Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle were both two of the greatest players to ever play for the Yankees. Whitey was the Yankees top pitcher back in the Yankee years, and Mickey was the man that would hit the long balls. Whitey and Mickey both come from extreamly different backgrounds. Whitey was a city boy from New York, and Mickey was a country boy from a small town in Oklahoma. Micley Mantle still holds Major League baseball records till this day. He has the most homeruns in all the world series he played in (18), and runs batted in (40), runs (42), walks (43), extra-base hits (26), and total bases (123). Those are just some of the amazing things that he did in his carrer. He played for the Yankees
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"Anyway, I was still in high school back where we were living out in the country near Commerce in 1948, and we didn't have a hell of a lot. My mother made every baseball uniform I ever wore till I signed with the Yankees. I mean, she sewed them right on me. I was sixteen years old then, and my brothers and me would play ball out in the yard or back in one of the fields."(16)
Mickey Mantle didn't have the best life when he was growing up. He was not very rich, and him and his family had to get by with just what they had. He wasn't priveledged enough like all of the other kids to have his uniforms made for him, so his mom had to sew them up for him. He grew up out in the rural country of Oklahoma learning how to play baseball out in the fields of his farm when other kids up north toward New York learn how to play the game on a baseball field. Mickey had more obstacles to overcome that all of the other baseball players because he wasn't as rich, priveledged and lucky as most of them.
"He showed up again and talked to my Dad and me, and said he was going to give me a $500 bonus. But my Dad said I could make more money than that by hanging around in semi-pro ball, right around home there. Greenwade asked my Dad how much I would make playing semi-pro ball around home that summer, and my Dad figured around $1,500. So Greenwade said he'd give me a $1,500 bonus and $140 a month for the rest of the summer. That's how I signed with the Yankees."(17)
To me, this explains how important the issue of money was to Mickey and his family. Sice Mickey didn't grow up as rich and priveledged as a lot of other kids, he had to find a way of making money just to get by. So the reason that Mickey's dad let him go to the MLB was so that he could mke so money to live off of. Everything was about money with Mickey and his family because they were so poor, and they had to go through the Great Depression when Mickey was a little child.
"I was scared out of my mind; I was just out of high school back in Oklahoma and I was only nineteen or twenty years old. One of those guys who didn't smoke in front of his Dad and that hadn't had very many drinks in his life. That first year in New York, though, I roomed with Hank Bauer and Johnny Hopp, and I did learn to drink a little bit."(21)
To me, this quote explains how scared Mickey must have been when he first got signed by the New York Yankees. Coming straight out of high school to playing in the minor leagues would be such a difficult obstacle to overcome. I consider Mickey Mantle to be one of the greatest baseball players to ever live because of not only how good of a baseball player he was, but how he had to overcome being afraid out on the road living by himself. This is a powerful quote because he was used to being around his Dad all the time and never doing anything wrong, but it all changed once he got to be a profesional baseball player.
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"If you want to press the point, I was a real city slicker, all bright and street-smart, and I knew my way around. He was a real country boy, all shy and embarrassed when he arrived with a straw suitcase, two pairs of slacks and one blue sports jacketthat probably coast about eight dollars in a store in commerce, Oklahoma."(1)
To me, this quote explains how much different Whitey was from Mickey, but yet they still became best friends even though they were from completely different backgrounds. Whitey Ford grew up around New York so he knew all about the city and had lived there all his life, and Mickey had come from rural Oklahoma to the biggest city in the United States and was lost. That was just another disadvantage for Mickey to have on his side.
"We were also poor. My father was a bartender in Astoria, and for a while he worked in a meat market down town on Fourteenth Street. My mother worked for the A&P on Fifty-Third Street and Second Avenue. She was a bookkeeper. I guess you would call us a below-average-income family."(3)
Mickey wasn't the only player on the New York Yankees to be poor. Whitey Ford's family didn't have to much money, but not as poor as Mickey's family. Whitey came from a little bit better town than Mickey did because Mickey came straight from the farm. Whitey was a pretty smart guy coming from the streets of New York, so he knew how to take care of himself when his parents weren't around.
After reading this book I know realized how important money was back when these two guys were growing up. They were both born during the Great Depression, so their families must have really struggled to raise them into becoming such great men. Whitey and Mickey were great baseball players and I learned a lot of intersting facts about them, and I even learned some interesting facts about history as well.
Whitey and MickeyAn Autobiography of the Yankee Years Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Joseph DursoW.S.
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Coffey, Wayne . "Par Three: The M&M Boys." Photograph. The Stadium. . 04 December 2008
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Snyder, Matt . "Whitey Ford." photograph. . . 4 December 2008
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