A career that touched us all in a big way

Sporting News, The, August 21, 1995 by Mike Lupica

He was a Yankees fan out of the past. He sat behind the left-field line in the shade and looked out at the green outfield grass of Yankee Stadium, looked into the bright sunlight that tried to make everyone young. And Jim Kearney saw things the way they were, for Mickey Mantle and the Yankees and even himself. This was an afternoon when he had been told that Mantle might be dying in a Texas hospital, far from the 1950s and '60s and far from New York.

"I used to sit directly across from here in right, by the foul pole," said Kearney, who, at 77, saw all of Mantle's career. "Even when he was in the outfield, out there on that grass, you couldn't take your eyes off him. When he was young, you never saw anything that fast on a baseball field."

Kearney came to watch the Yankees play the Orioles with his wife. He goes back to Babe Ruth and grew up a Yankees fan, but said he is not a Yankees fan now. He came to root for Cal Ripken, who got one day closer to Lou Gehrig on a day when the medical reports on Mantle seemed so final. Across the field was the right-field foul pole, with "314" written right next to it. To his left was Monument Park, which honors Yankees immortals, living and dead. "I remember when the monuments were part of the playing field," Kearney said. "I remember when they were in center, right behind Mickey."

Darryl Strawberry came to the plate as Kearney was talking, and there was all the noise, mostly good, that follows Strawberry these days. There is even this romantic idea going around now that Strawberry was once a beloved baseball star around here. He was not, even when he was young. Strawberry could hit the ball over the sky, the way Mantle could when he was young. But he was never Mantle, or even close.

This has nothing to do with drinking or drugs, the mistakes either one of them made. This is about the way Mantle was framed by this place, and by Jim Kearney's memory, and the memory of everybody who ever saw him on this grass.

Strawberry struck out. Kearney wasn't watching. He stared into the outfield, where the monuments and Mantle once were.

"You must understand something about him," Kearney said. "We were a little resentful of him at the start. We were always protective of our legends here, protective of the past. So we wanted to know who this Mantle kid was who was going to replace Ruth and Gehrig. How dare anybody think that somebody could replace Joe DiMaggio in center field at Yankee Stadium.

"But then we saw him play, and it was as if all questions were answered."

It was not so far from Kearney's seat to Monument Park and plaques for Jacob Ruppert and Ruth and DiMaggio and Gehrig. And Mantle.

It was not the plaques that mattered so much, on a glorious day for baseball, in what still is the best baseball place, whatever they say about other ballparks, in other cities. It was the view. Yankee Stadium has changed in the years since Mantle retired. You still could stand there in the sun and look at the people in the stands and see it all as Mantle saw it once. Jim Kearney had a wonderful view from the seats in lower right field, when he was young and Mantle was younger. Mantle's view, from the great lawn, was better.

He was the fastest thing they had seen on a ballfield and came here with more power than anyone since Ruth. They always have called this The House That Ruth Built. But there were years, glory years, when it was built around Mickey Mantle.

There were people like Jim Kearney in the stands who remembered. Nick Priore, the clubhouse man, can tell you Mantle stories all day long, the same way he can tell you about the man he always calls "Joe D." Frankie albone, who worked on the grounds crew when Mantle played, who worked on that grass, had a million Mantle stories, but Frankie Albone passed on in the spring.

This was down the hall from the Yankees clubhouse. The game had moved into the late innings. In those hallways you mostly heard questions being asked about Mickey Mantle by some of the security people in grey sports jackets and others on the maintenance staff of Yankee Stadium.

Bill Burbridge was one of the staff guys in the hall. He said he began work as a vendor at the old Yankee Stadium July 4, 1949. So he was around when Mantle played his first game in 1951. "People will always talk about the power, but I remember the speed," Burbridge said. "I never had seen blazing speed like that in my life. When he was young, he could do anything."

Burbridge leaned against a wall, and closed his eyes, and smiled. "This place was made for history," Burbridge said in a quiet voice. "And Mickey Mantle was made for this place."