In the bottom of the sixth inning of his 1,352nd major league game—the second game of a Sunday doubleheader against the Washington Senators—Mantle bounced a ball down the third base line. The score was 1–1. Hector Lopez was on first base. The Stadium was half full. They witnessed the unthinkable: the fastest man in the major leagues, who ran harder than anyone else no matter how much it hurt to do so, did not run. He jogged down the line. And he didn’t arrive in time. The Senators turned a potential rally into an easy, inning-ending double play. Upstairs in the press box, reporters sighed. Mantle’s hurt again. But he wasn’t. Casey Stengel yanked him from the lineup and dressed him down with an unprecedented dugout rebuke. “Quitter!” shouted a man in the stands. Mantle kicked the water cooler en route to the clubhouse. The indignity of losing a doubleheader to the woeful Nats was compounded by the fact that the second loss dropped the Yankees into third place, where they had finished the year before.
