The Mickey Mantle Book

I just finished reading Jane Leavy's new book "The Last Boy, Mickey Mantle the End of America's Childhood." Despite the ponderous title, I strongly recommend that any baseball fan read this book. Few ballplayers of the post-war era have been written about more than Mantle, so you would wonder why would someone tackle yet another bio of him and what could possibly be written that hasn't been written before.

Leavy's book is so thoroughly researched - it took her six years to complete the project - and so well written that it makes it worth the effort and worth reading. There may be little about the Mantle the ballplayer new in this book, but the most fascinating part of the book, as is often the case with such biographies, is that part that tells about Mantle's life after his playing days were over.

Unlike players today who can earn millions of dollars during their careers, Mantle needed to make a living and earn money when he retired, and what does someone who has spent his entire life playing baseball, and who is relatively uneducated, do to earn a living at that point in life? And then there are all of the other demons that were in Mantle's life: alcohol, the inability to relate to his wife and his sons, the fear of life ending diseases, the constant womanizing, and being always surrounded by people who enabled this lifestyle made this, to me, a very sad story. There is a episode in the book about Mantle going to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown - as a paying customer - with his mistress and another couple on a weekend in 1988, 14 years after his induction, that is almost heartbreaking.

If you read Leavy's book on Sandy Koufax from a few years back, you will recall that she structured that book around the nine innings of Koufax' perfect game in 1966. She uses a similar device here as she goes back and forth describing her encounter with Mantle when she was a young sportswriter who interviewed - or attempted to interview - him when he was shilling for a casino in Atlantic City in 1983. (After making a crude pass at her, Mantle drunkenly passed out and fell into her lap.) As it did in the Koufax book, this method works as Leavy tells the story of The Mick.

As I read this book, and read about how Mantle played his entire career in such great pain, I remembered my one time of seeing Mickey Mantle play. It was in an old-timers game at Three Rivers Stadium shortly after the Stadium opened. That would have been 1970, and the Pirates were celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the 1960 World Series win over the Yankees. (Can you imagine the Pirates doing something like that today?) Anyway, I was sitting in the first row of the centerfield seats at Three Rivers with my Dad and my brother Bill (not sure if Jim was there or not). Anyway, playing centerfield for the Yankees was none other than Mickey Mantle. I can remember someone hitting a ball to centerfield that got through the gap or over Mantle's head, and he had to run back to the wall to chase it down, and I can remember the very painful look on his face as he did so. It made all those Mickey-playing-in-pain stories that we had read about over the years come to life right in front of us.

Another terrific baseball biography written by Jane Leavy. Put it on your must read list.