Free The Last Boy by Jane Leavy

center fielder can get there, it’s his ball. Especially if that center fielder is DiMaggio. Hank Bauer learned that the first time he made the mistake of taking a ball hit between them. Jogging back to the dugout, DiMaggio gave him a lethal stare. “I said, ‘Joe, did I do something wrong?’
    “He said, ‘No, but you’re the first sonofabitch who ever invaded my territory.’ Center fielders don’t call for nothin’. When I heard the grunt, I got the hell out of the road.”
    The past and the future converged on a routine fly ball in Mantle’s ninety-eighth major league game. Imagine Mutt watching. He seesthe geometry of disaster. The ball is dropping. Joe’s coming. Mickey’s charging. “I was running as hard as I could,” Mantle told me. “At that time, I could outrun anybody. I ran over to catch it. Just as I was getting ready to put my glove up, I heard him say, ‘I got it.’ Well, shit, you don’t want to run into Joe DiMaggio in center field in Yankee Stadium. I slammed on my brakes like that.”
    Embedded in the outfield sod that sloped downhill at perhaps a 10-degree angle from the right field fence was a six-inch round depression. “Actually it was a sewer drain, maybe four by four inches,” said former batboy Frank Prudenti. “There was, like, a piece of metal in the center. You could pull it up, and you could push it down. Like a cork on a bottle.”
    The cover was made of thin plywood with a rubber coating, Prudenti says, maybe three-fourths of an inch thick. “It was wedged in there, belowground. You had to hit it with your heel, wedge it down real tight. If it wasn’t, somebody could definitely trip on it.”
    Generations of Yankee outfielders and their opponents were well acquainted with this ancient piece of Stadium infrastructure. “Been in it, been on it, been around it, and fell on it,” said Bobby Murcer, another of Greenwade’s Oklahoma finds.
    Bauer used it as his anchor. Berra was taught to play off it. “Never stand on the drain,” Tommy Henrich told him.
    Gil McDougald, the second baseman, had retreated into right field, following the flight of the ball. “You could see the whole thing coming in your mind. I knew that it looked like trouble. Mickey, you gotta understand, was playin’ pretty deep because he had to come down that hill, or incline, I guess you’d call it, out there. So it wasn’t what you’d call a short fly ball. It was like a humpback job. It was Mickey’s ball, but DiMag, being the icon he was, and Mick being a rookie, he gave way instead of really taking charge.”
    From the visiting dugout Al Dark also tracked the flight of the ball. “All of sudden, Mickey throws on the brakes and his legs went out from under him and he slipped as you would slip on an ice thing. Then he couldn’t get up and it didn’t look like he wanted to get up.”
    Mantle was motionless. Yankee Stadium was still.
    A sequence of news photographs documented the progression of the disaster in right center field.
    Click.
    There’s DiMaggio camped under the ball, his glove open at his side, looking up into the sun. There’s Mantle splayed on the grass in front of the 407-foot sign. The shadows of the championship banners ringing the Stadium point toward his fallen form. His right leg is folded beneath him, the injured knee bent backward at an ugly angle. His left leg extends upward toward the sky. To his left, there is a faint indentation in the grass.
    Click.
    Now DiMaggio cradles the ball, his glove pressed against his stomach, and turns toward Mantle. He lowers his uninjured leg like a drawbridge, shifting his full weight onto his side. He buries his head in his arms on the turf. Behind him, the polite grandstand crowd, some in fedoras, some in coats and ties, begins to rise, Windsor-knotted necks craning to see.
    Click.
    DiMaggio kneels beside him, whispering words of reassurance, a consoling hand resting on his shoulder. They’re coming with the stretcher, kid. Mantle