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seeing Mantle in Los Angeles, Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, wrote Dan Topping, “I hereby agree to pay any price (fill in the blank) for the purchase of Mickey Mantle. And please be reasonable.” Topping’s facetious reply: Ralph Kiner and a half mill. Frank Lane, the White Sox general manager, fumed at the Yankees’ dumb luck: “They got him for nothing. Nothing—do you hear? Why, for a prospect like that I’d bury him in thousand-dollar bills.”
    New York Daily News , March 19: “Mantle very well could be the key to the pennant.”
    New York Daily Mirror , March 20: “Now the Mickey Mantle madness has spread to the players. Yankees, old and young, openly debate the ability of Mantle, whose speed and power in six exhibition games forced the reporters to all but star him as a daily feature.”
    “Who is this Mickey Mantle who knocked my Yogi off the front page?” wondered Carmen Berra.
    The Bay Area was home to Jerry Coleman, Billy Martin, Jackie Jensen, Frank Crosetti, Charlie Silvera, and Gil McDougald. But it belonged to DiMaggio. At Seals Stadium, where the wind blew in from right field and the fog rolled in nightly off the bay, Mantle hit a 400-foot home run that cleared the right field wall. “You had nineteen or twenty homers in twenty years hit over the right field fence,” McDougald said. “Bounced up in the park across the street not far from where I lived,” Silvera said.
    On Saturday night, March 24, DiMaggio hosted a party at the family restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf for teammates and writers. One impertinent diner inquired whether Joltin’ Joe would consider moving to left field to make room for Mantle in center. “There’s nobody taking center from me until I give it up,” DiMaggio replied.
    On March 26, the Yankees were back in Los Angeles to play the Trojans at USC—their last West Coast game. USC’s new coach, Rod Dedeaux, had played two games for Stengel when he managed the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dedeaux got a bigger bonus in 1935 than Mantle got from the Yankees. Three of Dedeaux’s former players—Hank Workman,Jim Brideweser, and Wally Hood—were Yankee rookies. He would continue to send talent to the majors for another thirty years: Tom Seaver, Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Fred Lynn, Dave Kingman, Bill Lee, and Ron Fairly, among others.
    The Yankees arrived on campus in time for an 11:30 A.M. luncheon at the University Commons, where, according to pitcher Dave Rankin, “sorority girls played bridge all day and hoped for the best.” By then snug Bovard Field was SRO. “Additional stands had been erected and the outfield roped off to accommodate any spillage of customers,” the Los Angeles Times reported—the crowd was later estimated at 3,000. Those unable to find seats could listen to a special broadcast on radio station KWKW.
    Cozy, palm-draped Bovard Field (318 feet down the right field line, 307 feet down the line in left) was tucked into a corner of the campus near the Physical Education building, which sat along the third base line. Beyond the right field fence lay a practice field where USC footballers were running spring drills. The impressionable Mantle importuned USC’s senior team manager to point out the gridiron stars. Wise guy Phil Rizzuto sent the Trojans’ eight-year-old batboy, Dedeaux’s son, Justin, to keep Mantle company on the bench—“Hey, rook, I got somebody here your age.”
    The temperature at game time was only 59 degrees, with a wind from the southeast at 6 miles per hour. Conditions were Southern California dry—it hadn’t rained in twenty days. The National Weather Service noted “some haze.” Smog had not yet entered the vocabulary. Tom Lovrich, the Trojans’ ace, had already beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Hollywood Stars that spring. A sidearming right-hander who threw a heavy, sinking fastball, he would go on to a respectable career in Triple A ball. When Mantle came to bat in the first inning,