Mickey Mantle's spectacular career still remembered fondly 30 years after his death

Just because the pitcher, one of your best friends, is serving up meatballs doesn’t mean you can feast on them. Just because 46,000 adoring fans at your old home ballpark are standing and cheering for you to work your magic doesn’t mean you can make that baseball disappear. Just because the announcer, another old friend, has joined the crowd in rooting you on doesn’t mean you can hit the ball where you want to nearly five years after you retired.

But just because you are Mickey Mantle, and just because this is Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, and just because you’ve always had a flair for the dramatic, of course you can deliver one more jolt, one more forever memory, one more home run . . . one last home run.

It’s Aug. 11, 1973. Whitey Ford is struggling with his control. The Yankees’ former ace lefthander is desperately trying to put the ball where the switch-hitting slugger likes it.

“Up and in batting righthanded,” Ford recalled to author Phil Pepe in his 1987 book, “Slick.” “I got the ball a little inside and Mickey pulled it foul along the third-base line.”

Mantle — who was two months shy of turning 42 — hit two more foul balls to leftfield, one that was crushed into the upper deck.

“How about that!” roared the on-field announcer that day, the legendary Mel Allen, uttering one of his trademark phrases. “Straighten it out, Mick!”

Ford remembers finally finding his groove. “He motioned for me to get it out over the plate a little and, amazingly, the next pitch was exactly where he wanted it. Mickey got into it and drove a shot [25 rows into the lower deck in left]. That was the most noise I ever heard standing in Yankee Stadium.”

Cue Allen for another signature line. “There’s a long drive going deep to leftfield. It is going, going and gone!”

Little did the exuberant crowd of 46,293 realize that would be Mantle’s last Yankee Stadium homer.

 Many more watched on TV that day. Many more have watched it since, again and again, courtesy of the internet.

“Honestly, my recollection is that it was amusing. We all had fun with it, we loved that it happened, but we figured Whitey would groove one every year on Old-Timers’ Day,’’ recalled Marty Appel, the Yankees’ public relations man at the time, in a phone interview with Newsday.

“We didn’t think it was historic in the sense of his last time around the bases. But it was, and looking back on it now, it was a really nice moment. It’s good it’s on YouTube, and it was no small feat. He’d been retired five years, and you can’t just say you’re going to go up and hit one out. It’s hard to do. That’s a big deal.’’

‘The signature Yankee’

Mickey Mantle was a big deal. Always has been. Always will be.

That’s been the case from a hyped first spring training in 1951 through a storied yet injury-plagued 18-year career, all with the Yankees, to legendary status achieved in retirement thanks to the nostalgia and baseball card craze and the long memories of baby-boomers everywhere.

That’s why even now, on another Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium and just days away from the 30th anniversary of Mantle’s death on Aug. 13, 1995, at the age of 63 from liver cancer, his admirers speak glowingly of the iconic No. 7.

“For baby boomers, he is the Yankee. He’s the signature Yankee even though they had Yogi [Berra], they had Whitey Ford, they had [Roger] Maris in back-to-back MVP seasons. The guy was Mantle,” former Commack resident and announcer Bob Costas said in a phone interview with Newsday.

Costas was a longtime Mantle fan and friend who delivered the eulogy at Mantle’s funeral in 1995 and did a widely acclaimed 1994 interview in which the slugger admitted he was an alcoholic who abused his body.

“Mick was one of the most compelling players ever, especially before injuries and other things caught up with him,” Costas said. “He was baseball’s greatest pre-steroid combination of power and speed.”

Though Mantle has dropped on the list in many career categories since his retirement after the 1968 season, his numbers still resonate today, even in the age of analytics and advanced statistics.

He retired third in all of baseball in career home runs with 536 but now ranks 18th. He was first in career strikeouts with 1,710 but no longer is in the top 25. He was third in career walks with 1,733 but now ranks eighth. He retired as the all-time leader in games played as a Yankee, his favorite stat, with 2,401, but that was surpassed by Derek Jeter (2,747).

However, he ranks first in career World Series home runs with 18, remains in the conversation about the greatest player of his era and has gained legendary status as a kind of a baseball folk hero because of enduring popularity and some prodigious feats. That includes a Triple Crown season in 1956, winning three MVP awards and being the champion of the tape-measure home run (long before Statcast.)

“It’s the 1950s and early ’60s. That was when the legend of Mantle took hold,” Costas said. “He wasn’t a PR creation. He didn’t just hit homers, he hit tape-measure homers, and he just had a presence that was beyond compelling. It was easy for people to say that he was their favorite player.”

Even if he wasn’t necessarily the best player, at least not without a great debate.

“Could he field, even when healthy, as well as [Willie] Mays? No. Is he as historically significant as [Hank] Aaron turned out to be? No,” Costas said. “But you can easily understand why at his peak, there was no greater baseball star than Mickey Mantle.

“It’s not a discussion now. Mays had a greater career. But if we’re talking about when we were kids, [Costas was born in 1952], you could have a reasonable argument, Mantle or Mays. His peak seasons of 1956, ’57, and ’61 are as good as any player of his time. And Mantle has the edge in terms of what we now call OPS [on-base plus slugging percentage] and home runs per time at bat. Look at it through the prism of modern analytics, and even then, Mick is just something special.”

Straight out of central casting

It was never simply about statistics for Mantle, though his certainly were Hall of Fame-worthy despite all those injuries.

“There’s the ring of the name itself, his presence. He had a certain look [blond hair, blue eyes, muscular frame] and that kind of aw-shucks country boy persona,” Costas said. “From a national standpoint, the Yankees were in the World Series 12 of Mickey Mantle’s first 14 seasons. And they were disproportionately featured on the [national TV] game of the week. So if you’re somebody who doesn’t live in a big-league town, the Yankees are the team you probably saw more than any other.”

As Appel noted, “Mickey was in the NBC fall lineup every year, right there with ‘Bonanza.’ So it was organic. His popularity started in New York and just spread nationally. The way he played the game, the way he hit a home run. There were no bat flips, there was no hot-dogging around the bases. He knew he’d sort of embarrassed the pitcher and he was determined to just drop the bat, circle the bases and go in the dugout, no fanfare.”

The fanfare, though, was everywhere. “You know, if Hollywood were to send in for Central Casting, Mantle would be the kind of appealing baseball player they’d call,” Costas said. “There he is, ‘Home Run Derby’ in black and white, Mickey Mantle against Willie Mays. That stuff’s just content now. It’s just inventory now, but it was something that felt special to us then. He’s standing there in centerfield [at Yankee Stadium] in the shadow of the three monuments, and you knew even then that he was the next in line. That it was Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, and nobody disputed that.”

Part of Mantle’s mystique as a player was his propensity to play hurt, something he did almost from the beginning, when he badly tore up his knee as a rookie during the 1951 World Series. Ten years later, he was bleeding through his uniform during the 1961 Series from an abscessed hip. When teammate Bobby Richardson suffered a spiked toe that filled his shoe with blood, the second baseman said, “How could I come out when he’s played with what he’s got?”

Mantle himself once said, “When I was playing at my best, I was certainly as good as Willie. But he played at 100% all the time. I did a few things he couldn’t do. I hit from both sides. I hit the ball farther. I ran faster. At full strength, I thought I was as good as anyone.”

But he also admitted that it was his own fault that he wasn’t at full strength for chunks of his career. “If I could do everything all over again, I’d be like Willie Mays or Pete Rose,” he often said. “They took care of themselves all year long. I was stupid. I thought it was never going to end. I was 36 years old when I had to quit — which is practically the prime of life.”

‘Most popular player’

Fortunately for Mantle, his popularity far outlasted the prime of his baseball life.

“He was the most popular player in the game, and he got cheered wherever the Yankees played, which was a beautiful thing to see,” Appel recalled. “It didn’t really register with him at the time, but it made him feel good. And then when he started doing card shows later on, he really understood the depth of the popularity.”

Appel, a noted baseball author and historian, discovered a gem of a statistic that points to the respect Mantle had earned.

“In 18 seasons, Mickey was hit by a pitch only 13 times,’’ he said. “Even though they knew about his bad legs, nobody wanted to hit Mickey. It is amazing. Starting in 1960, so his last nine years, he got hit just four times. They had to know if you hit Mickey, you might be taking him out of the lineup for that day, which would be to your advantage. But nobody would do that. He was Mickey Mantle.”

Appel also was an executive for the Topps baseball card company, and Mantle’s popularity fueled the hobby and the nostalgia boom of the 1980s. “In the hearts of many fans, the image of Mickey Mantle is defined by his trading cards. Mickey drove the hobby for all those years,” he said.

Recently, the Topps 1952 Mantle rookie card sold for more than $27 million, a category in which The Mick remains the all-time leader. For years, Costas carried a Mantle baseball card in his wallet and produced it for fans and media upon request. He understood Mantle’s appeal.

“For us baby boomers, the value of a baseball card was emotional,’’ he said. “Like I said in his eulogy, when a Mickey Mantle card popped up in between an Eli Grba and a Pumpsie Green, it was like a Rembrandt had turned up while you were riffing through old Saturday Evening Post covers.”

Indeed, The Mick, flaws and all, remains a masterpiece with universal appeal.

Bob Herzog was a Newsday sportswriter and editor for 42 years, and covered the Yankees and Mets for 10 years.