. As I
was looking at this story, I kept coming across totally
unrelated wedding announcements like Miss Babe Ruth Turner of Smithville

(12:23):
buried HD Ellison of Oklahoma City Tuesday. In bass Drop,
marriage licenses were issued to Lois J. Cantrell twenty seven
and Babe Ruth case twenty one. So we have one
girl named Babe Ruth legally, one boy legally. Both were
about the age that they would have been born in
the nineteen twenties when the Babe was doing things that
no ballplayer had ever done before, and seemed to be

(12:45):
a benign presence as well. Sure, rough, rowdy, uncouth, and
a hazard to other drivers if behind the wheel that
was a lifelong thing, but still benign. More than benign
fun and often noble, generous to a fault, So why
not name your kid after him? Nomenclature isn't destiny, of course,
But I knowe that during the War HC. Ellison, Babe

(13:07):
Ruth's husband, went into the service, served in the Pacific
may or may not have shouted to hell with Hirohido
and heard the other guy shout to hell with Babe
Ruth back and taking it really really personally, more personally
maybe than Babe Ruth himself. Hey, you guys, lay off
my wife. But that aside, he served. He was when

(13:27):
I lose track of him, a corporal. Pretty sure he
made it through, but not positive. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth, his
wife got a job building highways in Texas. She was
a gravel inspector, and the fellas weren't around to do
the job. As Bob Dylan sang, you've got to serve somebody.
In this case, we mean your fellow man, and that
goes double in times of emergency, at least that's how

(13:49):
we read it in the Infinite Inning. Well, hello there,

(14:28):
and welcome back to the show Infinite Inning, number three
forty five in an ongoing series. I am, as ever
your convivial host Stephen Goldman for this trip a mission
to the past with the express purpose of better understanding
the present. The time machine as ever being mostly but
not wholly, the American national pastime, the game of baseball

(14:51):
a microcosm of all that surrounds it. In the non
baseball category, Grover Cleveland one of New Jersey's favorite, most
honored high rest stops, and I guess one of its
most libidinous highway rest stops, although that depends on what
you do there. I suppose Grover never having visited his
own rest stop. That's one of those cosmic unfairnesses that

(15:13):
may happen to many of us. He was the glory
of his times and also was a rest stop. But
it really does put a different spin on things as
you're driving down the highway and you see the sign
next exit Grover Cleveland service area. In eighteen eighty four,
the year of the election that we discussed, the National

(15:34):
League home run hitter was ned or Ed Williamson of
the Cubs with twenty seven. The rest of the top
four were also Cubs, all with over twenty home runs.
In the first non Cub big Dan Brewthers hit fourteen
for Buffalo. The top ten was rounded out by a
couple of guys who hit only seven. If you look
at Williamson's baseball card, his home run totals go one one, zero, one,

(15:59):
three to twenty seven, three, six, nine, eight, one and
two for a total of sixty four in a twelve
hundred game career. What gives with eighteen eighty four The
Cub's right field fence was only one hundred and ninety
feet from home plate. As a team, they hit one
hundred and forty two homers. The Bisons were second with

(16:21):
thirty nine. Cleveland was the other outlier, of course, because
Democrats just didn't win presidential elections in those days. And well, wait,
what has changed by that? Of course, I meant Grover Cleveland,
not the thirty five, seventy seven and one Cleveland Blues,
a short lived National League team that's not the same
club as the Spiders. Their leading home run hitter hit four,

(16:42):
which was a quarter of the team's total. That was
second basement Germany Smith. We've talked about him before, actually
way back in episode forty six, when we discussed Phenomenal Smith,
a rookie pitcher trying to break in with the Dodgers,
but his teammates decided they weren't having any of that
and just intentionally drop balls all over the place. George

(17:02):
Jay Germany Smith was one of those who didn't cover
himself in glory that day, or certainly covered himself in
something dishonor, I suppose, speaking of honor and dishonor, I
hope that the week we spend a part since last
episode was good for you, despite the ongoing end of
the Republic. That is, we spent that week apart only
if you didn't check out this week's reissue show, whereas

(17:24):
always I spoke for ten to fifteen minutes about whatever
was on my mind. I freelanced it a little bit
more on those reissue shows before we go into the
reissue part. I want to make it worthwhile for everyone,
even those who have heard the episode before. So if
you want to check out after the first ten minutes,
you can. But if you enjoy my company, and I

(17:44):
assume that's why you're here, I enjoy yours, then there's
something for you. And aside from whatever I did say
this week, there was a little baseball story, just two
sentences long, more or less, that I told at the
end of that segment. I'm not going to reat here,
but it was from nineteen forty one, and the gag was,
isn't this black baseball player stupid? But of course I

(18:08):
didn't tell it that way. I don't believe in ethnic
or racial jokes or stereotypes, And in fact, it seemed
to me that the gag was subversive of itself, that
the baseball player, in saying what the original author characterized
as kind of dumb, was actually sort of brilliant and
a statement of optimism and resiliency. And if you haven't

(18:30):
heard it, I hope you do, and let me know
if you hear it the same way. And as a
slight spoiler, I will say there is very little daylight
between what that nineteen forty one author characterized as dumb
and what Yogi Berra said as manager of the nineteen
seventy three Mets for which he was celebrated, which is,
it ain't over till it's over what this person was saying.

(18:53):
And again, these words don't appear in the story, so
I don't think I'm spoiling it. Is it ain't over
until it's true begun. And with that thought in mind,
let's all get up there and get in our licks
at bat before we call the game on account of darkness.
I want to tell you what I wrote about at
Baseball Perspectives this week because thematically it's related to what

(19:15):
we're going to get into and act to of the
show in just a few minutes. I wrote about Dixie
Walker and yes, about the petition he circulated to keep
the Dodgers to keep branch Trickey from integrating the roster
with Jackie Robinson. And that sounds like the same old story,
doesn't it. But I tried to do it from a
different point of view, a point of view that included

(19:38):
a reflection without saying so. I want to leave that
stuff there for you to find on current events in
some of the ways that we are being encouraged to
think and not think, or to speak and censor ourselves.
One thing I definitely said in this week's reissue episode
is that I hope you enjoy these visits to Brooklyn
as much as I do. What strikes me as funny

(19:58):
is it's not that I, a New Jersey boy who
only lived in New York City for a brief portion
of his life, has a sentimental feeling about that Dodgers
team that went extinct long before I was born. I've
gone to Brooklyn for a number of reasons, but I've
never gone there to mourn the Dodgers or or Ebitts Field.
I'll go to a natural history museum and apologize to

(20:20):
the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet and the dodo
or the specimens thereof. And I'm not embarrassed to admit
that I've gone to shrines like the Lincoln Memorial, and
I have had moments of talking to the statues in
my head. That is, I don't do it out loud,
and no they don't talk back. But I have used
those places as opportunities to reflect on history, and certainly

(20:43):
I've done that at ballparks too. I always felt a
little bad that when I started getting press passes for
Yankee Stadium, it was twenty years over twenty years since
they had rebuilt the place, so the version of Ruth
and Gerrig and Demijio and Mantle and so on was
kind of gone. And at the same time, I could
sit in the dugout and say to myself, my goodness,

(21:05):
the babe stood well, here's sort of more or less.
I'm pretty sure. For a lot of years the Yankees
preferred to use the third base dugout, but that's fine.
I went over there too, And if you want me
to be really honest about it, and I think I've
said this before on the program at Yankee Stadium, the
version that's now been demolished, the dugout floor was this weird,

(21:25):
spongelike substance that just seemed to me was put there
to absorb years of saliva of expectoration. And when you
walked on it, it kind of whether it had rained
or not, went and I thought, I'm walking on Babe
Ruth's bodily fluids. What can I say. I'm a romantic

(21:47):
at heart, so I guess I'm sentimental about that, but
not necessarily about the Brooklyn Dodgers. I think what it
is is that that one team generated more affecting tales
of humanity than chime with the Greater history of America
than any other team. I think that's objectively true, and
it isn't just that I've fallen for some kind of

(22:09):
nostalgia machine. The story that I wrote is called a
dead Outfielder speaks his truth, And as I said, it's
about looking at Walker, and how we should think about
someone like him in retrospect when all we have left
is some pictures and some stats, good stats, and a
story or two. Can you separate your admiration for the

(22:30):
stats from your disapproval of the person? Should you? And also,
of course we have to bring this in especially today.
What if you don't disapprove of the person and I do,
or vice versa. How we remember the dead says more
about us than the dead guy. We put them to
our own purposes. And the further we get away from

(22:52):
the complexity of the person, the more we have enmeshed
ourselves in an illusion or the author of the illusion
is trying to enmesh us. And I do hope you'll
check it out. It's a baseball story, damn it. And
in act too, we're going to continue with that theme obliquely,
obliquely trust me, not with the Dodgers, but with the Yankees.

(23:13):
This story was sparked by cal Rally's great big season
in Seattle, one in which he passed Mickey Mantle for
the single season home run record by a switch hitter.
And I wanted to talk about what part mantle season
played in allowing him to do it or what happened
from mantle side of the story that helped shape his total,

(23:35):
and inevitably that leads us to questions about other aspects
of Mickey Mantle and his time. We are more than
overdue for a break, so let's do that very quickly.
And on the other side, we will ring in one
of the relatively few visits this show has made to
the Mick. Quick note on current events. As you know,

(24:18):
this show initially comes to you Friday night into Saturday mornings,
and as I look at the scores as they are
coming in Cleveland, the Guardians have won eight straight. The Tigers,
who have just been relentlessly scuffling, have dropped four straight.
They lost one tonight to the lowly Braves. We don't
get to say that very much anymore because the Braves

(24:40):
are so generally successful, but they've had all the injuries
and very little depth in their system at this point
after all that success, but they got overturned Charlie Morton
did by Atlanta, and so now Cleveland trails only by
two games. And here's another subject I wrote about a
couple of weeks b I think for baseball prospectives, which

(25:02):
is if only Cleveland had traded for a bat at
the deadline or if ever in the last I don't
know how many years they are always short. They seem
to in the eras subsequent to the big Albert bell
Manny Ramirez, Jim Tomayers be able to turn up better
pitching than they could then when Charles Nagy and old
guys like Dennis Martinez and Oral Hrscheiser were the best

(25:25):
they could do. And I mean no insult to any
of them, they were, particularly Herscheizer and Martinez, very close
to Hall of Fame level pitchers. However, they were both
forty Well, now that's less the problem. However, it's now
on the other side of the ball where their catchers
are something historically bad at one seventy eight two sixty three,

(25:46):
three twenty nine for the season. Good defense, well you
hope so, given what you're trading off for it. And
the outfield is also something truly pathetic, maybe the worst
in franchise history, with as I speak to you, the
center fielders in particular hitting two two, two fifty five
three twenty seven, and the right fielders hitting one ninety

(26:08):
six two sixty four three nineteen. And you say, haha,
left field but Steve Kwan has been hurt since the
All Star break, and those numbers are trending rapidly downwards.
So why are you complaining they've won eight in a row,
there are only two games out, and the answer is
because they have only nine games left. Their ownership keeps
throwing away seasons like we're all gonna live forever. Dudes,

(26:30):
You're on seventy seven years since the last time you
guys got to dogpile on the field and shake the
champagne in the clubhouse. So let's go from something vexing
to something fun. One of the best stories, as I
said before the break of the twenty twenty five baseball season,
is the explosion of home runs from Mariners catcher Cal Rowley,
who is not only having one of the best seasons,

(26:53):
particularly well the best home run season that a catcher
ever had, but he's doing something that has been pretty
rare for Meers catchers, Like there's no Roy Campanella and
Yogi Berra in that franchise is past, no offense meant
to Kenji Jojima or Mike Zunino or Dave Valley. There's
just not a huge tradition of big backstop seasons by

(27:16):
catchers in Mariner's history. I remember when Scott Bradley hit
three h two in singles in a platoon season, and
it was kind of a big deal given what had
come before. Three catchers in team history have had thirty
home run seasons and they're all named cal Rally over
the last three years. And no doubt some of that

(27:37):
is environmental. It's the balls, it's the ballparks, it's the era,
it's the strike zone, whatever you want to call it.
But you can't take anything away from him. He is
a switch hitting gold glove backstop and as I speak
to you today, he has fifty six home runs a
total which leads the American League. One hundred and eighteen
RBIs which dido and he's hitting two forty six, which

(27:59):
is high for him. That's the one thing he doesn't
do well. And he's drawn ninety four walks, in part
because he's been intentionally passed sixteen times. Not only has
Rally set a record for catchers, but he also has
passed Mickey Mantle's nineteen sixty one total of fifty four
home runs by a switch hitter. And that one makes
me a little sad and regretful, I think is the word.

(28:21):
Not because I'm a big Mantle partisan, or as I said,
I don't begrudge rally anything, but rather because it's such
a strong reminder of what Mantle, as good as he was,
managed to either throw away or to be less judgmental
about things had taken away from him by misfortune and
bad timing as well. You know, one of the big

(28:45):
stories of the nineteen sixty one season, the big story
of a season that was a statistics distorting expansion year,
was the competition between Mantle and his teammate and outfield
partner Roger Maris to break Babe Ruth's single season of
sixty home runs set in nineteen twenty seven. Mantle got
through August with forty eight home runs in one hundred

(29:06):
and thirty one games. Marius had fifty one in one
hundred and thirty two games. So both the overall quest
and the intra team competition were very much still alive.
It's fun to look at how each player started the
season two. Mantle didn't homer in his first three games,
but hit seven over the next week or so. Barris
got off to a slow start. The defending MVP by

(29:28):
the way of the nineteen sixty season, and he hit
one sixty one with no home runs over the first
ten games, and from there Mantle held on for a
long time. It took until mid August for Mantle to
yield the lead. As of August fifteenth, Mantle had forty
five home runs and Maris passed him that day. Over

(29:49):
the rest of the season, Barris hit fifteen, Mantle nine.
As you know, Marius finished the season with sixty one
and Mantle finished in the hospital. In September of sixty one,
Mantle got sick. He had every kind of gunk you
can think of, as Jane Levy, a former guest on
this show, wrote sports writers following the team followed his

(30:10):
condition closely, diagnosing a cold, a head cold, a heavy colt,
a virus, an eye infection, and an upper respiratory infection
that lingered through a long home stand against the Tigers, Senators,
and Indians, and then a road trip to Chicago, Detroit,
and Baltimore. At that point, broadcaster Mel Allen, and this
is unforgivable, sent him to doctor Max Jacobson, the literal

(30:34):
doctor feel good. He injected Mantle. You've probably heard this before,
but still he injected Mantle in the hip with Lord
knows what and botched the actual shot hitting bone miracle.
Max lost his license in nineteen seventy five, but that
was way too late to save Mantle's nineteen sixty one season.
The site of the shot absessed down to the bone.

(30:57):
Go please, I don't know about you have no desire
to view my own bones. I mean on an X ray. Sure,
I've done that multiple times, but not like looking through
a window on my arm. Certainly not one that's festering
and alive with microbiology. Them bones, them bones, going to
walk around, but in a in a suit, a nicely
tailored suit. You understand now. Mantle didn't see Doctor Feel

(31:20):
Good and receive his bolus of amphetamines and industrial runoff
until September twenty fifth. By then, he had hit one
home run in his prior fifteen games. There wasn't much
season left. Jacobson's visit or his visit to Jacobson came
on an off day between games one fifty eight and

(31:40):
one fifty nine. The shot endangered Mantle's life and ruined
his postseason, but it didn't end the home run chase.
What did that was the month span from August fifteenth
to September fifteenth, when Mantle hit three p thirty with
eight home runs in thirty one games. Anyone else would
take that it was much better than Maris over during

(32:01):
that period, in that Marius hit only two twenty two.
He just happened to hit ten home runs to Mickey's eight,
and Marius kept on going, whereas due to this illness
or series of illnesses, that Mantle had climaxed by this
ill administered shot meant that he was done, whereas Roger

(32:21):
just kept going. Now, whether you want to say that
it happened that way because Marius just hit more home
runs and would have happened no matter what, and you
might be comfortable and fair and right saying, hey, Mantle
got sick, it happens, or maybe you want to impute
Mantle's illnesses to his lifestyle. There's less direct evidence for that.
It's hard enough to prove who got you sick if

(32:42):
you've been sitting in a room of sniffling kindergarteners, which one,
which one is the guilty one. No doubt Mickey had
a lot of late nights when he didn't get sick.
And yet it's not wholly unreasonable to take that into consideration. Well,
that will determine how much of a loss one feels
about his season's Dani you Ma. Prior to the Doctor
Feel Good shot, he'd already been leaving games early because

(33:04):
of his illness, and he'd sat out all but one
at that of games one fifty three through one fifty six.
Post Doctor Feel Good, he started only three of the
remaining six games and finished none of them. Back at
the beginning of the month, he had his last two
home run game against the Tigers, he had fifty homers
with twenty six to play. Maris had fifty three, and

(33:28):
in retrospect, either of them should have done it. And
as great as Mickey was, it seems very reasonable to say, hey,
you had a good run at it. Sick or no,
that just isn't a normal home run pace eleven in
twenty six games. I mean, that hasn't happened very often,
and to the extent that it has, those who did
it were part of the juiced ball and juiced player era.

(33:51):
There are some exceptions, Gian Carlos, Stanton, J. D. Martinez,
Reggie Jackson, going back, they've all exceeded that, but mostly
you see Sosa and Bonds and McGuire, you just have
to tip your cap to Roger Maris and yeah, okay, microbes, bacteria,
viruses of all kinds. But still, when Mantle was unable
to play because his leg was falling off and it

(34:13):
had caused him to register one hundred and one degree fever,
the Yankees sent him to the hospital so he didn't
die of septicemia, and he had surgery to clean that
sucker out and pack it with gauze. So that was
the conclusion of a health journey that in his memoir
the Mick Mantle said had all started with a head cold. Now,
in Levy's book, she doesn't imply that he had also

(34:35):
fallen off the wagon, but she does say that throughout
that season, a number of teammates, including Marius, Bob Serve
and Yogi Berra, had worked to keep Mickey away from
the New York City nightlife and had mostly succeeded. But
somewhere around Labor Day Mickey had gotten well. Grover Cleveland
dish and draw your own conclusions about that. The fact

(34:56):
that there is that ambiguity invites us to talk about
it and speculate, And although it may not be fair
at least not to Mickey Mantle in that particular moment.
The overall arc of his life argues that it is
reasonable for us to talk about it and draw what

(35:16):
knowledge and wisdom we can from what happened at the
end of that season. Right now today, there is a
campaign against speaking honestly about certain public figures. And if
that applied to the Mick, I couldn't talk about what
we just did, and Levy couldn't have written her book.

(35:36):
And yes, Mickey didn't pardon the expression put himself on
a mantle. He spoke of these matters himself quite often,
in fact, before he left us in nineteen ninety five.
But somehow that's no defense to whatever this is that
we're going through. Quoting the dead at their worst is
apparently not a defense to an accusation of, well, I

(35:56):
don't really know, reveling in their demise. Somehow, for the record,
I don't think I need to say this, but I will.
I'm really sorry Mickey isn't here anymore. My career got
started a few years after he died, and just before
Joe DiMaggio passed, and I never got near enough to
either of them to have any kind of conversation or
even shout hi. And that is one of my big regrets.

(36:20):
Back in nineteen ninety nine, I was writing for the
original version of Yankees dot Com. I'd been doing so
for a while. At that point, there was terribly little
oversight from the Yankees themselves, pretty much none at all.
This was so early in the life of the internet
that I don't think the people running the team, and
they were all more of George Steinbrenner's cohort than mine,

(36:42):
had understood how much money there was to be made
and how important it would be to them financially and reputationally.
And so someone approached them and a bunch of other
teams too, and said, hey, we'd like to produce a
website for you. Well, you take three dollars in ninety
nine cents for the rights. I'm exaggerating, but it probablyably
wasn't a great deal more. And they said, sure, knock

(37:03):
yourselves out. And basically they would have preferred if they'd
never heard from us again. And periodically we'd say can
we get some press passes and they'd say no. Can
we get a ticket or two? And they'd say no,
can we interview Bernie Williams and they'd say no, and
we'd say, this is your website, you know, we're advertising you,

(37:23):
and they'd say it is. Now. Over time, much of
that did get better. This is before MLB dot Com
swept all of that away, So I don't want to
act like they never let me into the building. In fact,
that is when I started getting credentials and getting to
talk to some of these old timers and of course
present day players as well, and I only irritated some
of them, but there were a number of people, some

(37:45):
of whom are still there, who were very helpful to me.
So I don't want to be unfair to the club
in that sense. And as far as being on my
own in terms of what to write about and how
to write it, that's the way I like it. And
I stayed with them through the transition to MLB dot
Com and the Yes Network, and it was only when
that started to change that I finally left. At Christmas

(38:06):
that year, I found myself casting about for a subject.
There was nothing going on, but I was supposed to
write anyway. Christmas Day that year would be the tenth
anniversary of Billy Martin's death in an alcohol related single
vehicle accident. So I chose to think and write about him,
his close friend Mickey, and their mutual manager and occasional

(38:29):
father figure, Casey Stengel. I know that won't surprise you.
I am who I am, I was who I am,
although I hope I've grown in other ways. But these
are the stories that I care about. These are the
people that I care about. I'll try to unpack that
more in a moment, but for now, as we head
into a break, what I need to say is that

(38:50):
I tried to write about them tenderly, but honestly, and
that upset one reader and it has stayed with me
ever since, and it chimes with what we're going through now.
And I'll tell you about what I wrote and what
my correspondence said when we return on the other side.

(39:25):
Welcome back. You didn't stop at the Grover Cleveland service
area by any chance while we were away, did you.
For the record, it's on the Turnpike between exits eleven
and twelve, but if you happen to be on the Parkway,
you can visit the Larry Adobe service area between exits
one fifty one and one fifty three. A Hey, give

(39:46):
them credit for trying right and for honoring the right people.
So on that day, Christmas Day. Basically in nineteen ninety nine,
I wrote in part the problem with Casey Stengel as
a parental figure was that he had never been one
and did not really see himself as one. Stanngele's self
image was that of a teacher, someone who took young

(40:07):
players and taught them how to play the game. As such,
he was capable of a teacher's frustrations when his pupils,
particularly Mantle, who Stanngle saw as his legacy in the
game his creation, in the same way that Melott had
been his mentor John mcrath's, failed to perform to his
level of expectation. The teacher's student relationship superseded any other

(40:31):
emotional bond in refusing to be like a true father
and limiting his parental attentions to the ballpark, Stanngele failed
to hold up his end of the bargain with these
two young men who played their hearts out for him.
I think this is particularly true in relation to alcohol,
an area where Martin and Mantll emulated Stanngele without having
Stengele's tolerance. It was a failure that led to the

(40:54):
untimely deaths of both men. Mantle, who bravely made his
alcoholism public, died of liver disease, and Martin's drinking heavily
figured in his professional problems and ultimately his accidental death.
Alcohol is a troubling part of the legacy that Stanngele
left them. Stangel was a heavy drinker. Johnny Murphy, one

(41:14):
of his pictures, joked, when he dies, they'll have to
send his liver to the Smithsonian. This was not so
much because he lived to an advanced age while continuing
to drink, but because, despite his consumption, he was almost
never seen to have been inebriated. In this, he was
kind of similar to Winston Churchill, who was probably just

(41:34):
very slightly potted all the time. Either Stangel nursed one
drink for hours at a time, too busy talking to
actually finish it, or he had a tremendous tolerance. The
truth is probably somewhere in between. He had a permissive
attitude toward his player's consumption of alcohol. In this he
showed his age in Stanngele's youth, and for a considerable

(41:56):
time afterwards, players who did not drink were fought to
lack manhood. They say, some of my stars drink whiskey.
Stengle said, but I have found that the ones who
drink milkshakes don't win many ball games. Of clean cut
Bobby Richardson, he said, look at him. He doesn't drink,
he doesn't smoke, he doesn't stay out late, and he
still can't hit two fifty. The Stengele drinking only became

(42:21):
a problem when it affected a player on the field.
No ballplayer should ever get into the habit where he
drinks before a ballgame. When I had one of those boys,
I said, well, this man is limited. If he doesn't
want to change, why disappear him. However, if a player
with off the field problems was productive for him, as
Don Larson was, Stengele was able to ignore his lapses

(42:44):
up to and including Larsen driving his car into a tree,
as he did during spring training nineteen fifty six, the
same year in which he would pitch his perfect game.
Asked why his pitcher was out driving at five am,
Stanngele said that he must have gone to mail a letter.
Stengle's ambivlio towards drinking carried over to his team as
a whole. Ryan Duran Stengel's bullpen ace in nineteen fifty

(43:06):
nine and nineteen sixty and later, a recovering alcoholic told
writer Peter Golenbach, there were several full blown alcoholics on
that team, and there were three or four more who
came pretty close. And I want to interject from here
the vantage point of twenty twenty five that whereas Stengel's
attitudes towards drinking were those of a player whose career

(43:29):
began about nineteen ten, that he wasn't any different from
any of his contemporaries in many Americans down to the fifties,
and passed it that alcoholism conceived as a disease was
still in the future, that men and young men drank
was an accepted and still is an accepted part of
the culture. And of course that Casey never picked up

(43:50):
a bottle and forced anyone to drink from it. In retrospect,
what I think I should have said was that although
Stengel was a manager who believed in Billy Martin as
a player more than anyone else did at that time,
and was responsible for him having a major league career,
and that he promoted Mantle heavily and said many many

(44:14):
positive and encouraging things about him, about how great he
was or could be. That in an ideal world, these
two players might have had a manager who involved himself
more with them as people rather than players, who was
able to say or took it upon himself to say, Hey,
you guys need to slow this down the way that
you're living. And I'm not saying that Casey didn't say that,

(44:37):
because I feel fairly certain that in some ways he
probably did, but only to the extent that he was
capable of it, and that his own attitudes didn't mitigate
the message. I might be wishing for someone totally unrealistic.
I don't know who that manager would have been. I
don't know that he was around whoever in the nineteen fifties,
and if you think forward to the seventies and eighties,

(44:59):
when drugs came into the game and players needed that
guy to have both the empathy and authority combined to say, fella,
you're gonna kill yourself. And I don't mean twenty years
from now when your liver goes back on you, but
today or tomorrow. Baseball men were more inclined to be
punitive and judgmental than they were to be compassionate. Returning

(45:23):
to what I wrote at Christmas in nineteen ninety nine,
in retrospect, it now seems clear that one of those
Durham referred to was Mickey Mantle. Stengel's occasional hostility toward
his greatest player has been cited as evidence of his
selfishness and ingratitude. In his memoirs, Stengel selected All Star
teams for both his Yankee years and his entire career

(45:43):
to that point. Although he listed Mantle among the best
Yankees he had managed, he did not list Mantle as
one of the best players in the majors during a
period spanning fifty years. Despite Mantle's great success and incredible performances,
Stengel often seemed frustrated with his approach and lack of focus.
At the time, this seemed unreasonable, but with Mantle's liver

(46:06):
failure and resultant death in nineteen ninety five, and the
concomitant knowledge that some of his lapses in performance resulted
from his undisciplined lifestyle, Stangle's disappointment becomes more understandable. Nonetheless,
Stangles shared some responsibility for the fate of Mantle and Martin.
Both were teenagers when Stanngel first came into contact with them,

(46:29):
Both adopted him as a father figure, and Stanngle's casual
attitude towards alcoholism his mixed messages about drinking undoubtedly influenced
the two young men. Again, in retrospect, I think I
was a bit unfair to Casey here, who I was
asking to be not only someone that he wasn't, but
to buck an entire culture, not to mention Martin and

(46:51):
Mantle's entire personalities and backgrounds. And Casey was very aware
of what those were with both of them and commented
on them. But that's a lot for anyone to be
up against. Both Mantell and Martin were not only drinkers,
they were very determined drinkers, and even if Stengel had
done nothing to ask them to dry out, a whole

(47:11):
lot of people around them did and it didn't take
I concluded by saying, I think that heroes and fathers
are meant not only to inspire but to disappoint you.
The moment you discover that someone you idolize has faults
and weaknesses, you grow a little bit. Realizing that you
can't find perfection in another human being is an essential
step on the road to maturity and adulthood. That's why

(47:34):
every hero has a little something left out, so you
can miss it in them and find it in yourself.
I don't know if Mickey Mantle or Billy Martin ever
found whatever qualities that absent fathers and a difficult surrogate
failed to instill in them. And there I put down
my pen and went on my gloomy way to experience

(47:54):
the holidays in my usual ruminative fashion. You have to
understand that I love these people and never met Casey,
who died when I was a very young child, but
I care about him. As I said, I never got
to talk to Mantle. I shared an elevator with Billy
Martin when I was fourteen, oddly enough, but it was
a weird late night situation and it was too awkward

(48:15):
for me to say anything. So I don't love them
out of personal experience, the way you would a member
of your family, but out of learning about them. And
maybe that's not the most realistic way to love someone,
but I do. The thing is as a matter of
both personality and philosophy. I don't love anyone uncritically. It's
a good way to blind yourself get hurt, be disappointed perpetually,

(48:40):
and not only won't you do yourself any good, you
won't be of any help to those you do love
if you insist on experiencing them in a way that
doesn't reflect who they really are. Shortly after that column appeared,
I got a hostile response from Jenny That really was
the writer's name, but let's call her Scott. Scott wrote,
I usually enjoy your commentaries on the Yankee Forum, but

(49:02):
your one on Casey Billy Martin Mickey Mantle was not
one of my favorites. The Yankees website is not the
right place to speak of drinking, habits, et cetera. How
about dwelling on how Billy Martin interrupted his career in
the majors to serve in the Korean War, or how
his timely hitting was key in many Yankee postseason victories.
Leave the smut to the message board and all that

(49:26):
garbage around the holidays when kids are home surfing the net. Sincerely, Scott,
you know what jumps out at me now and I
didn't respond to it at the time, is that Billy
Martin interrupted his career to serve in the Korean War
the same way A Ton of Americans interrupted their careers
to serve in the Korean War reluctantly, unwillingly, and because

(49:48):
there was a draft and it was the law, they
were not thrilled to go. Martin was not thrilled to go.
Ted Williams really didn't want to go. Yes, they did
their duty by their country, and we honor them for that.
But it wasn't like they nobly said baseball must wait
until the present national emergency has concluded. They were spectacularly

(50:08):
unthrilled by it and remained unthrilled for the rest of
their lives. Now, in terms of my actual response, it
was similar to what I said earlier that speaking honestly
about people is a service to each other and ourselves.
Otherwise you're living a lie, dwelling in a happy cotton
candy bubble. I'm not going to read my response to
Scott word for word, but a few excerpts. Americans don't

(50:31):
trust each other to understand nuance, so we sterilize our history,
so our heroes are bland and faultless. They become one
hundred percent good, our motives one hundred percent pure. A
warm blood at George Washington is a lot more interesting
to learn about than the marble man. Washington was offered
tremendous power and consistently refused it. If you don't assume

(50:54):
that he was perfect, then it's a fascinating story how
strong he must have been to ever give in to temptation.
In school, we learn about the high ideals of our
revolution and how we made the world safe for democracy
in World Wars one and two, but we hear almost
nothing about what we did to the Philippines at the
turn of the twentieth century. For our dozens of interventions

(51:16):
in Latin America. We learned that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves,
which is a simplistic notion in itself, but get very
little sense that it took him years to figure out
that that was what he was supposed to do. To me,
a Lincoln who was born with his moral compass screwed
on exactly right is far less instructive than a Lincoln
who had to get his bearings in the world before

(51:39):
his inner goodness and morality finally asserted themselves and made
him an instrument of destiny. That he paid for that
destiny with his life makes his struggle to arrive at
it all the more poignant taken solely on his ability
to take a bad team and turn it into a winner.
Billy Martin was the greatest manager of all time. No one,

(52:01):
not Connie mack or Earl Weaver or John mcraw could
turn a team around the way that he did. Unfortunately,
he had a dark side. He was suspicious, paranoid, often violent,
and alcohol played a large part in making him that way.
If we tell the story of Billy Martin without talking
about those qualities, we are telling a lie. We have

(52:23):
to make up outlandish excuses for him. Martin was fired
nine times in sixteen seasons because every owner he worked
for was insane. He stopped getting along with his players
nine times in sixteen seasons because all of his players
didn't want to win as badly as he did. Denying
the truth about this one aspect of Martin's life quickly

(52:45):
forces us to alter his entire story in so many
other areas that we're not talking about the real Billy
Martin anymore. He's just a character we made up. The
same is true of Mickey Mantle. We can learn from
Billy Martin and Mickey Mantle, and knowledge is more valuable
than mere awe. Mantle knew that when just before he

(53:07):
died he said, kids, don't be like me, he was
asking us to remember him as he was, not as
we would have wished him to be. In preparing this response,
I've avoided touching on alcoholism because my areas of knowledge
are baseball in history, not substance abuse. However, I would
like to assert that the subject of alcoholism should not

(53:29):
be hidden from children. Several studies have shown that children
who are well acquainted with alcohol and its destructive powers
are much less likely to abuse it in later years.
Unrealistic heroes have little value. Like fairy tales, they exist
to socialize our children with dramatized examples of right and wrong. Unfortunately,
fairy tales also lack the complexity of the real world.

(53:52):
They leave us helpless to interpret the contradictions inherent in
real people and in our national story, and priv us
of the ability to think critically. James Baldwin wrote, American
history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more
terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. As

(54:14):
baseball is part of American history, that's true of the
game as well. But we don't have to let it
be that way, That's where I left things with Scott
aka Jenny, and that also concludes this week's sermon except
for me to say that deciding what of the proceeding,
if any, applies to current events, is entirely up to you.

(54:37):
And now that I've gone back through all of that,
I would ask a further question, and this kind of
goes to both what Jenny aka Scott and some of
our leaders are saying now, which is how dare you
say these things about person X or person why? And
my question would be how dare I why? What is

(54:58):
it that you're afraid of? What change if people hear
what you don't want them to hear? Who is it
that you think will be harmed? Is it you? Good
Old Jenny aka Scott. I hope they're doing well. Should
you wish to do well? With me? On social media?
You can follow me at Stephen Gooldman dot bsky dot social.

(55:18):
You can also write us by which I mean me
at infinite inning at gmail dot com. And there's still
a Facebook group. Simply go to Facebook search on infinite Inning.
Bang you're there. I put up a photo of Babe
Ruth collecting his war bonds, or half of them, should
you wish to support the show, and I very much
hope you do, and yeah, I know times are hard
and the price of coffee has like doubled, please go

(55:40):
to Patreon dot com. Slash the Infinite Inning. We're all
in this together. Gear of a rudimentary kind available at
the hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com.
Original soundtrack available Cratis at casual observer Music dot band
camp dot com. Finally, should you find yourself with the
proverbial moment to spare, please go to the podcat of
your choice. I've heard me say it a million times

(56:01):
or three hundred and forty five and rate, review and subscribe.
And if your podcatcher doesn't let you do those things, well,
grab a piggy bacon start saving up for that next
cup of coffee. Our theme song, which you are hearing
now and have been listening to throughout the episode, was
a co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring, who says,

(56:21):
may I paraphrase Richard carl Here's that you may live
one hundred happy years and I may live one hundred
less one day, for I don't care to live any longer.
When all our liberties have passed away. Well, if I
can figure out how to surpass that bit of doggerel,
despite the fact that I don't own a dog and
the parakeet tends to denigrate my ability to write verse.

(56:43):
I'll be back next week with more tales from inside
the Infinite Inning