David Levy ✡️❤️

"A tearful Yogi Berra yesterday honored the last wish of his long-time friend and teammate, Mickey Mantle. Yogi signed a, "Join Mickey’s Team" organ donor card at the Manhattan kickoff of a year-long organ donor awareness campaign in the metropolitan area. "I lost a great friend," Yogi said, his voice choking and his eyes filled with tears. "I really can’t say anything else right now." "The Mickey Mantle Donor Awareness Foundation" was launched by the family of the Yankee slugger, who received a liver transplant before dying of cancer Aug. 13. His final request was for a continuing organ donor program. Mickey Mantle’s restaurant partner, Bill Liederman, said 3 million Mantle donor cards have been distributed since Labor Day. Yesterday, Mantle’s widow, Merlyn, and sons, Mickey Jr. and Danny, watched as Berra, sportscaster Bob Costas and ex-Knicks star Earl "The Pearl" Monroe signed donor cards at Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant and Sports Bar on Central Park South." "The Daily News", December 1995. Mickey Mantle batting, and Yogi Berra on deck during a 1956 Yankees-Senators game at Griffith Stadium.

"Ted Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us; Stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause. No calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; With the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush. Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; The right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; The season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future. Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; The ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished. Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs: Hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted, "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters." "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." John Updike. October 22, 1960. No Batting Gloves,no Elbow Guards, just a little spit and dirt and Ted Williams was ready to hit!