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Whitey and Mickey: An Autobiography of the Yankee Years
Whitey and Mickey An Autobiography of the Yankee Years Author:Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Joseph Durso During the 1950's and 1960's baseball in NY was dominated by the New York Yankees with their great, unmatched run of success. And the Yankees in turn were dominated during that epoch by two players - the country boy and the city boy - both with a rousing flair for drama on the field and for high living off the field: Mickey Charles Mantle and E... more »dward Charles Ford.
They joined the Yankees in 1950, when Casey Stengel was the manager and Joe DiMaggio the resident household god. They stayed for 18 summers, 11 World Series, 536 home runs (by Mantle, switch-hitting), and 236 victories (pitched by Ford). They were teammates and they were roommates, and they ran together through two decades of life on the national stage. By the time they entered the Baseball Hall of Fame on the same day in the 1970's, they were folk-heroes of the Yankee legend: Mick and Slick.
Now, for the first time, Mickey Mantle and Whitey FOrd reminisce in public about how it was during the glory years, in the days when the Yankees owned the ball. In counterpoint conversation, set in a background narritive supplied by Joseph Durso of the New York Times, they relive their hours in the sun and in the headlines, starting with the separate paths that took them there - the teenager from Oklahoma farm coutry and the city slicker from the east side of New York.
They provide an inside view of life with Casey and his free-wheeling stars through five world championships in a row and fourteen pennants in sixteen years...intimate portraits of Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Ralph Houk, and the Brooklyn Dodgers...the manager's favorite brat, Billy Martin, who made it a threesom until the Yankees traded him, many battles later...the celebrated brawl at the Copacabana, described from ringside by the boys who were blamed...the team's reaction to Elston Howard, the Yankee's first black player, and the others who followed, or tried to follow...and what it was like with the Yankees at home, on the road, in the dugout and locker roomm the missed trains, plains, and signals from FLorida to Japan.
Confessions too: the agony of Mantle's damaged knees...games played after "the night before"...the temper of the big team as age hastened the changing of the guard. How they struck out Willie Mays with Horace Stoneham's money on the line. How they lost money in some way-out investments off the field. How Yogi distracted Ted Williams at the plate. And, in a rare expose by the culprit himself, how Slick would load the ball or cut the ball or otherwise prepare for crucual third strikes when conventional pitches could not be relied upon.
It's all here, from the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids to Cooperstown, with interspersed comments and flashbacks from Stengel, Martin, Mays, and others in the case, and with pages of photographs. They tell what happened and why it happened, a fascinating slice of recent history, as it can only be told by Mick and Slick and the other men who made it.« less