Mickey Mantle BATTED 400 — What Happened in Locked Room Left Teammates in TEARS
The Yankees had just outscored the Pirates 55-27. They were the better team by every measure. Three blowout victories. 16-3, 10 to 0, 12 to0. Dominant, unstoppable. Mickey Mantel had delivered the performance of his life. Three home runs, 11 RBI’s, a batting average of 400. But when Bill Mazeroski’s bat connected with Ralph Terry’s pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning, none of that mattered.
What happened next? Most people never saw. The photographers weren’t allowed in. The reporters were kept outside. For 20 minutes, the door to the visitors clubhouse at Forbes Field stayed locked. Inside that room, something broke that had never broken before. Mickey Mantel was crying. Let’s go back six days. October 5th, 1960. Game one of the World Series.
Yankees versus Pirates at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The Yankees were heavy favorites. They’d won 97 games in the regular season. They had Mickey Mantel, the Triple Crown winner from 1956. Roger Maris, who’d hit 39 home runs. Yogi Barra, a three-time MVP. Whitey Ford, the best pitcher in baseball. The Pirates, they were scrappy.
They’d won 95 games, sure, but nobody gave them a real chance. This was supposed to be a coronation, not a competition. Game one started badly for the Yankees. The Pirates jumped out to a 6-2 lead. But then something happened that would define the entire series. The Yankees started hitting. Mickey Mantel came to the plate in the fourth inning.
Bill Mazeroski had just hit a two-run homer for Pittsburgh. The crowd was roaring. Mickey dug in. He was batting right-handed against the Pirates starter. He crushed the ball. Not just hit it, crushed it. The kind of sound that makes an entire stadium go quiet for half a second before the roar begins. Home run.
The Yankees were back in it. But they lost that game six to four. And when game two started the next day, something became clear. These two teams were playing different kinds of baseball. The Pirates won close games 4 to three, 5-2, grinding out victories with timely hitting and clutch pitching. The Yankees, when they won, they destroyed.
Game two, Yankees 16, Pirates three. Bobby Richardson drove in six runs. Mickey went two for four with a walk. The Pirates looked helpless. Game three. Yankees 10. Pirates nothing. Whitey Ford threw a complete shutout game. Mickey hit another home run. The Yankees had now outscored the Pirates 26-3 in two games. This was what everyone expected.
This was the Dynasty showing why they were the Dynasty. But game four went back to the Pirates 3-2. Another close game. Another gutty performance. Game five, Yankees 13, Pirates five. Mickey hit his third home run of the series. The Yankees were hitting everything. Roger Maris, Yogi Barra, Moose Scaon. It was batting practice.
Game six, Yankees 12, Pirates nothing. Another shutout, another demolition. Whitey Ford’s second shut out of the series. Mickey went two for five with two RBI’s. Do the math. After six games, the Yankees had outscored the Pirates 46-7. They’d won three games by a combined score of 38-3. But the series was tied three games to three because the Pirates had won their three games.
And in baseball, that’s all that matters. Game seven was scheduled for October 13th at Forbes Field. Winner take all. The weather in Pittsburgh was perfect. Clear skies, cool October air, the kind of day that baseball was made for. 36,683 fans packed into Forbes Field. The entire city had shown up. This was their team, their chance, their moment.
The Yankees started Bob Turley on the mound. The Pirates countered with Vern Law, their ace, who’d won 20 games in the regular season. The game started like a heavyweight fight. Both teams trading punches. Pirates scored two in the first. Yankees got one back in the fifth on a Moose Skoron home run. Pirates extended their lead to four to one in the second. Then the sixth inning.
This is when the Yankees remembered who they were. Mickey Mantle led off with a single. Yogi Barra followed with a three-run homer. Suddenly, it was four to four. The Pirates got a run back in the bottom of the sixth. 5 to four Pirates. Top of the eighth, the Yankees exploded again. Four runs. Mickey drove in a run with a single.
By the time the dust settled, it was 7 to5 Yankees. Three outs away from a championship. Three outs away from validating everything the statistics said. Three outs away from proving they were the better team. But baseball doesn’t care about statistics. Bottom of the eighth, Gino Simile led off with a single. Bill Varden hit a ground ball that should have been a double play.
Should have ended the threat. Instead, the ball hit a pebble, hit a bad hop, jumped up, and struck Yankee shortstop Tony Kubc in the throat. Kubc went down. He couldn’t breathe. He was choking. They had to carry him off the field. He’d spend a night in a hospital. And the Pirates were still alive. Dick Gro singled. Roberto Clemente beat out an infield hit. The bases were loaded.
Hal Smith came to the plate. A backup catcher. Not a star, just a guy doing his job. He hit a three-run homer. Forbes Field exploded. 9 to7 Pirates. Two outs away from a championship. But the Yankees weren’t done. Top of the ninth, Bobby Richardson singled. Dale Long singled. Roger Marris fouled out, but Mickey Mantle came through again.
Another single. Richardson scored seven to nine. Gil McDougled, running for long, scored on a Yogi Barra ground out that Mickey barely beat at first base. If Mickey had been out, the run wouldn’t have counted, but he was safe. 9 to9. The crowd at Forbes Field was losing their minds. Nobody could believe what they were watching.
Bottom of the ninth, Ralph Terry came in to pitch for the Yankees. He’d given up that Hal Smith home run in the eighth. Now he had to get three outs to send the game to extra innings. Bill Mazeroski stepped to the plate. Mazeroski was the Pirates second baseman, gold glove defender, good hitter, but not a power threat. He’d hit 11 home runs all season.
Terry threw ball one. The clock on the scoreboard read 3:36 p.m. Terry threw again. High fast ball. Maseroski swung. The crack of a bat was different. Everyone in the stadium knew immediately. Yogi Barra in left field turned and ran. He watched the ball sail over his head, over the wall, over the ivy. 406 ft from home plate.
The Pittsburgh Pirates had won the World Series on Maserosk’s walk-off home run. The first time in history a World Series ended that way. The fans poured onto the field. Mazeroski was jumping. His teammates mobbed him at home plate. The city of Pittsburgh was exploding with joy. And across the field in the visitors dugout, the New York Yankee stood in stunned silence.
The walk from the dugout to the locker room at Forbes Field wasn’t long, maybe 50 feet, but for the Yankees, it felt like miles. Outside, the celebration was deafening. Inside the tunnel, there was only silence. Mickey Mantel walked with his head down. His legs achd. They always achd. The torn cartilage in his right knee from the 1951 World Series had never properly healed.
Every step was pain. But he never complained. He just had the best World Series performance of his career. Three home runs, 11 RBIs, a 400 batting average, nine walks, eight runs scored. And it meant nothing. When the team reached the locker room, manager Casey Stangle told the clubhouse attendants to lock the door.
“Give us 20 minutes,” he said quietly. “No photographers, no reporters, no questions. Not yet.” Inside, the room was dead quiet. Players sat at their lockers, still in uniform, staring at nothing. Yogi Barra stood near the door, arms crossed, his face blank. Roger Maris sat with his head in his hands and Mickey Mantel, the great Mickey Mantel, the switchhitting center fielder who could do everything on a baseball field, sat on a wooden stool and began to cry.
Not quiet tears, real crying. His shoulders shook, his face was in his hands. He couldn’t stop. It was the first time any of his teammates had seen him like this. Mickey played through injuries that would hospitalize most men. He’d played the entire series on knees wrapped in bandages. He never showed weakness.
But this wasn’t about pain. This was something else. We were the better team, Mickey said, his voice breaking. We were the better team. He said it again and again, like he was trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense. Casey Stangle stood near him but didn’t say anything. What could he say? The Yankees had outscored the Pirates 55-27.
They’d hit better, pitched better, fielded better, and they’d lost. Whitey Ford, Mickey’s best friend, sat down next to him, put a hand on his shoulder. Mech. Mickey looked up. His face was wet with tears. How do we lose? How do we lose when we were that much better? Whitey didn’t have an answer.
20 minutes passed. The crying stopped. Mickey wiped his face with a towel. He stood up slowly, wincing as his knee took his weight. He started taking off his uniform. By the time the door opened and the reporters were allowed in, Mickey’s face was dry. His uniform was folded on his stool. He gave the standard answers.
They played well. We came up short. That’s baseball. But the teammates who were in that room never forgot what they saw. The day greatness wasn’t enough. The day doing everything right still meant losing. The day Mickey Mantel cried. Years later, Bobby Richardson, the Yankees second baseman, talked about that day.
He remembered Mickey sitting on that stool, tears streaming there in his face, saying, “We were the better team.” over and over. Richardson said it was the saddest thing he’d ever seen in baseball. Because Mickey was right. The Yankees were the better team. By every measure that should matter, they should have won.
But baseball doesn’t work that way. Life doesn’t work that way. You can do everything right and still lose. You can be the best and still fail. You can give everything you have and watch it slip through your fingers in the bottom of the ninth. That’s the crulest lesson of October 13th, 1960. Mickey Mantel would play eight more years. He’d win two more championships.
He’d hit 536 home runs in his career. He’d become a legend. But he said later that the 1960 World Series was the only loss in his entire life, amateur or professional, that made him cry because it taught him something he didn’t want to learn. That greatness isn’t always enough.
That sometimes the better team doesn’t win. That life isn’t fair. Forbes Field is gone now. They tore it down in 1971. But if you go to the University of Pittsburgh campus, you can find home plate preserved under glass. And there’s a plaque that marks where Bill Mazeroski’s home run left the stadium. Every October 13th, people still gather there.
Pirates fans mostly celebrating the greatest moment in their team’s history. But somewhere in that crowd, there’s usually a Yankees fan standing quietly thinking about Mickey Mantel, thinking about the day greatness broke. If this story moved you, hit that like button and subscribe because there are more untold stories like this one. Stories about the moments that made legends human.
And if you want to hear them, we’ll keep telling them. The greatest stories aren’t always about winning. Sometimes they’re about what happens when you lose despite doing everything right.
