IT WAS PHOTO DAY AT THE New York Yankees' 2019 spring training, and I always like to imagine what it would have been like to have been on hand in 1951 to watch Mickey Mantle on the first day of the spring training that would launch his incredible career.
This photo shows what might have been Mantle at nineteen -- he certainly looks like a teenager -- though the photo is from his second season with the Yankees. The patch on the left shirt sleeve was one the Yankees wore on their home uniforms in 1952 celebrating the team's 50th anniversary.
Mickey's 1951 rookie season had its highs and its lows for Mantle, but my forthcoming book Mantle: The Best There Ever Was -- to be officially released by Rowman & Littlefield April 12 -- presents it as his personal favorite year, his Triple Crown 1956 season notwithstanding. Here's a sneak preview from the book:
MICKEY MANTLE ONCE CORRECTED ME without hesitation when I called 1956, the year he won the Triple Crown and virtually every sports award given out, his “favorite season.” It was when he became “Mickey Mantle,” a household name in America, and the most popular athlete in a culture that worshipped them. It was his best season, he said. His greatest season, without a doubt. He had even put his name on a ghostwritten book about 1956 having been My Favorite Summer 1956. But his true favorite season, he insisted, was 1951, his rookie year despite all the learning bumps and bruises, regardless of the humiliation of having been demoted to the minors in mid-summer, and notwithstanding the awful knee injury in the World Series that would impact his abilities for the rest of his career.
“I could be me then,” he said about his rookie season. “Nobody really knew me. I was just a wide-eyed kid in the big city. Everything was new. It was fun getting an education to New York, to being a big league ballplayer, to being a Yankee. I had no money to speak of, barely any walking around money, but I was finding I didn’t need any. I was free, but I was also free to succeed and fail, and I guess I did both. But I was playing next to DiMaggio, and day-to-day I saw how he handled not just being a big leaguer but being Joe DiMaggio. This is important. If I was as good as Case was saying as I could be, as good as my daddy always told me I could be, I needed to see and know what that was like. And what better example than Joe. He had come to the Yankees while Lou Gehrig was there and got to see him and learn from him day after day. And I reckon it might have been the same way with Gehrig becoming a Yankee alongside Babe Ruth.”
