Mantle: The Best There Ever Was Hardcover – Illustrated, May 22, 2019

Yup. Re-reading this great book about the greatest baseball player you could ever see if you were a kid in the 1950-60s. The Mick, warts and all, but still my hero.

From the time I was five In 1955 I was in love with Mickey Mantle. Luckily I grew up in a baseball loving family that watched Saturday baseball games on TV. When Minnesota finally got Major League Baseball my mom would take me out of school to go sit in the outfield bleacher on Ladies Day. Mickey Mantle threw me a baseball over the fence in 1962 during warm up practice and it is one of my most treasured possessions.

Why write a THIRD book about Mickey Mantle as Tony Castro has done? What could be new?The answer, as least as put forth by the publisher's title and book jacket blurb and the author’s first chapter, is that "the evolution of analytics" proves that "Mantle truly was the greatest ballplayer of all time". That is, to provide a modern upgrade of his historical ranking. That would be an interesting read--greater than the Babe? "The Best There Ever Was"?-- but alas....not really what this book is about.After the first chapter in which Castro uses wife Merlyn Mantle's musings to introduce that theme, it's dropped for the next 200+ pages, and only picked up at the end in a relatively brief and unconvincing way. In fact, ultimately (and unexpectedly) Castro bemoans that modern analytics cannot fully capture Mantle's greatness and he ends up talking about "making his teammates better" and "popularity" and, of all things, the outsized price of his baseball cards.The book consists mostly of familiar Mantle lore, the stories about his father, Casey, the return to the minors, the 1951 knee injury, the fear of early death... and, drinking, drinking, drinking, cussing, cussing, cussing.(haven't we heard enough about the latter?) Unfortunately, some of it reads like a quest for reflected glory, a litany of "Mickey told me...", reiterating that the author became pals with the Great Mick. That does yield some particular tales not told before, Castro's personal observations of Mantle in action, but none of it provides any new insights, just more of Mantle drinking and cussing.Castro does advance a different perspective on the Mantle-DiMaggio relationship. Also, for those interested, he casts Holly Brooke as the true and sustained love of Mantle's life, with Merlyn as a far less important woman merely thrust upon him by his father, and who Mantle never loved. That's certainly different from the usual take of Brooke as merely a 1951 fling. Whether true or not, it's Brooke's tale and Castro runs with it. Apparently, he alone among biographers found her (late in life) and interviewed her at length.For the many Mantle-lovers, this is worth reading, everything about Mick is, and it faithfully tells of his trials and tribulations. But I don’t think it adds much to previous fine Mantle books like Jane Levey's The Lost Boy and Allen Barra's Mickey and Willie.And for those specifically interested in the purported motif—a reanalysis of Mantle based on modern analytics-- I suggest Hot Hands, Draft Hype, and DiMaggio's Streak, which includes relevant essays titled "Mantle Better than Mays" and "Mickey Mantle, Unsurpassed"

Good read

tHIS IS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS ON MY HERO, 'THE MICK". i HAVE SEVERAL BOOKS ON HIS LIFE AND THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST. THE PICTURES ESPECIALLY ARE VERY NICE. I ACTUALLY MET "THE MICK" BACK IN 1980'S, WHEN HE WAS IN THE LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA AREA. MY GOSH, WAS THAT I DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET. I WAS THERE TO GET HIS AUTOGRAPH AT A BOOK STORE, AND OH MY GOSH, I CAN STILL SEE HIM NOW, AS I WRITE THIS. HE IS, AND WILL ALWAYS BE THE VERY, VERY, VERY BEST BASEBALL PLAYER THERE EVER WAS. A VERY HUMBLE MAN BESIDES.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, could not put it down. It dispells myths about Mickey's enmity of Joe D. as well as shedding light on Mick's extended romance/friendship with Holly Brooke. Well written and full of facts and figures supporting the author's claim that Mickey deserves the book title.

I was a bit disappointed because I had hoped this was a biography of Mickey Mantle. Altho' there were a lot of new insights that I never knew about, it really wasn't that much. I wish he would have written more about Mickey's interactions with his teammates.

Awesome book

This book provided more information about his life outside baseball than I knew before, much of it provided by the two women who knew him best