Rant #3,351: Mickey

In my family, late April through pretty much all of May brings up one birthday or anniversary after another, and today, May 14, is another one of those days.

It is not a family member's birthday--another big one is still to come--but today is kind of a quasi-anniversary, all brought on by a bit of serendipity "created" courtesy of my late father.

My father was full of stories.

Whether he was speaking about his time growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, his school days, the family's butcher shop on Delancey Street, his time in the Marines, or his more than 50 years driving a cab in Manhattan, my father had a story to tell.

How many of the stories were 100-percent true is another matter ... but the stories were fascinating, some were hilarious, others were poignant, and others were ...

Well, I don't have an proper adjective to describe some of the stories my father told us through the years.

But they were so vivid in his mind and the way he told them to us, I, personally, had no reason to doubt any of these stories.

Like they say, you can't make this stuff up.

And today is the 57th anniversary of one of them, and I have no doubt that it happened--

Because my father said it did.

And here is that story, which I am actually a part of, which makes it a bit more plausible to me, that it actually happened the way he described it.

Most sports fans look.at today as the 57th anniversary of Mickey Mantle's 500th home run, but I know a little bit more about it than even the biggest Mickey Mantle fan can ever even realize ...

Due to the supposed backstory of this achievement, as told by my father.

Let's go back to Rant #2,488, September 9, 2020, and rediscover that backstory.

And again, I have no reason to doubt one word of it.

"One of my father's great interests was sports, and he was a die-hard Yankees fan. Family lore has it that in May 1967, he picked up an obviously drunk Earl Weaver, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles whose team was in town to face the Yankees in a weekend series.

Weaver, the future Hall of Famer who was also known as a fierce drinker, had arrived in town a day early with his team, and even though it wasn't even the evening yet, he had tied on a big one on this particular day.

Hurling a cascade of expletives as my father pretty much carried him into his cab because he was so inebriated, my father realized who he had picked up and asked him a favor: he had purchased tickets for my birthday to see the Sunday, Mother's Day game at Yankee Stadium between the Yankees and the Orioles. Mickey Mantle was stuck at 499 home runs, and could one of his pitchers groove a pitch to Mantle so he could hit his 500th homer during the game that we attended?

Mantle was at the end of his career, he was old and broken down, but he was revered by other players as few players had been at that time. Pitchers would often groove pitches to the Mick to hit as homers by this time, literally so they could tell their children and future grandchildren that Mantle had hit one off of them, so my father wasn't asking anything out of the ordinary.

Weaver used one F-bomb after another in reply, coughing and gagging in between expletives as if he was going to upchuck anything he had previously imbibed.

Finally, my father got him to the hotel where the team was staying at, and he literally had to drag Weaver from the cab to the hotel doorman's feet, and he told the doorman, "He's your problem now."

That was on the Thursday off day. The Orioles and the Yankees played on Friday and Saturday, and the Mick was stuck at 499 homers.

Then came Mother's Day of 1967, a bright sunny day, and my father took me and two friends to Yankee Stadium to see that day's game.

Every time Mickey Mantle came up during the game, people--all 23,000 of us or so, filling about one-third of the Stadium--stood up, in anticipation for what we felt was a historic at bat.

I know that Mantle had one at bat early on, and I don't remember what he did, but by the middle of the game, Stu Miller, a pretty good pitcher in his day on excellent Oriole teams, was on the mound and Mantle came up to the plate.

After a few pitches, Miller threw another one to Mantle, a real meatball that even a vegan would jump at.

Mantle swung, the ball went into the rightfield seats, and the Yankee slugger jogged around the bases with his 500th home run, and the place went wild.

We will never know if Weaver did that to pay back my father for taking him while drunk as a skunk to his hotel, but it is a nice story to tell, and to believe if you want to."

That story has become part of family lore all these years later, and you can believe the backstory if you want to.

But what happened as a possible result of the backstory--one of the greatest baseball.players of all time reaching a monumental milestone--actually did happen, so if nothing else, today is the 57th anniversary of that accomplishment.

But in my family, today is the 57th anniversary of my father's little 15 minutes of fame in New York Yankees history, even though few people know about it--

And I am going to stick with it in that way.