Was Mickey Mantle Really Better Than Joe DiMaggio?
From the first moment I put on a baseball glove my father was telling me the legend of a player by the name of Mickey Mantle. He roamed the great prairie that was center field at the old Yankee Stadium. I don’t mean the Yankee stadium that now sits in crumbles in the Bronx next to the billion-dollar new stadium. I mean the old-old Yankee Stadium, prior to the renovations in the 1970’s. That Yankee Stadium had a center field that went on forever, or at least until you hit the monuments that were actually in play in front of the wall. No one who patrolled that territory was better than The Mick — at least according to my father. It wasn’t until I was a teenager and I became more interested in the history of baseball that I learned how great a player Joe DiMaggio was during the late-1930’s and early-1940’s. Sure, I had heard about the hitting streak as a kid, but I assumed it was more of a fluke, like Johnny Vandermeer’s back-to-back no-hitters or Mark Whiten’s 4-homer game. As it turned
