Yesterday’s Heroes : The Graying of an Entire Baseball Generation

Sing a song of sadness for yesterday’s heroes, who came from another time, a time long ago when they were young and bold and on a joy-ride that seemed like it would never end.

Now it is ending.

Yesterday’s heroes are aging, their generation graying, their fans wondering just where the time went.

Wasn’t it only yesterday that Mickey Mantle was hitting all those home runs and Whitey Ford was throwing all those shutouts?

Now Mantle recuperates from liver transplant surgery in a Dallas hospital and Ford goes for once-a-month checkups after having a cancerous tumor removed last December.

How can that be? How can Mantle and Ford, cornerstones of a Yankee dynasty, both be battling serious illness? They’re too young for that. They ought to still be slapping each other on the back, laughing at each other’s bad jokes, having the time of their lives.

Instead, this.

Sad.

And all around them, there are reminders that those Yankees, who once seemed so invincible, are being ravaged by the years.

Hank Bauer had a bout with throat cancer. Bill Skowron underwent double heart-bypass surgery. The pitchers who surrounded Ford--Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi and Ed Lopat--have all died. So have his catcher, Elston Howard, and his and Mantle’s longtime running mate, Billy Martin.

Ford looks at team pictures now and then, thinks about his old teammates, and shakes his head.

Then there are the 1965 Minnesota Twins, the team that benefited first when the Mantle-Ford Yankee dynasty disintegrated. After five straight Yankee pennants and nine in 10 years, suddenly the Twins were AL champions and came within one game of winning the World Series.

Their shortstop was Zoilo Versalles, the American League’s MVP that year, the table-setter for the middle of an imposing batting order. Versalles died last week at age 55, alone and mostly forgotten. He sold his MVP trophy and World Series ring to the scavengers long ago, when the bad times began to set in.

His teammate, Bob Allison, died earlier this year after a terrible battle with ataxia, a neurological disorder. A year ago, Cesar Tovar, another Twins teammate, died from pancreatic cancer.

Sad. So very sad.

One of the central characters in the Twins’ World Series against the Dodgers was Don Drysdale, who lost the opener but came back to win Game 4. He died two years ago, alone in a Montreal hotel room, another statistic from the star-crossed Boys of Summer.

Most of that memorable team is gone now--Campanella and Hodges, Robinson and Gilliam, Amoros and Furillo, Drysdale and Cox. All gone, all far too early.

Around ball parks there’s always been a saying--it’s a young man’s game. And no one ever watches the participants get old. But they do, just like everybody else.

Their’s was a different time in baseball, a time of macho, knock-this-chip-off-my-shoulder types, tough guys who drank and smoked, played hard and lived the same way. When you were riding this train, it seemed like it would never stop.

It was a time of knockdown pitches and spike-high slides. Pantywaists need not apply. The clubhouse newspaper of choice was The Sporting News, not the Wall Street Journal. Nobody had an agent or a cellular phone.

There were no nutritionists running around the dressing room, and no psychologists, either. There were no vitamins or vegetables on the training table. This was The Show, The Bigs, not some health spa.

There were no player strikes and no owner lockouts. There were no free agents and no arbitration hearings. There was nothing but hits, runs and errors.

It was a simpler time, a time long ago and far away, a time that grows more distant every day the doctor looks in on Mickey Mantle and each month Whitey Ford goes for his post-surgical checkup.

In “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevye may have put it best when he sang of his daughters: “I don’t remember getting older; when did they?”