“When he ran, he made everyone else look like they were standing still.”
— Ralph Houk on Mickey Mantle
(I’m watching the fabulous HBO special on Mantle right now. I AM IN HEAVEN.)
Billy Crystal: “If you were going to build a baseball player from scratch, all you’d have to do would be say: Him. Give me him.”
One of his teammates from the 50s: “You knew you could never be as good as him. But let me tell you: you broke your fanny trying. Trying to live up to him, and be as good as him. He brought the team together.”
Talking about how built his body was, one of his teammates said: “He didn’t need steroids. As a matter of fact, we didn’t even know how to spell it back then.”
“Why do they love me so much? I just play fucking baseball.” – Mickey Mantle
A sportswriter said: “I learned how to do long division so I could keep up with his batting average.”
“There was always a sadness about him. A wistfulness about him.” – Bob Costas
“I often wondered how a man who knew he was going to die could stand here on this field and say he felt like the luckiest man on earth. But now I think I know how Lou Gehrig felt.” — Mickey Mantle’s retirement speech
Richard Lewis : “I’m just glad his name wasn’t Cy Schwartzstein.”
I met him several times in his last decade when I lived in Dallas. When sober, a class act. He went out of his way to provide a Christmas gift to a family member of mine that grew up idolizing him.
It was sad to see how much the alcohol took over his life. The comment was made by another star, but I can only imagine how difficult it was to be Mickey Mantle.