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9–5 double play, Henrich declared his work done. “Best throw I’ve ever seen,” he said.
    Players size up other players. That spring, rookies and veterans alike stopped to watch when Stengel’s protégé took batting practice. “It was like he was hittin’ golf balls,” Yankee pitcher Tommy Byrne said.
    “Who in the heck is this kid?” wondered Yogi Berra.
    Mantle’s talents were unprecedented. Only four switch-hitters played regularly in the majors in 1951, and none of them ever hit more than eighteen home runs. “He has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster—and nobody has ever had more of both of ’em together,” Stengel declared. “This kid ain’t logical. He’s too good. It’s very confusing.”
    Compounding Stengel’s befuddlement was the disconnect between Mantle’s power and his actual size. At only five feet eleven and maybe 185 pounds, he wasn’t big at all. Yankee pitcher Eddie Lopat was first to observe, “That kid gets bigger the more clothes he takes off.”
    Potential is the most elastic of human qualities. By the time the Yankees boarded the train for California, the dispatches being wired back east were inflated with wonder and speculation: How much more might he grow? And if he filled out, what place in baseball history might he occupy?
    Stan Isaacs, writing for the Daily Compass , was the lone voice of reason, but he had the advantage of being in New York:
Since the start of spring training, the typewriter keys out of the training camps have been pounding out one name to the people back home. No matter what paper you read, or what day, you’ll get Mickey Mantle, more Mickey Mantle and still more Mickey Mantle.
    Never in the history of baseball has the game known the wonder to equal this Yankee rookie. Every day there’s some other glorious phrase as the baseball writers outdo themselves in attempts to describe the antics of this wonder: “He’s faster than Cobb…he hits with power from both sides of the plate the way Frankie Frisch used to…he takes all the publicity in stride, an unspoiled kid…sure to go down as one of the real greats of baseball.”
    Mantle wasn’t in the starting lineup when the Yankees arrived in Los Angeles on Friday, March 16, to play the Hollywood Stars. The game was a sellout; across town the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox played in front of 235 fans, including their unhappy owners. (The Yankees would draw nearly 140,000 during their ten days in California, acccording to the Los Angeles Times. )
    The next morning, Nick Ferguson arrived bright and early to take his pal out to breakfast at a greasy spoon on Wilshire Boulevard. As Mantle inhaled box after tiny box of cornflakes, Ferguson thought back to the mornings he had spent at the Mantles’ home watching Mickey and his twin brothers eat big soup bowls full of cereal. That was one reason the family moved out of Commerce to Dr. Wormington’s farm east of town, where they could have some cows and enough milk for all those cornflakes. Mickey milked all nineteen of them before heading off to school.
    After breakfast, Mantle and Ferguson drove to Wrigley Field, the minor league park where Gary Cooper had once stood at home plate to deliver Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech in The Pride of the Yankees. Mantle hit a mammoth home run—“cannonading the pellet over the center field bleacher fence 412 feet from home plate and another wall beyond,” according to The Arizona Republic.
    Gil McDougald, destined to become 1951’s Rookie of the Year, saw a scene often repeated by unwary center fielders. “Mickey hit a two-iron shot, and this guy come runnin’ over in center field thinkin’ he was gonnacatch it. He leaps up, and that ball took off like an airplane over the fence. The center fielder was in a state of shock.”
    The next day, at Gilmore Stadium, Mantle went from first to third with such blinding speed it drew a collective gasp from the crowd of 13,000. After