Mickey Mantle
Mickey Mantle
Mickey Charles Mantle, nicknamed "The Commerce Comet" and "The Mick", was an American professional baseball player. Mantle played his entire Major League Baseballcareer with the New York Yankees as a center fielder and first baseman, from 1951 through 1968. Mantle was one of the best players and sluggers, and is regarded by many as the greatest switch hitter in baseball history. Mantle was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 and was elected to the Major...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBaseball Player
Date of Birth20 October 1931
CitySpavinaw, OK
CountryUnited States of America
Hitting the ball was easy. Running around the bases was the tough part.
Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been.
The strain on Roger (Maris) was unbelievable. After I dropped out the reporters only had one guy to go to. They surrounded him everywhere he went. He had big clumps of hair falling out. That he went ahead and did it was unbelievable.
I always loved the game, but when my legs weren't hurting it was a lot easier to love.
No man in the history of baseball had as much power as . No man.
He foresaw the platooning that managers like Casey Stengel used years before it happened. He told me I had to be a switch-hitter if I was going to play.
I've often wondered how a man who knew he was going to die could stand here and say he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth, but now I guess I know how he felt.
You never have to wait long, or look far, to be reminded of how thin the line is between being a hero or a goat.
I thought I raised a ballplayer. You're nothing but a coward and a quitter.
Thank God for baseball.
My dad taught me to switch-hit. He and my grandfather, who was left-handed, pitched to me every day after school in the back yard. I batted lefty against my dad and righty against my granddad.
Bravery is a complicated thing to describe. You can't say it's three feet long and two feet wide and that it weighs four hundred pounds or that it's colored bright blue or that it sounds like a piano or that it smells like roses. It's a quality, not a thing.
All the ballparks and the big crowds have a certain mystique. You feel attached, permanently wedded to the sounds that ring out, to the fans chanting your name, even when there are only four or five thousand in the stands on a Wednesday afternoon.
If I had played my career hitting singles like Pete (Rose), I'd wear a dress.