COMMENTARY
Mickey Mantle’s boyhood home in Commerce, Okla. (Image credit: Rev. Bill Louder)
The photo above is Oklahoma history. It’s the childhood home of Mickey Mantle located in Commerce, Oklahoma.
If Mickey had stayed healthy, he would statistically have been the greatest player in the history of professional baseball. As it stands, he’s still renowned by all generations of players.
I took a friend and his son one summer to see Mickey’s childhood home in Commerce, and he said he was so thrilled he could hardly believe he was standing and playing catch with his son, right where Mickey learned to play ball with his father and grandfather.
You are looking at the same place where his father and grandfather taught him to play baseball and pinch-hit. A hit over the house was a home run. A broken window was only a base hit.
‘The Oklahoma Hillbilly’ Became One of the Greatest Players in Major League Baseball
When Mickey was called up to play for the New York Yankees in 1951, he was only 18 years old and showed up with a $7 suitcase and an $8 suit. The New York press welcomed him by calling him a “hillbilly.”
He left his hometown of Commerce with a total population of 2,000 and played his first game in front of nearly 80,000 fans in Yankee Stadium.
Mickey Mantle 1951 Rookie baseball card by Bowman’s Gum. (Public Domain image, courtesy Heritage Auctions)
Joe DiMaggio reportedly shunned him and wouldn’t speak a word to him, because all the talk was about how good Mickey was going to be. DiMaggio finally spoke to him once, during the 1951 series against the Giants. DiMaggio was playing center field and Mickey was in right field. The manager told Mickey to take everything he can get “cause the old man (DiMaggio) can’t run like he used to.” Mickey could run like greased lightning (3.1 seconds from 1st to 2nd base).
When Willie Mays came up to bat and hit a pop fly into center field, Mickey flew over there, had a bead on it, but at the last minute he heard DiMaggio yell, “I got it! I got it!”
Mickey pulled up and tripped over a drainpipe in the outfield, severely injuring his knee.
After the game, Mickey’s dad helped him to the hospital and as Mickey leaned on his dad, his father collapsed. It turned out his dad had cancer. Mickey and his dad ended up in the same hospital, lying next to each other. A little while after that, his father passed away.
Mickey Mantle was the opposite of DiMaggio as he was often the first to welcome new players and make them feel a part of the team. Elston Howard, the first Black Yankees player, recalled how during spring training his rookie year in St. Pete, he wasn’t allowed to eat in the restaurant where the team had gone to eat dinner. Howard also recalled how Mickey got his food and brought it out to the bus, so he could eat his dinner with him.
In 1953, Mickey tried to volunteer for the U.S. Army and was rejected on account of his knees, but the newspapers called him a “draft dodger,” and up to the last year he played, he still got booed for that lie made up by the press.
Mantle and Maris Aim for Babe Ruth’s Home Run Record
In 1961, Mickey and his Yankee teammate Roger Maris made an attempt at Babe Ruth’s home run record, Mickey was bandaged for each game like a mummy from all his injuries with no cartilage in his knees and a bum shoulder hurting so much he couldn’t even comb his hair. But he still played a season most players can only dream of.
One of his last home runs came during a game when he tore a muscle in his right forearm as he swung at a pitch and fouled the ball. After the painful strike, Mickey told the catcher to signal the pitcher to try it again, and using only the power of his left arm to do the swinging, Mickey hit the ball more than 450-feet over the center of Fenway Park’s fence!
New York Yankees teammates Roger Maris, left, and Mickey Mantle, right, attempted to break Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961. (Public Domain image, courtesy State Archives of Florida.)
Due to the injuries to his knees, shoulders, and having to be hospitalized because of his hip, Mickey Mantle dropped out of the home run race with Maris, but remained on the sideline to be his greatest cheerleader to beat Ruth’s record.
43-Year Struggle With Alcohol
On a sidebar note for those who held something against Mickey because of his struggle with alcohol, before he passed, he finally got free through the professional help of the Betty Ford Center. His breakthrough came one day when the instructor told everyone to think of one person that they didn’t get to say goodbye to before they died. She told them to write a letter to that person saying everything they wished and wanted to say to them.
Mickey at first refused because it was too painful emotionally, but with the instructor’s encouragement, Mickey wrote the letter to his father. No one will ever know what he wrote, but the end result was Mickey no longer needed to drink to cover up his pain. He finally had closure.
Let me tell you something. God will never call you for jury duty, or appoint you as judge over someone, but He will call you to help, encourage, deliver and heal people. Instead of looking for dirt on someone, try seeing the gold inside them, and help them bring that out. Amen.
An Eternal Home Run
Speaking of seeing and bringing out the gold inside of another. That’s exactly what happened before Mickey passed away.
Even though Mickey was the “go-to guy” whenever any friends were down or needed help, he personally felt like such a failure in areas of his life that he couldn’t reconcile, as so many of us do. He related so well to his friend Roy Clark’s number one song, “Yesterday When I Was Young,” that he asked Roy to sing that song at his funeral, which Roy promised he would, and did.
All was redeemed when Mickey made the ultimate, eternal home run when he told his old teammate Bobby Richardson, how he wanted him to know that he had received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Bobby cried tears of joy, and they talked about their saving faith.
Then later, Bobby’s wife shared her testimony with Mickey, and she asked him, “Mickey if God were standing here today and was to ask you, ‘Why should I let you in my Heaven?’ What would you say?”
Without hesitation, and to all their joy, Mickey quoted John 3:16 and said, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. That whosoever shall believe in Him, shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”
A home run decision, I know Mickey and his loved ones are rejoicing over today and will be for eternity.
How about that. Who knows? Maybe one day when you cross over, you can play ball with Mickey and some of the other greats in the ultimate field of dreams.
Rev. Bill Louder is the founder of Bill Louder Ministries. Located in Bixby, Okla., the ministry has served hundreds of thousands of people and has offered free crisis counseling since 1987.
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