Read The Last Boy for Free Online

were the first team to do that. Sheehy had gone to work for the club when he was fifteen, summoned to his calling while waiting for the Stadium gates to open one day in 1927—and stayed until his death fifty-nine years later. The Yankee locker room is named after him. He was the institutional memory of the club, who divulged nothing. He fetched hot dogs and bicarb for The Babe and joe for Joe D.; he informed a historically challenged rookie that George Herman Ruth’s number 3 was not available, nor was Henry Louis Gehrig’s 4. As for 5, everyone knew 5 was still working on immortality. Sheehy gave Mantle 6. “The law of mathematical progression,” the Yankees’ public relations man Red Patterson called it.
    Veterans reported on March 1. Archie Wilson, a pitcher returningfrom military service, arrived to find both beds in his assigned room taken. Archie’s widow, Sybil Wilson, recalled that as her husband put his things down on a roll-away, Mantle rose from his bed and said, “You’re not going to sleep on the cot.” He took it—Wilson was an Army vet and his senior.
    On March 2, Stengel announced that he was moving Mantle to the outfield. The next day, DiMaggio announced that the 1951 season would be his last. His throwing shoulder was sore, his left knee was swollen, and his pride was smarting. All those questions didn’t help, either. Louella Parsons, the dominatrix of Hollywood gossip, wanted to know about a possible reconciliation with his estranged wife, Dorothy. The baseball writers wanted the dope on the new kid. So DiMaggio threw them all a curve.
    His retirement was on the horizon, but the Yankees had no idea an announcement was coming that day. “What am I supposed to do, get a gun and make him play?” Stengel groused. Overnight, Mantle went from a good story to the story. “When they’d go into the hotel lobbies, all the newspaper people would flock to Mickey,” Sybil Wilson recalled. “He would get down behind Archie and squat down so they wouldn’t see him. He was so scared of them.”
    Tommy Henrich, Old Reliable, was assigned the task of turning him into an outfielder, teaching him how to gauge the angle of the ball off the bat; how to position his body to catch the ball on his back foot and get rid of it in one smooth motion; how to react to a drive hit straight at him. His arm was plenty strong—legend had it that minor league ballparks refused to sell tickets behind first base when Mantle was patrolling the infield or put chicken wire up to protect the spectators. Delbert Lovelace, a friend from sandlot ball back home, was on the receiving end of more than one errant heave: “One time he let the ball loose, and it looked like surely that ball was goin’ to drop into the dirt, and I put my glove down, and it hit me on the wrist above my glove.”
    The seams of the baseball were engraved in his flesh.
    In the outfield, Mantle couldn’t hurt anybody—except maybe himself. Out there, he could outrun his mistakes.
    When the New Yorkers opened their 1951 Cactus League season against the Cleveland Indians in Tucson, Mickey Mantle was the startingcenter fielder for the New York Yankees. He got three hits. The next day he was conked on the forehead by a line drive while trying to adjust his sunglasses; he had never worn them before. The Southwest sun was so intense that players slathered black shoe polish under their eyes to minimize the glare radiating off their cheeks. “Still couldn’t see,” said Al Rosen, the Indians’ third baseman.
    In the Indians’ dugout, Mantle’s blunder was greeted with sympathy and laughter. “Here comes a kid, and everybody is talking about how great he is,” Rosen said. “First thing, he gets hit with a fly ball. Everybody says, ‘Some kind of great.’ I never saw him drop another fly ball, by the way.”
    By the end of spring training, when Mantle threw out a runner at third who unwisely wandered off the bag on a fly ball to right, to complete a rare