Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould Page B

proposed measures of offensive performance—from his own runs created for outs consumed, to Thomas Boswell’s total average, Barry Codell’s base-out percentage, Thomas Cover’s offensive earned run average, and Pete Palmer’s overall rating in The Hidden Game —judge Mantle’s 1957 season as unsurpassed during the modern era. Consider just one daunting statistic, Mantle’s on-base percentage of .512. Imagine getting on base more often than making an out—especially given the old saw that, in baseball, even the greatest fail about twice as often as they succeed. No player since Mantle in 1957 has come close to an on-base percentage of .500. Willie Mays reached .425 in his best year.
    In 1958 the Yankees’ general manager, George Weiss, a tough old bastard, had the audacity to offer Mantle a contract with a $5,000 pay cut, reasoning that 1957 had not matched his triple crown performance of the year before!
     
    In a nation too young to generate truly mythical figures, Americans have been forced to press actual, rounded people into service, and to grant these special folks a dual status as human and legend. When, as with Mickey Mantle, sports heroes exemplify the cardinal myths of our culture, their conversion to parable and folklore is all the more rapid and intense.
    Mantle’s legend is the most powerful and enduring since Babe Ruth’s because he mixed into the circumstances of life and career three of the most potent folk images of American mythology. First, Mantle was young, handsome, and bristling with talent. His skills satisfied both sides of the great nature-nurture debate, for he combined the struggle of Horatio Alger with the muscles of John Henry. He was big and strong and could hit a ball 565 feet. His father, an impoverished miner, lived and breathed for baseball. He named his son after his favorite catcher, Mickey Cochrane, and made a playing area (usually against a barn) wherever they lived. Mutt Mantle converted his son, a natural righty, into a switch-hitter by delaying dinner each night until Mickey had taken enough successful swings from the left side.
    Second, Mantle was the gullible and naive farmboy who prevailed by good will and bodily strength in a tough world. Commerce, Oklahoma, as Mantle describes it, is a movie theater, a cafe, four churches, a motel, and a lot of grassroots (or rather slag heaps, in this bleak mining region) baseball. Mantle’s father labored in the mines all his brief life, except for a failed stint at farming. Mantle grew up as an Okie in the depths of the Depression—a family that stayed while Tom Joad and his compatriots moved westward.
    Third, his country innocence met the Big Apple. Mickey hit New York, symbol of immensity, rapacity, and sophistication, at age nineteen. He was soon bilked by a sleazy agent and victimized in a phony insurance scheme. His dad was so awed and disoriented on his first visit to Manhattan that he mistook the monument of Atlas at Rockefeller Center for the Statue of Liberty.
    Yet even this conjunction of unparalleled talent and naivete alone in the big city cannot in itself set an enduring legend. Mythological heroes need flaws and tragedies, the Achilles’ heel that defines an accessible humanity. Mantle’s innocence was tainted by tragedy and dogged by disappointment. He did it all for (and because of) his father, but Mutt Mantle lived to see only the dicey beginnings of Mickey’s then uncertain career. After Mickey’s injury in the 1951 World Series, Mutt took his son to Lenox Hill Hospital. As they got out of the cab, a hobbled Mickey put his weight against his father, and Mutt collapsed on the sidewalk. They ended up together in a double room—Mickey to recover from torn ligaments, his father to begin the slow process of dying from Hodgkin’s Disease, a form of cancer now usually curable.
    Serious injuries continued to plague Mantle. He never could put together a long string of healthy seasons, and he often played in pain,