Tony Castro's America

'My world growing up was Mickey Mantle. Period.'

Best-selling author Tony Castro's latest book is Mantle: The Best There Ever Was (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The softcover edition of his acclaimed 2016 dual biography DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers (Lyons Press) was recently released, and his acclaimed biography of Ernest Hemingway will be out in September. NPR named Looking for Hemingway one of the best books of 2016. He was interviewed by Kerri Ladshaw.

Where are you from?

I grew up in Waco, Texas, in the heart of the Bible Belt in mid 20th century America, bilingual, bi-cultural, and religiously bi-polar.

Religiously bi-polar?! What in the world does that mean?

I was both Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic. But I quoted too much Protestant scripture for a good Catholic, and I knew too many saints and too much Latin for an acceptable Baptist.

 

PATRIOTS & TYRANTS - WORK IN PROGRESS

MURDER IN THE WHITE HOUSE

“Any Hispanics in the room?” 

DONALD TRUMP

IN EARLY FEBRUARY OF 2017, PRESIDENT Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, trudged around the Oval Office a little over a month after his inauguration while preparing his first address to a joint
session of Congress. Son-in-law Jared Kushner and adviser Stephen Miller were with the president as he practiced some scathing, campaign-style rhetoric on immigration that he said would cause his audience to go wild. He read aloud the names of criminals and their crimes — rapes, murders, drug dealers — felons he said he was planning to toss about in his speech. They were all Hispanic names, and the president seemed to relish saying each with an anglicized pronunciation. Trump told the two men that the tough talk on illegal immigrants was irresistible red meat for his Make America Great Again base, and predicted the audience would go wild when he talked about tossing them out of the country. Kushner and Miller reportedly laughed aloud at the president’s performance, but then that would have been expected. Trump was accustomed to such immediate support from Kushner, his senior adviser and daughter Ivanka’s husband of almost a decade. Miller was an anti-immigration hardliner and a chief champion of the Trump administration's decision to separate migrant children from their parents who entered the country illegally, as a policy that would deter migrants from coming to the United States. It was only when other White House aides heard of Trump’s plans to double-down on his anti-immigrant stance that the president reluctantly agreed with their suggestions that he tone down the blistering rhetoric on Latino immigrants that he would deliver to America in the nation’s Capitol.

When Mickey Tried to Console Jackie O.

BASEBALL LEGEND MICKEY MANTLE, who lived in fear of dying young of the Hodgkins disease that killed several members of his family, tried to reach out to comfort former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the early 1990s when he learned she had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Mickey’s longtime friend Pat Summerall, the former New York Giants football player and sports analyst, told Mantle biographer Tony Castro that he tried to connect the legendary slugger with the widow of President John F. Kennedy.

“But I think that by the time Mickey and the rest of the world were aware Mrs. Kennedy’s was sick that her condition had worsened and she was only seeing family,” Summerall told Castro, whose new book Mantle: The Best That Ever Was will be released April 12 by Rowman & Littlefield.

Bestselling ‘DiMag & Mick’ Now Out in Paperback

DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers has just been released in paperback, two years after its bestselling debut in hard cover by Lyons Press. It is the second installment in author Tony Castro's Mickey Mantle trilogy. The third book, Mantle: The Best There Ever Was, will be published in April by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.  Tony has also has written Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.

Q: Why did you decide to write a book looking at both Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle?

A: Dating back to my childhood, I’ve long had an undying interest in both Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle.

My father was a New York Yankee fan and returned home from World War II with a huge poster — off an old New York market calendar, I believe – of DiMaggio in that classic swing of his. A few years later, the DiMaggio poster in my bedroom was joined by one of Mantle finishing off his own powerful swing.

'Mantle The Best's Starred Review from Booklist

"Mantle’s life story has been told many times, but it’s never received as loving a treatment as this one."

Mickey Mantle Meets Moneyball

But in the light of the new baseblall analytics, Mickey Mantle's 1956 season comes off as one of the greatest in the game's history -- and part of the finest back-to-back seasons in the modern era, which started in 1947.

In 1956, Mantle won the Major League’s Triple Crown when he batted .353, hit 52 home runs and batted in 130 runs. In 1957, he batted .365 with 34 home runs and 94 RBIs. It would appear to have been a horrendous follow-up season, but it wasn't. 

Mantle's on-base percentage was almost 50 points higher in 1957 than in 1956, and his OPS of 1.177 was better than the 1.169 he recorded while winning the Triple Crown.

Enter then what may be Sabermetrics' most powerful statistic -- Wins Above Replacement, known among baseball nerds as WAR -- that takes into account everything that a player accomplishes. Wins Above Replacement asks the question, “If this player were injured and his team had to replace him with a minor leaguer or someone from the bench, how much value would the team be losing?”

In his Triple Crown winning season, Mickey had a WAR of 12.9 in 1956, which ranks second only to  Babe Ruth's WAR of 14.7 1923 and 14.0 in 1921. Mantle's WAR in 1957 was 12.5.

By comparison, Barry Bonds’ best three seasons produced WAR marks of 12.5, 12.4, and 12.2. Willie Mays’ best was 11.0, Lou Gehrig’s higher was 12.0 and Ted Williams’ topped out at 11.8.