The Last Yankee Baseball Hero? : Baseball: The sport will be a long time finding a player and a personality like Mickey Mantle.

If he was not The Last American Hero, a designation accorded to a stock car driver by author Tom Wolfe, Mickey Mantle may well have been The Last Baseball Hero in America. Although he was not the best player of his time, let alone of all time, the death of this flawed man was cause for mourning throughout the United States. It was a tribute both to an extraordinary talent and to the age in which he flourished.

For millions of his countrymen, Mantle not only belonged to the 1950s but came to symbolize the decade. Whether the years of Ike in the White House were as innocent and uncomplicated as they have been portrayed is a matter for debate. But it assuredly was the final era in which baseball was unchallenged as the national pastime, a fitting reflection of American values.

In the intervening years, pro football and pro basketball have stolen much of baseball’s glory as well as the majority of the country’s gifted athletes. But when Mantle was growing up in the mining country of Oklahoma, baseball was the dominant sport and the outfielder seemed to embody the virtues of the game. He was the product of a small town, a hayseed really, who could have served as the model for the Norman Rockwell painting of the rookie with the straw suitcase that adorned the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. He was named by his father for an earlier baseball star, Mickey Cochrane, and the combination of first and last names was more than alliterative. It was downright poetic.

Of course, none of that would have mattered if he had not been capable of feats that seem superhuman even now. The tape-measure home runs that threatened to escape Yankee Stadium, the breathtaking speed to first base, the triumph over his deteriorating legs later in his career. In an age when we have a diminished capacity for awe, when we are able to see and hear almost every sports achievement again and again thanks to all-sports television and radio, Mantle’s feats are the subject of oral history. They have been re-created and perhaps embellished in recent weeks not only by former teammates but also by average citizens who have dialed call-in shows around the nation to share the memory of a specific moment in time.

That’s in accord with the primary definition of hero as set down in The American Heritage Dictionary: Lifestyle was not a consideration. Even Achilles had his heel.

Mantle’s defects, widely exposed in his later years, also managed to set him apart. They made him more sympathetic, more human. Unlike the dignified Joe DiMaggio, who was loath to do or say anything that would jeopardize his place on a pedestal, The Mick made jokes at his own expense, frequently rued his failure to fully exploit his ability and ultimately made a public confession of his alcohol abuse and his inadequacy as a family man.

Among his peers, Willie Mays was just as electrifying and a superior all-around player and Hank Aaron surpassed a monumental record. But it’s highly unlikely their passings will be marked by similar displays of grief. Granted, race certainly is a factor. So was Mantle’s affiliation with the Yankees, the most successful and storied of major-league teams rather than a franchise that packed up and moved in the midst of his career. Yet he seemed to have an impact on people that was beyond his own comprehension.

Remarkably, the man who considered himself a neglectful parent inspired a flood of calls Sunday from people who credited him as the foundation of a relationship with their own fathers. As rude and as crude as he could be to impressionable youngsters in his playing days, he nonetheless was the subject of warm remembrances from the same children now inhabiting middle-aged bodies. Whatever he was, he was the genuine article.