A couple of years ago, Mark Armour alerted me to a strange book: Fritz Peterson’s Mickey Mantle is Going to Heaven. It sounded sort of terrible ... but I read it anyway. One representative sample:
During my last year in baseball I did become a “born again” believer. It helped me mentally and spiritually. I did share that with Mike while he was with the Seattle Mariners in 1977, but he said “thanks, but not thanks” to the Jesus thing...
As far as Mike’s belief in God is concerned, I heard from one of my sons that Mike was not a “believer” (in Jesus) and certainly didn’t attend a church. Not that my son’s assessment has anything to do with Mike’s salvation or about his future plight in the hereafter, but I would be surprised, knowing Mike, that he, or Bouton would attend any Church or Synagogue unless they had been the founders of it.
Like Bouton, I’m afraid Mike will be taking a “dip”, maybe even a “swim” in the “lake of fire” for a long time. He is pretty bullheaded.
There’s a lot of that in the book. Now, it’s been a couple of years since I read it, but my understanding is that while nobody’s necessarily consigned to Hell forever, if you’ve not been born again before your death – Mickey Mantle was born again, which is why he went straight to Heaven despite all those earlier transgressions – well, you’ll have to do at least a bit of splashing around in Satan’s molten swimming pool.
Again, as I remember.
Well, there’s very little of that in Peterson’s new book, When the Yankees Were on the Fritz: Revisiting the Horace Clarke Years. Actually, there’s very little religion, and no molten lakes at all. Here’s one of Peterson’s few dips into theology: “God has already saved all of us over 2,000 years ago. It is a free gift to all of us. I might have been partially responsible for Thurman’s possibly going to hell! Not! In fact, I’m working on a book right now called The Born Again Club, which will deal with the business of religion and how people play church using eternal damnation as their hammer to scare people. It is amazing and unconscionable!”
Well, okay then.
Where the odd thing about Peterson’s first book was the theology, the odd thing about this one is his obsession with the relatively poor play of the Yankees during the so-called Horace Clarke Era.
When I named every Yankee “era” a few years ago, I gave Clarke only five seasons, 1965 through ’69. But Peterson starts with ’65 and goes all the way through ’74, the season in which Clarke was traded to the Padres. Which was also the season in which Peterson was traded to the Indians.
So Peterson doesn’t just mention Horace Clarke in his book’s subtitle; he specifically references, by name, the “Horace Clarke Era” 40 times in the book. And he’s real specific with his criticisms, too. Clarke, a second baseman, wouldn’t hang in there for the double play. Roy White, arguably the Yankees’ best player during much of the era, played too deep in left field and couldn’t throw. Everybody who played shortstop during the era was a “Horace Clarke Era”-type of player. Same for third base. “Since we never won a pennant during those years,” Peterson writes, “some of the players started looking for reasons why we weren’t contenders. I was one of those guys because it had gotten so frustrating that I finally started speaking out about it. I actually went so far as to ask Lee MacPhail, in a letter, to give Jerry Kenney away to some team (any team) so that we could finally sign a real third baseman… Looking at it now, we just wanted answers, or maybe scapegoats to blame for not winning pennants. Two of the obvious targets were Jerry Kenney and Horace Clarke.”
About 80 percent of the book is Peterson telling stories about his teammates; Peterson was fond of handing out nicknames, and even fonder of playing practical jokes (some of which were actually pretty clever). Another 15 percent is devoted to running down his less-than stellar teammates. But finally, Peterson winds up blaming the organization rather than his teammates; in the old days, he says, the Yankees’ coaches and veteran players would make sure the younger players did things the right way. The Yankees’ failures during the Horace Clarke Era might be blamed not on Horace Clarke, but on a general lack of leadership.
Which is no doubt reductive. But served as a welcome note of charity in a book with so much negativity.
I don’t mean to complain. Peterson’s book is just lightly edited and occasionally repetitive, but crackles with personality in a way that most baseball memoirs don’t, as Fritz Peterson writes as if he just doesn’t really give a damn.
