Mickey Mantle - An Appreciation

(Book summary from inside jacket cover)

He was larger than life on a ball field and, as it turned out, larger than death when he touched a nation's heart in the face of his fatal illness.

This was Mickey Mantle, described by many as the last great player on baseball's last great team, the New York Yankees of the 1950s and early 1960s.  He was cheered, and imitated, and loved in a way that no player may be again - a country kid out of Oklahoma, who began his career with good legs and made it to the Hall of Fame on two gimpy ones.

Had he stayed healthy, there's no telling what level of baseball greatness he could have achieved.  As it was, he hit 536 home runs, set records, won games with a dramatic flair, and became a legend.  Mantle and the Yankees went to the World Series in twelve of his first fourteen seasons, a feat that isn't likely to be repeated.

This is a unique and poignant look at the fellow who wore Number 7 on his broad back, who was a symbol of  a generation when Yankee pinstripes seemed to be woven with magical thread.

In a series of vignettes and anecdotes that are touching and funny and genuine is a portrait of Mickey Mantle that captures the two sides of him - the hero who was human, the icon with a touch of Peck's Bad Boy.

Here is Mantle confronting his drinking problem, a quarter century after his retirement from baseball, stunned by the realization that his four sons had become his drinking buddies.  And here is Mantle, brave and open, cracking jokes in a Dallas hospital after the controversy over an eleventh-hour liver transplant, and learning that the surgery had been in vain.  Cancer had overtaken his body.

Mantle had made public his battles with alcohol and his decision to seek treatment, the beginning of a new and hopeful life.  Sadly, he would have less than eighteen months to revel in it.  But as his hours played out, his family and his fans bacame part of a national love story.