MICKEY & BILLY

Stars of ballpark and barroom.

During their team’s heyday, Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin were enthusiastic postgame partiers. Their revelries became tabloid fodder after the 1957 nightclub brawl that led to Martin’s “exile” from the Yankees. This uneven dual biography is equally interested in the players’ between-the-lines triumphs and “self-destructive” impulses. Martin was a heady, hard-nosed infielder, his combativeness forged during a hard-knock youth in Berkeley, California, which Castro narrates in rich detail. The author goes even deeper on Mantle, invoking Freud and Shakespeare. As Castro recounted in a previous book, Mantle: The Best There Ever Was (2019), young Mantle was sexually abused by a relative. Meanwhile, at his father’s behest, he worked tirelessly on his baseball skills. Castro contends that Mantle’s “nightlife carousing” and “sexual escapades” constituted “an unspoken rebellion against” his father. Further, Mantle’s “overwhelming fear” of failure, which surfaced during batting slumps, suggests “a hint of possible panic disorder.” This is more armchair psychoanalysis than his research can support. The author, who was a reporter in 1970s Texas when he “met and befriended” Mantle, bases parts of his 1950s-set narrative on the recollections of the ballplayer’s “longtime girlfriend,” whom Castro met and interviewed “half a century” after the events described in the book. Thus do some quotes and scenes feel overly tidy. Castro also pens a “dream sequence” that takes us into “Mickey’s mind” and catalogs his memories. “Traditional attribution felt restrictive,” Castro writes, “so I turned to a literary approach.” His methods figure to frustrate readers trying to differentiate fact from fiction. He’s much stronger on the Oklahoma-born ballplayer’s fish-out-of-water introduction to Gotham and the Paul Bunyan-esque quality of Mantle’s long home runs. And he has an interesting take on Martin’s Hall of Fame worthiness. But aside from Yankee completists, this book’s appeal seems limited.

A colorful, not always judicious biography of nightlife-loving, World Series-winning teammates.