Mantle by Tony Castro

Author:Tony Castro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-03-06T17:44:20+00:00

12

The Prince of America

I may not have been the best goddamn ballplayer of all time, but if I wasn’t, I’d like to see who the fuck was.

—Mickey Mantle

If the 1965 season that began with Mickey Mantle making more history with his Astrodome dinger didn’t seem as if it was his fifteenth year with the Yankees, it may have been because so many of us baby boomers who looked up to him were still in our teens. Mantle certainly didn’t look much older than he had in 1961 when he and fellow Yankee Roger Maris chased Babe Ruth’s home run record. He was thirty-three at the start of the 1965 season, and he still had that overgrown blonde crew cut that made him look even younger. And if he limped around the bases, well, few of us had ever seen him run any other way. We had been too young when he was fully healthy in his rookie year. We had little or no memory of what he had been like back then except for the occasional flashes such as when he legged out a drag bunt or chased down Gil Hodges’s sixth inning deep blast to left center field to save Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.

But we were not alone. By 1965, Mickey Mantle was the prince of America. Who could have imagined a time without him in it? For almost a decade and a half, he had been the royalty of the national pastime, not only for his accomplishments on the playing field but also in large part because of the national media saturation of his exploits. Certainly Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio had been equally recognized in their day, especially playing in New York, the media capital of the world. What was different for Mantle, though, was he became the heartthrob of the national pastime in the age of television. In 1946, as the baby boomer generation was beginning, there had been only 17,000 television sets in the country. By 1950, Americans had 4.4 million television sets. Then TV exploded in the country with fifteen million sets sold in 1951 alone. By 1953, two-thirds of American homes had at least one TV. If American homes now seemed like something from the futuristic George Orwell novel 1984, replete with telescreens used for constant surveillance, well, this by now had become the age of conspiracy theories. More than fifty million television sets dotted the country in 1960. If we weren’t being “watched” by Big Brother, certainly Americans were being influenced by their TVs in what they bought, wore, did, and talked about. Television was also a boon to baseball, much as radio had been in the 1920s.

In fact, you could call baseball the very first reality series of American television. Baseball was on every Saturday during the season and then Sundays and doubleheaders too. The casts were the rosters of the sixteen major league teams, though most often it was the Yankees who became what seemed like regulars on CBS’s nationally televised Game of the Week.

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