The Return Of the Sober Superstar
By Dave Anderson - New York Times
Published: Sunday, July 10, 1994

OUT near home plate during the Yankees' Old-Timers Day, the announcer Frank Messer asked the 42,521 customers to stand in memory of more than three dozen baseball people who had died during the past year.

"Bill Dickey . . . Marv Throneberry," were among the names he mentioned... "Chub Feeney . . . Harvey Haddix."

As the baseball year's necrology droned over the public-address system, you had to wonder if Mickey Mantle, standing in the Yankee dugout with his Yankee cap over the chest of his pinstriped uniform with "7" on the back, was thinking about what one of his doctors told him after an exam early this year.

"Mickey," the doctor said, "the next drink you take might kill you."

Mickey Mantle has yet to take the next drink.

He soon checked into the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, Calif., for alcohol abuse.

Not long after his release, the third oldest of his four sons, Billy, who was named for Billy Martin, died of a heart attack at age 36.

"That was a hard time," he has said.

Hard not to pour some vodka... But he didn't.

And yesterday he returned to Yankee Stadium for the first time.

Not that he was exempt from the barbs of two of his old teammates, Whitey Ford and Clete Boyer.

"They were were asking me, 'Did you know how to get in here sober?' " he was saying now with a smile.

"But I'm sober today and I'll be sober tomorrow."

He's 62 now.

As he sat in the middle of the Yankee clubhouse, his face appeared smoother and dryer than in recent years, as if the vodka had been sanded off it.

But he wanted to set something straight about his drinking as a switch-hitting slugger who hit 536 home runs.

"I never did play," he said, "when I felt like I was hurting my team."

Hurting himself was different.

The hurt in his damaged knees that he still hobbles on.

The willingness to endure pain.

Whitey Ford remembered the abscess on his thigh during the 1961 World Series.

"When he slid into second base, blood was all over his pants," Ford said.

"You don't forget that."

All those who played with Mickey Mantle haven't forgotten other moments.

Hank Bauer remembered him as a rookie in 1951 who lost a fly ball in the sun during spring training after flipping his sunglasses down too soon.

"I told him, 'You got to find the ball before you flip down the glasses,' " Bauer said, "and he said, 'Casey didn't tell me that.' "

Casey Stengel was his manager for 10 years, but Yogi Berra was the Yankee manager in 1964 when Phil Linz was playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on his harmonica on the team's chartered bus outside Comiskey Park after the White Sox had swept a four-game series.

"I learned later," Linz recalled, "that when Yogi heard the harmonica, he yelled, 'Shove it.'

But I hadn't heard him and when I asked, 'What did he say?' Mickey said, 'Play it louder.' So I did.' "

That's when Berra slapped the harmonica out of Linz's hands.

But for all his nights on the town, Mantle wasn't always being playful with his teammates.

About a year later, Joe Pepitone was moping over his divorce when Mantle took him aside.

"He told me, 'Hey, kid, stay with me until you get it straightened out,' " Pepitone said.

"He had a suite in the St. Moritz... I moved in for a month."

Like most people, Roy White remembered a Mantle home run.

Actually two home runs during the 1966 season.

Batting right-handed against left-hander Marcelino Lopez, he hit a line drive into Yankee Stadium's top deck in right field.

"Not near the foul line, but out near the overhang above where our bullpen was then," White said.

"Two days earlier, batting left-handed, he had hit one off Lew Burdette into the visitor's bullpen in left field... What power he had."

Now, more importantly, Mickey Mantle has willpower.

During the old-timers' introductions in yesterday's steambox heat, the fans had clapped politely for most, then in a burst for Phil Rizzuto, the newest Hall of Famer.

But when Frank Messer began talking about "the victor in one of his toughest battles," they stood and applauded with a different reverence than in other years, and slightly louder than they did moments later for Joe DiMaggio.

"Whenever you get to where I was," Mickey Mantle had said earlier, "it's a matter of life and death."