The Last Boy by Jane Leavy

Author:Jane Leavy [Mickey Mantle and Jane Leavy ]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061987786
Publisher: HarperCollins

3.

When the season opened, Mantle was living alone in a suite at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South. Merlyn had stayed home in Dallas with the boys. Spring rains on the East Coast had played havoc with the first week of the season, scrambling schedules and pitching rotations. More wet weather was predicted.

When the April 19 game against the Angels was postponed, Mantle invited his former teammate Eli Grba up to the suite for a party. Grba, who’d gone to the expansion franchise in the off-season draft, gladly accepted. As soon as he arrived, Grba said, “Mickey took off. So here we are. Two guys and four of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in my life. As he’s leavin’, he says, ‘Take your pick.’ And they’re not prostitutes. Lord have mercy!

“It wasn’t like he was pimpin’. They were friends. He went someplace with Bobby Layne. Left us there. ‘Here, party!’”

Grba got home at 4 A.M. and awoke six hours later to find a cloudless sky and unwelcome news in the morning paper: “Doubleheader: Yankees vs. Angels, Game 1, starting pitchers, Ditmar and Grba. “Oh, shit,” he said.

When he got to the ballpark, a teammate pulled him aside and said, “What did ya do to Mickey last night? He doesn’t feel too good. Sonofabitch isn’t gonna play.”

“But, see, I know better,” Grba said. “Because when Mickey wasn’t as strong, he hit the ball further. He didn’t swing as hard. I get out there, and I’m pitching a pretty good ball game. First inning. I get a man on base. He comes up. The sonofabitch hits a home run. I hung a slider. What the hell—he’s Mickey Mantle.”

In the bottom of the fifth inning, with two on and two out, the score 2–2 and Mantle due up next, Angels’ manager Bill Rigney walked to the mound for a conversation. “Do you wanna pitch around him?”

Grba considered his options. His control was never that refined. He decided to waste a pitch inside anyway. But which pitch to waste? “I have a hard time hitting your fastball,” Mantle had told him the night before. “Your ball is like a metal ball.”

He’s setting me up, Grba reasoned. He’s gonna look for the fastball. And he’s gonna hit that sonofabitch nine miles.

So he threw Mantle a hard slider inside. “Well, that’s what he was lookin’ for all the time,” he said. “He hit that sonofabitch nine miles.”

As Mantle circled the bases, Grba circled the mound, calling him every name he could think of, beginning with Okie.

Mantle drove in five of the Yankees’ seven runs and was personally responsible for five of their first seven wins of the season. When he hit his fourth homer of the year the next day, the New York Times took the measure of his auspicious start: “…he’s eight games ahead of the pace set by Babe Ruth when he hit sixty homers in 1927…”

The drumbeat of historical imperative sounded often and early. By the end of the

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