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Mickey Mantle:
The American
Dream
Comes To Life® |
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"Mini-Biography" by Lewis Early (Part 2 of 3) (Excerpted from the award-winning DVD, Mickey Mantle: The American Dream Comes To Life®. Click Here to learn more about it. Click Here to see an outline of the contents of the DVD.) |
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| In 1948 Yankees' scout Tom Greenwade came to
Baxter Springs to watch Mickey's teammate, third baseman Billy Johnson,
in a Whiz Kids game. During the game Mickey hit two homers, one
righty and one lefty, into a river well past the ballpark's fences. Greenwade
wanted to sign Mickey on the spot but, upon finding out that he was only
sixteen and still in high school, told him he would come back to sign him
with the Yankees on his graduation day in 1949. Good to his word, Greenwade
was there right on schedule, signing Mickey to a minor league contract
with the Yankees Class D team in Independence, Kansas. Mickey signed for
$400 to play the remainder of the season with an $1,100 signing bonus.
It was one of the great steals in baseball history. Tom Greenwade was quoted
in the press release announcing Mickey's signing as saying that Mickey
was the best prospect he'd ever seen.
After finishing the summer at Independence, where his team won the K-O-M (Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri) Championship (the beginning of Mickey's incredible string of playing for championship teams), Mickey went on to play at the Yankees' Class C team in Joplin, Missouri. The following year, 1951, Mickey was invited to spring training with the Yankees in Arizona. Mickey had one of the great rookie springs in history. His speed was unbelievable to Yankees' manager Casey Stengel. He was clocked at an incredible 2.9 seconds from home to first on a left-handed drag bunt (after his 1951 World Series injury he slowed to a still blazing 3.1 seconds), and could round the bases in and amazing 13 seconds! He pounded homers to places where a ball had rarely been seen hit before and, by the time the Yankees reached New York for their exhibition series with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Casey talked Yankees' owners Del Webb and Dan Topping, and General Manager George Weiss into bringing Mickey up to the Yankees for the season. It was the first time any player jumped from Class C directly to the Yankees. Except for a brief visit to the minor league team in Kansas City later that summer, Mickey never looked back. That fall the Yankees played the New York Giants in Mickey's first World Series. Yankees' center fielder Joe DiMaggio, in the last season of his career, was slowed by a nagging heel injury. Casey Stengel asked Mickey to help DiMaggio in center (Mickey was playing right-field) and on a pop fly by Willie Mays Mickey's spikes caught in a drain cover when he stopped suddenly to avoid a collision with Joe. Mickey went down as if he'd been shot, and was carried from the field on a stretcher. It was the first of what turned out to be many injuries he suffered throughout his playing career. One of the questions baseball scholars ponder
is the great "What if?" What would Mickey have accomplished if he had been
healthy during his career? A question that will never be answered, but
the answer certainly would make a staggering difference in Mickey's lifetime
stats. What if...?
© Copyright 1998 - Lewis Early |
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