Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould Page A

with his audience. As I listened on the radio, Allen leaned out of his press box and accosted a fan in the midst of a raucous Bronx cheer: “Why are you booing him?” The fan replied, “Because he ain’t as good as DiMaggio”—and Allen, rendered momentarily speechless (for once) by simple fury, busted a gut.
     
    “Mickey Mantle” first appeared in Sport magazine, December 1986.
     
    Suddenly I realized something in a cold sweat. Mickey was actually closer to me in age (ten years older) than he was to DiMaggio (nearly seventeen years younger). Before then I had simply lumped all full-sized people into the single, undifferentiated category “adult.” But Mickey was more like me, and I would have been scared shitless out there in center field. My heart went out to him—as it had, for the first time, when he caught his spikes on a drainage spout during the 1951 World Series and almost ended his career with the first and most serious of many leg injuries.
    In 1956, his magical year of the triple crown, I came to love Mickey Mantle. I suspect you had to be a kid growing up on the streets of New York to appreciate the context in all its glory. The fifties—before the great betrayal and flight to California by Stoneham and O’Malley—were the greatest baseball years that any single city ever experienced. I was lucky to be the right age in the right place. We had three great teams (and seven subway World Series in the ten years between 1947 and 1956). All Yankee fans hated either the Giants or Dodgers with blazing passion (we loved individual players, but the corporate entity was Satan incarnate). Affiliation was no laughing matter or passing fancy. I received my worst street beating—and deserved it—when I had the temerity to admit, while playing with a cousin and his friends in Brooklyn, that I was a Yankee fan.
    Success had smiled on my side. The Yanks had beaten the Dodgers in all five of their subway series between 1941 and 1953. But then, in 1955, it happened—the impossible, the soul searching, the unimaginably painful, the always feared but never really anticipated. The Dodgers won in seven and the Brooklyn Eagle featured on its front (not its sports) page a smiling derelict under a banner headline “Who’s a Bum?”
    We waited all year for revenge, through a winter of discontent and into a summer of Mantle’s blooming greatness. We recovered our pride in 1956 (the last subway series), a victory sweetened to true perfection by Don Larsen’s twenty-seven bums up and twenty-seven bums down. Mantle both won and saved that game for Larsen, first with a home run off Sal Maglie, and then with a dandy catch on Hodges’s 430-foot drive to left-center.
     
    His next year, 1957, was even better, probably the greatest single season by any player in baseball’s modern era. Mantle’s achievements in 1957 have been masked by a conspiracy of circumstances, including comparison with his showier stats of the year before and the fact that his career-best batting average of .365 came in second to Ted Williams’s .388. In 1957 Mantle had a career high of 146 walks, with only 75 strikeouts. (In no other year did he come even close to this nearly two-to-one ratio of walks to strikeouts; in ten of eighteen seasons with the Yanks, he struck out more often than he walked.) This cornucopia of walks limited his official at-bats to 474 and didn’t provide enough opportunity for accumulating those (largely misleading) stats that count absolute numbers rather than percentages—RBIs and home runs for example. Superficial glances have led to an undervaluing of Mantle’s greatest season.
    Sabermetrics (or baseball number crunching) has its limits and cannot substitute for the day-to-day knowledge of professionals who shared the playing field with Mantle, yet numerical arguments command our respect when so many different methods lead to the same conclusion. As Bill James points out in his Historical Baseball Abstract , all