Maris & Mantle: Two Yankees, Baseball Immortality, and the Age of Camelot by Tony Castro

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Maris & Mantle: Two Yankees, Baseball Immortality, and the Age of Camelot by Tony Castro Mark McGee Tony Castro. Maris & Mantle: Two Yankees, Baseball Immortality, and the Age of Camelot. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2021. 297 pp. Cloth, $28.00. It may be safe to say no one knows more about Mickey Mantle than Tony Castro. He has previously written three books on Mantle, but this is his first time to include Maris with an in-depth look. Like Charles Dickens’s A Tale [End Page 133] of Two Cities, this book is a tale of two vastly different players who were also teammates. Like many authors of the day writing about sports, Castro weaves the legends of Mantle and Maris with the history of the 1960s as the age of Camelot, ushered in under then president John F. Kennedy. Mantle and Maris were both baseball legends, but while each was blessed with tons of talent, especially as hitters, their approaches to the game, on and off the field, were total opposites. Castro reveals warts and all the personal life of Mantle, who openly chased women despite being married and whose drinking, combined with a knee injury in 1951, took such a toll on what could have been an even greater baseball legacy. He provides a profile of a player whose talents were praised from his first day as a baseball player to becoming a superstar who literally made grown men cry by his presence. Maris was the family man who had a quiet confidence in his baseball abilities but who was also tagged early by his first team, the Cleveland Indians, as a difficult player to deal with. In keeping with his small-town influences, he refused to indulge in the offerings of New York City that were available for star athletes, preferring to live in an apartment outside of Manhattan. One of the most revealing insights into how Mantle, who lived in Dallas, Texas, handled his stardom may have been this comment he made in one of his many conversations with Castro: “One day I am Mickey Mantle from Commerce, Oklahoma, that nobody outside of my hometown knows. Soon I’m Mickey Mantle, a piece of merchandise like something you can buy at Neiman Marcus downtown. Doesn’t make sense, does it?” (73). Mantle was loved by fans, but as the statement proves, he never really understood his impact on the game. A key portion of the book concentrates on the 1961 season, when Maris and Mantle were locked in a quest to become the first player to break Babe Ruth’s season record of sixty home runs set in 1927. Again, the contrasts between Mantle and Maris are evident in how they handled the spotlight. Maris bristled at the way many fans and members of the media tried to portray the chase as a bitter competition between him and Mantle, but he also realized the Yankees didn’t want him to break the record. They wanted that honor to go to Mantle. Castro points out that during the 1961 season Mantle became more approachable by the media, who had been frustrated in their efforts to interview him during previous seasons. Castro suggests the reluctance to talk with the media was a remnant of his upbringing in a country setting in Commerce. [End Page 134] Maris, also from a small-town background, was being overwhelmed by the news media, and some writers were less than kind in their coverage. Despite it all the two were close and became closer as the race progressed. The contrasts between the two were deep in so many ways. Castro does a wonderful job of analyzing the backgrounds of both players, especially how they dealt with the mental aspects of playing baseball at the highest level. This is an easily readable look at both players I highly recommend because of the insights it also provides on baseball and the history of the US in 1961. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press