Free October 1964 by David Halberstam

asked by Mantle to bring him a beer, demanded that Mantle bring him a beer, which seemed to amuse Mantle as well. It quickly became clear that Pepitone loved Mantle, loved being Mantle’s pal and basking in his reflected glory; in fact, Pepitone wanted nothing so much as to be Mantle’s caddy. One or two of the older players thought there was a certain desperate quality to Pepitone’s clowning, and his need for Mantle’s approval. In the locker room, Pepi always had his eye on Mantle, watching to see if the great star approved of what he was doing. Some were reminded of school days when an insecure and not particularly popular kid wanted to win favor with the most popular boy in the class.
    Generally Pepitone was successful in his attempts to charm Mantle. Pepitone, an amused Mantle said at the time, was “the freshest rookie I ever saw,” but he also had a quick bat, a good swing, and could play both first and the outfield. Pepitone loved it when Mantle nicknamed him “Pepinose” (Stengel, in those days before ethnic slurs were taboo, called him “Pepperoni”) and was thrilled when Mantle told a sportswriter that Pepitone was the key to the 1963 season. “I figure we’ll win by a nose,” Mantle said. Yet even the easygoing Mantle, a player always looking to be amused, thought there were times when Pepitone overstepped the bounds. Once, during batting practice, Pepitone jumped into the batting cage and got ready to take his swings when Mantle wanted to take extra swings because he wasn’t hitting well. “Five swings, Slick,” Pepitone said to an astonished and then enraged Mantle. The two exchanged sharp words, and even though Pepitone was embarrassed to have done the unthinkable, to have provoked his idol, he was in too deep and could not back down. Much to his regret, he heard himself telling Mantle to get to the ball park earlier and get himself wrapped earlier if he wanted extra swings, and not to hold up his teammates. It was not, as far as Mantle was concerned, a small matter, and he did not speak to Pepitone for several weeks, leaving Pep increasingly dispirited and desperate.
    There were other sins. During spring training the Yankees had a dress code: the players were to come down to breakfast in the motel in their civilian clothes, which meant a sports jacket, and then go back to their rooms and change. On one occasion Pepitone and Linz came into the restaurant in their Yankee uniforms. Houk was furious, as if this were somehow demeaning the uniform, and he sent them right back to their rooms to change. Pepitone was the first Yankee to bring a hair dryer into the locker room, as much as anything else to fight his onrushing baldness. On occasion he seemed to enjoy going on the field without his cap, as if to unveil himself for the young women in the stands. He not only tended to wear his street clothes tighter than most of his teammates did (on the same day he bought his new convertible, he also bought several flashy suits, styled, in his words, like those of “the younger, sharper racket guys”), he also started to wear his uniform tighter than the prevailing style of the day for ballplayers.
    Because they were young and ebullient and somewhat surprised to be playing for, of all teams, the Yankees, they showed their pleasure openly, especially to the younger sportswriters. Those writers were frustrated with the often unsympathetic older players, whose quotes seemed to come from some central clearinghouse of approved and sanitized athlete-speak, so, in turn, they were drawn to the extroverted new breed. But in the Yankee clubhouse the younger players were believed not only to talk too much, but to have talked before their turn. The ability to be quoted in a newspaper was not, in the Yankee tradition, a God-given right; rather, it was like being given a low rather than a high uniform number, something that was supposed to be earned, preferably over many years. They had not yet earned the right to be