This column marked Mantle's announcement of his retirement. March 3: A Parting Salute to Mickey Mantle He could, when his legs were right, run down to first base as fast as anybody who ever played baseball. He could hit the ball farther than anybody, and he could do it hitting either lefty or righty. There were few young baseball players who excited the imagination the way Mickey Mantle did when he first came down the spring training pike in 1951. It was almost a foregone conclusion then that Mantle would be in the Hall of Fame some day. And he will be in the Hall of Fame five years from now because he's finally made his on-again, off-again retirement official. Hall of Fame or not, Mantle's career will seem something less than what it might have been.
He had the bad legs. And for all his selflessness as a team player, he had a streak in him that brought about off-the-field behavior that did not always serve to nurse his precious body with the tender loving care it needed. The best of Mantle was his country-boy modesty and his ability to poke fun at himself. In ball players' terms he tried not to behave like a star. Most of the time he succeeded. When Mantle first joined the team as a raw Oklahoman, Joe DiMaggio was the pride of the Yankees, one of the great stars of the game. DiMaggio was basically shy, and he had been lionized for so long, he did not know how to go out of his way to make a rookie or anybody feel at home. Mantle suffered that. The experience made him vow that if he ever became a star, he'd be as approachable to the greenest rookie as he was to his buddies. And he was. Mantle's good humor and deprecatory remarks made rookies warm to him. He had more than his good nature working for him. Foremost was his remarkable ability. From the start Mantle was the ball player who made other ball playes stop what they were doing to look at him. Whatever he did earned so much respect that ball players would accept anything Mantle did as the thing to do. He often did what he did in the face of terrible pain. He seemed to withstand pain better than most men; doctors marveled at his ability to hang in despite the tortures his beat-up legs and shoulder suffered. There's a man's man quality about a hero who can perform uncomplainingly in the face of great pain, and that helped cast Mantle as a hero of epic proportion. A minor factor here-not be overemphasized, but not to be discounted, either-is the fact that Mantle stood out as one of the great white baseball hopes in a time when blacks took over the game. This had nothing to do with Mantle's attitudes or anything, but that peculiar factor helped further set off Mantle as a type-in the same sense that golfer Arnold Palmer came along at the right time and right place for people who were comfortable with middle-class white heroes. The least of Mantle was his behavior with the press. He learned well by DiMaggio's failure to welcome rookies, but he wasn't give a start in the right direction in dealing with the public through the press. At the beginning, when the Yankees were the arrogant pin-striped lords of baseball, the then Yankee publicity man advised him on dealing with reporters: "You don't have to tell those unmentionables anything." With that advice piled on top of Mantle's shyness with strangers, his fear of big-city slickers and the New York kind of smartness he feared in the press, he got off badly. He never really earned a place of real warmth among many who covered the team. Reporters who had a healthy opinion of themselves never took well to being looked through after asking Mantle a question. The newspaper offices are full of young men who gained a dislike for Mantle as a result of having suffered an icy response after an innocuous approach to him. Mantle has come to reget this. Recently he has said wistfully that he wished he could have been better about this. He has made fun about the fact that he never could take defeat well. Even at his best he ran away from interviews after losses. Then, when he turned on the charm in better moments, many were not ready to be charmed on his terms. He was the kind of athlete whose feats will seem more prodigious as the years pass. One little thing always left an impression here: nobody hit such high fly balls to the outfield, or pop flies to the infield. Even his outs were prodigious. His departure will leave the Yankees in a position of getting on with the business of molding a new team. As long as Mantle was around he dominated the picture, and deservedly so. The Yankees were trying to promote a bright, new youth image, but they still knew there was box office in the periodic productions they built around Mantle; after a while these resembled Judy Garland "final" appearances at the Palace. Amost every time Mantle inched up on some new distinction-a major or minor record-the Yankees milked it. Mantle, who did not like the sham, got more uncomforable about it. Those constant fusses and his aching inability to do somethng so basic to a ball player as the action of scoring from second base on a hit forced him to quit. In those short, brilliant bursts when he was right, he may have played the game a little better than anybody ever did.
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The Great Stickball Game Was a Gas 
