“That boy hits baseballs over buildings. He runs as fast as Ty Cobb.”
— Casey Stengel
Me and the Yankees is all this guy's fault; his star overrides being born in the Bronx and a murderous intent for damn near anything to do with Queens that's coded into my genes. I'll never forget the resignation that registered on Da's face when he handed me the sliotar that he'd smacked home for the winning point in a game at Gaelic Park and I, already havving my soul stoled at the ripe age of five, immediately forged Mickey's signature on the sucker and demanded he take me to that afternoon's game at The Stadium.
PS: Costas' eulogy: "But I guess I'm here, not so much to speak for myself as to simply represent the millions of baseball-loving kids who grew up in the '50s and '60s and for whom Mickey Mantle was baseball.
"And more than that, he was a presence in our lives – a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic. Mickey often said he didn't understand it, this enduring connection and affection – for men now in their forties and fifties, otherwise perfectly sensible, who went dry in the mouth and stammered like schoolboys in the presence of Mickey Mantle."
or will always be thinking "what could have been" if his knees had held up. Kinda like Bobby Orr; if they had the luck of good health, they would have rewritten the record books. First time I met him, at his joint in Manhattan, I was, according to a friend accompanying me, "reduced to a gibbering idiot."
Nah, I just reverted to that five year old kid.
Official Mickey Mantle Web Site
Hall of Fame page
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