Background

Ethnicity: Mickey Mantle's paternal great-grandfather, George S. Mantle, immigrated to the United States from Brierly Hills, Staffordshire, England, in 1848.

Mickey Mantle was born on October 20, 1931 in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, United States. He was a son of Elvin Charles "Mutt" Mantle, a worker at the Oklahoma zinc and lead mines, and Lovell Mantle.

Education

Mickey Mantle was directed toward baseball by his father, a former semi-pro baseball player, who named his son after his favorite player, Philadelphia Athletics and then Detroit Tigers catcher Mickey Cochrane.

In 1935, Mantle's parents relocated from Spavinaw to another Oklahoma city, Commerce, seeking for best job opportunities. Mantle's family was poor, and as soon as he was old enough to help his parents, Mickey got involved in different odd jobs, including assisting his father in the mines.

Mickey began practicing baseball with his father since the early childhood. Elvin Mantle trained his son as a switch-hitter, teaching him to swing from both sides of the plate. Mickey would use his natural right-handed swing against his left-handed father, then would turn around and bat left-handed against his right-handed grandfather. The St. Louis Cardinals was Mickey Mantle's favorite team in his teenage years.

While studying at Commerce High School, Mantle also played football and semi-pro basketball. A gifted halfback, he even received football scholarship from Oklahoma. However, Mantle's further football career was eventually jeopardized by the injure of the shin which led to osteomyelitis. That bone marrow disease would disturb Mantle all along his subsequent baseball career.

In 1946, following the advice of the Oklahoma's Baxter Springs Whiz Kids baseball team's umpire, Mickey Mantle traveled to Joplin, Missouri, in order to try his hand at the Yankees Farm club.

Career

The start of Mickey Mantle's professional baseball career can be counted from 1949 when he was admitted to the Yankees' Class D team in Independence, Kansas. After two years in the minor leagues, the Yankees invited him to their major league spring training camp. He earned a place on the roster, and the New York media soon began comparing him to Babe Ruth and other past Yankee greats. Being only 19 years old and having spent two years in high school, Mantle didn't immediately live up to the public's high expectations. He started slowly in his new position – right field – and was sent back briefly to the minors. Mantle's first year in the major league was marred by inconsistent play and jeering from fans both in New York and around the league. His difficulties continued when, early in 1952, his father died of Hodgkin's disease at the age of 39. Being much attached to him, Mantle took the death hard.

The player was moved to center field when Joe DiMaggio retired from the Yankees following the 1951 season. Little by little, he adjusted to big-league play, and by 1952 batted .311 with 23 home runs and 87 runs batted in (RBIs). That season Mantle began to establish himself as one of baseball's premier power hitters. During one game against the Washington Senators, Mantle hit a ball completely out of Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. Measured at 565 feet, the home run is believed to be the longest ever hit. The New York Yankees won the American League pennant and World Series during each of Mantle's first three seasons, from 1951 to 1953. During the 1952 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mantle batted .345 with two home runs. In the following series, again against the Dodgers, he batted only .208, but hit two more home runs.

Mantle's talents led the Yankees as they dominated the American League throughout the late 1950s. They won the pennant each year from 1955 to 1958, taking the World Series in 1956 and 1958. Such contributions to the team provided Mantle with personal accolades as well.

Mickey Mantle's success at the plate continued as the Yankees remained strong well into the next decade. After losing the pennant to the Chicago White Sox in 1959, the Yankees came back to win it the next five seasons, joined by new stars such as Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, Ryne Duren, Bill Skowron, and Roger Maris. Mantle captured the home run title again in 1960 with 40 round-trippers, and he led the competition for the title again in 1961, the most dramatic home run season in the history of the game.

Mantle continued to excel even with almost permanent pain in legs caused by osteomyelitis and other injuries. Although the Yankees continued to win pennants, their days of glory were waning. They lost the 1963 World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers and were swept in the 1964 World Series by the St. Louis Cardinals. By 1965 the Yankees' heyday was finished. Though frustrated with his pain and with his many strikeouts, Mantle continued to play through the 1968 season. The sportsman announced his retirement in the spring of the next year.

After the retirement from baseball, Mantle took up a business career, opening a restaurant franchise and dabbling in public relations for an Atlantic City casino. He also appeared to sign autographs and participate in celebrity golf tournaments. His experience in television commercials and small movie roles led to occasional stints providing color commentary for televised Yankees games.

Achievements

• 

  Epitomizing home run power greater than any man's since Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle is regarded as the greatest baseball switch-hitter of all times. His name was on everyone's lips in America during the 1950s and 1960s. Mantle's outstanding abilities and courage in the face of pain cemented his status of a hero to a generation of youngsters and adults alike.
  
  Mickey Mantle left the Yankees with many great achievements. In addition to hitting 536 lifetime home runs, he led the American League in homers four times and was chosen as its Most Valuable Player three times. He was among few players to win a Triple Crown. He played on 12 pennant-winning and seven World Series-winning teams, and kept the title of an All-Star player for 16 seasons, taking part in 16 of the 20 All-Star Games that were played.
  
  Mantle's all-time record for home runs in World Series play (18) as well as for RBIs (40), extra-base hits (26), runs (42), walks (43), and total bases (123) remain unbeaten. As much as DiMaggio before him, Mantle symbolized the Yankees and their dominance of baseball. In 1964, Mickey Mantle was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, and ten years later he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed on few players in the history of the sport. There is Mantle's plaque in Monument Park of Yankee Stadium.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Mick

    (The Yankees' star center fielder recounts his life and ca...)

    1985
  • All My Octobers

    (The one and only Mick relives every one of his World Seri...)

    1994
  • My Favorite Summer 1956

    (Mickey Mantle brings back a record-breaking 1956 season, ...)

    1991
  • The Education of a Baseball Player

    (Vintage baseball memoir from the New York Yankees basebal...)

    1967

Religion

Closer to the end of his life, Mickey Mantle took up residence on Lake Oconee, not far from Greensboro, Georgia. Now and then, he attended the local Methodist church and joined the members of the congregation at their Sunday dinners.

Views

Quotations: "I always loved the game, but when my legs weren't hurting it was a lot easier to love."

"The only thing I can do is play baseball. I have to play ball. It's the only thing I know."

"It was all I lived for, to play baseball."

"To play 18 years in Yankee Stadium is the best thing that could ever happen to a ballplayer."

"It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life."

"A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide."

"Heroes are people who are all good with no bad in them. That's the way I always saw Joe DiMaggio. He was beyond question one of the greatest players of the century."

"If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Mickey Mantle was 1.80 meters tall and weighed 88 kilograms.

Chronic diseases of legs, bones and cartilage, caused by the injuries that he received since high school years, were constant companions of the player over the course of his entire career. The problems aggravated closer to the end of his life when the simple swing of a bat provoked terrible pain.

Mantle's alcohol addiction also had a huge negative impact both on his career and personal life. Early in 1994 he stayed at the Betty Ford clinic to treat his alcoholism, but it was too late as his liver was damaged after years of heavy drinking. The sportsman was diagnosed with cirrhosis, hepatitis, and liver cancer. Although he underwent a liver transplantation in June of 1995, the cancer had spread to most of his internal organs.

Quotes from others about the person

• Bill Dickey, baseball catcher and manager: "He's the greatest prospect I've seen in my time, and I go back quite a ways. I'll swear I expect to see that boy just take off and fly any time."
  
  Harry Craft, baseball player and manager: "He can run, steal bases, throw, hit for average, and hit with power like I've never seen. Just don't put him at shortstop."
  
  Casey Stengel, baseball player and manager: "He has it in his body to be great."
  
  Roy Fitzgerald, The Boston Globe columnist: "Mantle's greatness was built on power and pain. He exuded the first and endured the second."
  
  Nellie Fox, baseball player: "On two legs, Mickey Mantle would have been the greatest ballplayer who ever lived."
  
  Billy Martin, New York Yankees manager: "No man in the history of baseball had as much power as Mickey Mantle. No man. You're not talking about ordinary power. Dave Kingman has power. Willie Mays had power. Then when you're talking about Mickey Mantle – it's an altogether different level. Separates the men from the boys."

Interests

• Athletes

  Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Roger Maris

Connections

Mickey Mantle married Merlyn Johnson, a bank employee, on December 23, 1951, in Commerce, Oklahoma. The family produced four children, David, Danny, Billy, and Mickey, Jr.

Mantle and Johnson broke out in 1988, mostly because of Mickey's problems with alcohol, drugs and his frequent marital infidelities. The divorce was never finalized. Mantle wasn't involved in the care of his children. Merlyn, too, had problems with alcohol, but she sought help, something Mantle finally did, but too late.

Mantle's son Billy died of heart failure in March of 1994 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, the same illness that had led to the death of Mantle's father and grandfather at an early age. Three other sons of Mickey and Merlyn also had problems with alcohol.

Father:

Elvin Charles Mantle

(born March 16, 1912 – died May 7, 1952)

Mother:

Lovell Mantle

(née Richardson; born February 14, 1904 – died 1995)

Great-grandfather:

George S. Mantle

(born January 22, 1805 – died June 9, 1879)

Wife:

Merlyn Mantle

(née Johnson; born January 28, 1932 – died August 10, 2009)

Son:

Mickey Charles Mantle, Jr.

(born April 15, 1953 – died December 20, 2000)

Son:

Daniel Mantle

(born March 19, 1960)

Son:

Billy Giles Mantle

(born December 5, 1957 – died March 12, 1994)

Son:

David Mantle

(born 1955)

nephew:

Kelly Mantle

(born July 9, 1976)

Kelly Mantle is an American actor, drag queen and reality television personality. Mantle took part in the 6th season of the reality TV show RuPaul's Drag Race. He starred in such movies as Confessions of a Womanizer (2014) and Middle Man (2016).

Friend:

Bobby Layne

(born December 19, 1926 – died December 1, 1986)

Bobby Layne, in full Robert Lawrence Layne, was an American football quarterback who spent 15 seasons in the National Football League. He was a member of such teams as the Chicago Bears, the New York Bulldogs, the Detroit Lions, and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Friend:

Billy Martin

(born May 16, 1928 – died December 25, 1989)

Billy Martin, in full Alfred Manuel Martin Jr., was an American Major League Baseball player. He began as second baseman and, beyond the New York Yankees, competed for other teams. He then became a succesfull manager able to promote even the worst teams. Martin was fired by George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, owing to his alcohol-related problems.

References

• The Last Boy Award-winning sports writer Jane Leavy plumbs the depths of the complex athlete, using copious first-hand research as well as her own memories, to show why The Mick remains the most beloved and misunderstood Yankee slugger of all time.
  2010
• Mickey Mantle: Rookie in Pinstripes A moving story of Mickey's early years in baseball, from his difficult rookie season to his triumphant return in 1951, the book portrays the everlasting bond between father and son and the making of one of baseball's greatest legends.
  2008
• Mickey Mantle of the Yankees The exciting story of Mickey Mantle of the Yankees by Gene Schoor.
  1958
• A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle Acclaimed historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith recount the defining moment of Mantle's legendary career: 1956, when he overcame a host of injuries and critics to become the most celebrated athlete of his time.
  2018
• Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son Former Sports Illustrated writer Tony Castro recounts a story of fathers and sons, rebels and heroes, and a youth's rite of passage.
  2002
• Mickey Mantle: Inside and Outside the Lines The book recalls never told before stories: from Park Avenue to Las Vegas to Cooperstown; from television shoots to concerts and Mickey's restaurant on Central Park West.
  2016
• Mickey Mantle: Stories & Memorabilia from a Lifetime with the Mick The illustrated biography published with the support of the Mantle family features rare photos and never-before-seen memorabilia, with 10 pull-out, removable facsimiles, covering the player's entire life from his impoverished youth to his glorious career and his poignant sunset years.
  2006
• A Great Teammate: The Legend of Mickey Mantle Colorfully illustrated with images of actual memorabilia from the games, the book pieces together amazing stories that have never been told in such a complete and accurate fashion.
  2007
• Mickey Mantle A veteran sportswriter Phil Berger reveals both the good and the ugly in the baseball great, recounting Mickey Mantle's many achievements and celebrated sportsmanship as well as his notorious alcoholism and his failure as a family man.
  1998
• Official Website of Mickey Mantle The website contains a variety of biographical material gathered by friends, family and baseball aficionados.