Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age
In the 1950s, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle played center field a few miles apart from one another—Mays in Manhattan’s Polo Grounds, for the New York Giants; Mantle at Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx. They were certainly the best players of their era and among the best of all time. Much has been written about both Mays and Mantle, but Barra takes a new and revealing tack: focusing on the uncanny parallels in the pair’s lives and careers. It is a remarkable story: two men, one black, one white, born in the same year, both raised in poverty by baseball-playing fathers who groomed their sons for stardom. Barra follows the pair’s development as players and their careers in the major leagues, always noting the eerie similarities: both started slowly but quickly rose like meteors, each enjoying unimagined celebrity and each, in different ways, reeling from the attention. Juxtaposing Mantle’s alcoholism against Mays’ growing bitterness over perceived and very real slights (his cool reception in San Francisco, when the Giants relocated from New York), Barra produces a compelling and deeply affecting portrait of two superior athletes who shared the terrible burden of being heroes. --Bill Ott