BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : The Mick Wasn’t the Babe, but He Could Have Been

Who knows when he sampled alcohol for the first time? The history of his knee is more definitive.

Mickey Mantle required the first of five operations on the right knee when he was a 19-year-old rookie with the New York Yankees in 1951. He would never play another game without pain, reaching the Hall of Fame at less than 100%.

How much greater would a great career have been if his knee had always been sound, if his head had always been clear, free of the alcohol abuse that spanned 42 years?

Buzzie Bavasi, former general manager of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, reflected on that from his home in La Jolla.

“If he had been healthy, he would have been in the same stratosphere as Babe Ruth,” he said. “Put it this way: There may be a player or two today who can run better or throw better or field better or hit for a better average, but no one can do all of that as well as Mickey could, and certainly no one has his power on a consistent basis.

“The kid up in Seattle [Ken Griffey Jr.] is a great player, but he doesn’t run as well as Mickey did, and he doesn’t have Mickey’s power.”

What might have been? There is an aspect of it that occasionally haunts Bavasi. Tom Greenwade, the Yankee scout who gave Mantle $1,100 to sign as a suspect high school shortstop, had previously worked for the Dodgers.

How many times has Bavasi envisioned a Brooklyn outfield of Mickey and the Duke, along with Carl Furillo? Would Mantle or fellow Hall of Famer Duke Snider have played center field?

“I think I would have recommended to the manager that Duke play center in Ebbets Field, and Mickey play it on the road,” he said. “Mickey wasn’t a better outfielder than Duke, but he was quicker, and there were much bigger outfields on the road.

“Both would have played 77 games in center and combined for about 95 home runs. Not bad. The manager better not have lost too many games.”

Mantle’s statistics are in any record book, but maybe you needed to see Mantle every day during the ‘50s before injuries eroded what booze and late nights hadn’t.

“He was the greatest talent ever to play the game,” former teammate and close friend Tony Kubek said. “He was part of what I call a biblical line of ballplayers, from Ruth to [Joe] DiMaggio to Mantle. You can talk about everybody else all you want, but that’s the only line that really matters in baseball. In my opinion, those were the players.”

Now Mantle fights for his life after a liver transplant at a Dallas hospital. He has been sober since entering the Betty Ford Clinic in January of 1994, but 42 years of hard living took an obvious toll.

His illness further darkens the landscape of a seemingly rudderless sport.

A season devastated by the eight-month labor dispute and a 25% attendance drop has already lost some of its brightest players. Injuries have sidelined Griffey, Matt Williams, Jose Canseco, Jimmy Key, Don Mattingly and Lenny Dykstra, among others.

Owners met in Minneapolis this week and couldn’t decide on a labor strategy--when to return to the table and with what. Indecision is rampant at a time when a need for imagination is imperative.

How the owners would love the players to take the economic approach of Mantle, whose highest salary was the $100,000 he made in each of his last six seasons.

“I always felt I was overpaid,” he said in a recent interview. “I didn’t think I should be getting more than Whitey [Ford], Yogi [Berra] and Moose [Skowron], and so I didn’t ask for more. It was embarrassing. Today, I can do three card shows and make what I was paid in a season.”

The hope, of course, is that he will be healthy enough to do those card shows again.

PRESSURE PLAY?

American League President Gene Budig expects commitments on new, baseball-only stadiums in Anaheim, Boston, Seattle, Detroit, Milwaukee and Minnesota within 18 months, adding, “It is clearly in the best interests of those communities to protect those franchises.”

Some baseball people saw a threat in it and felt it was the wrong message to send at a time when baseball is trying to rebuild its fan base, needs a labor agreement above all and faces huge stadium hurdles in each of those communities. Besides, where would all those teams move if they don’t get new stadiums?

“It’s a lofty goal and a worthy one, but maybe not what should be at the top of our agenda right now,” Twin President Jerry Bell said.

VIEW FROM THE HILL

It was the year of the pitcher--1968. Denny McLain won 31 games with a 1.96 earned-run average. Juan Marichal won 26. Bob Gibson won 22 with a 1.12 ERA. The league earned-run averages were amazing--2.98 in the American, 2.99 in the National.

Owners decided that the game needed more offense and the mounds were lowered from 15 inches to 10 in 1969. League ERAs that season jumped to 3.59 in the National and 3.62 in the American. Each league averaged 8.1 runs per game, up from 6.8 in ’68.

With expansion diluting pitching, run production has continued to soar. It was 10.4 in the AL last year and 9.2 in the NL. The AL ERA was 4.80, the NL was 4.21.

Now owners have approved raising mounds back to 12 or 13 inches next year, one of several recommendations made by Steve Palermo to help knock 30 minutes off the time of games. Pitchers will also be allowed to go to their mouth without leaving the mound, providing they wipe immediately, but former Angel Manager Buck Rodgers anticipates a siege of spitball controversies as pitchers fake the wipe. They are currently forced to leave the mound before going to their mouth.

“Everybody recognizes . . . they’ve got to give the pitchers a leg up,” Rodgers said of the elevated mound. “It won’t make a poor pitcher a good pitcher, but it will make a good pitcher a better pitcher.”

MOON SHOTS

The United Baseball League continues to forge ahead with plans to open as an alternative third major league next year despite public apathy toward the current two. A news conference--in part to announce that the Los Angeles area franchise will be located in the Coliseum rather than the Inland Empire--is expected within two weeks.

Founder Dick Moss, a longtime agent and former players’ union counsel, said he has been surprised by the size of the attendance drop in the majors but added “there has been an appalling lack of imagination among leadership on both sides.” He said the UBL will begin without that acrimonious baggage and will present a package that is far more fun, the ownership shared in part by community and players.

The Coliseum, of course, is hardly state of the art. It provided a strangely shaped home for the Dodgers from 1958 through ‘61, a launching pad for Wally Moon’s famous wedge shots over the high screen in left field.

EXASPERATED

Robin Ventura has followed the released Chris Sabo, the benched Warren Newson and the injured John Kruk in the Chicago White Sox cleanup spot occupied last year by the productive Julio Franco, now in Japan, but Frank Thomas continues to be pitched around. He had been walked 48 times in 38 games through Friday, and his frustration has become worse.

“Anyone can go up there and leave the bat on their shoulder four times,” Thomas said. “You can’t stay focused, and you can’t stay aggressive. It’s trash. It shouldn’t happen in the big leagues. No one player is that dangerous. No one.”

Not even the winner of two consecutive most-valuable-player awards?

ZIM’S ADIEU

After 47 years in uniform, never having earned a paycheck from anything except baseball, Don Zimmer retired Tuesday in inimitable fashion. The Colorado Rockies’ bench coach, a former Dodger shortstop and manager of the San Diego Padres, Boston Red Sox, Texas Rangers and Chicago Cubs, walked from the dugout to the clubhouse during the fifth inning of a game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Coors Field. He showered, packed his bags and left, leaving a letter thanking the players and wishing them well. “I kept waiting for Zim to come back down and tell me it was a joke,” Manager Don Baylor said.

Affected by the recent deaths of close friends Don Drysdale and Bob Miller and his spring hospitalization caused by a loss of blood flow to the brain, Zimmer said the fun had gone out of it and he wanted to see his twin grandsons play their first Little League all-star game. The Rockies wanted to hold a night in his honor, but he declined.

“Baseball doesn’t have to give me nothing,” Zimmer said. “It’s given me everything I’ve got. I don’t have to have no night. I’m a . . . .238 hitter.”

NAMES AND NUMBERS

--Oakland outfielder Ruben Sierra has been on fire since Athletic Manager Tony La Russa publicly questioned his intensity and commitment again last week, calling him “clueless” and “the village idiot” after Sierra had laid into General Manager Sandy Alderson in a San Francisco Chronicle story. In nine games of the current East Coast trip, Sierra is 15 for 38 with four home runs and 11 runs batted in. “That wasn’t a motivational ploy by the manager,” La Russa said. “Ruben is just playing a complete game, that’s all. It’s what he’s capable of and what we need. He’s been sensational.”

--The Texas Rangers began the weekend 17-7 since May 15 but face the hard reality of playing the season without ever fielding their regular lineup. Juan Gonzalez, who missed the first 33 games because of a herniated disk and could miss more, made his debut last Thursday. Two days later, third baseman Dean Palmer (.330, nine homers, 24 RBIs) went out for the year because of a ruptured biceps tendon from trying to stop his swing on a changeup. “I was off eight months for the strike, and now this,” Palmer said. “It’s terrible.”

--Ellis Burks, unable to regain a starting spot in the Colorado Rockies’ outfield because of his long battle with a wrist injury and the productivity of Dante Bichette, Mike Kingery and Larry Walker, has asked to be traded, accusing Manager Don Baylor of miscommunication. “I understand his frustration,” Baylor said. “I was in the same situation with the Yankees and Oakland. I also understand that our left fielder is hitting .359, our center fielder is hitting .310 and the right fielder is hitting .323. Somebody has to sit.”