Mickey Mantle

On 17 April 1951 the Boston Red Sox came to Yankee Stadium and made six hits without scoring a run. The Yankees made seven and won 5–0, all five runs arriving in two innings. The game took two hours and twelve minutes. Mickey Mantle, nineteen years old and appearing in his first major-league game, was in the lineup.

That first season he played ninety-six games, batted .267, and hit thirteen home runs. The following year he played a hundred and forty-two games and hit twenty-three. In 1953 he hit twenty-one. The climb was not steep, and the early totals give no hint of what the middle years would look like.

In 1955 he hit thirty-seven home runs and posted an on-base-plus-slugging figure — OPS, a combined measure of getting on base and hitting for power — of 1.042. In 1956 he hit fifty-two and posted 1.169. In 1957 he hit thirty-four, batted .365, and posted 1.177. The home-run total fell but the average rose and the OPS stayed nearly level. From 1955 through 1961 his OPS was above 1.000 in each season and above 1.100 in four of them. The fifty-two home runs in 1956 are the highest single-season figure in the table, but they sit inside a span of years rather than standing alone.

In 1962 he played a hundred and twenty-three games. In 1963 he played sixty-five — the fewest of his career — and recorded a hundred and seventy-two at-bats. He returned to longer schedules: a hundred and forty-three games in 1964, a hundred and forty-four in both 1967 and 1968. But the at-bats in those final two full seasons were 440 and 435, well below the 514 to 549 he posted in the early 1950s and the 500-plus figures of the late fifties. He was playing, but not as often within each game.

The final line is 1968: a hundred and forty-four games, 435 at-bats, eighteen home runs, a .237 average, an OPS of .783. It is the lowest average and the lowest OPS in the table. The career lasted eighteen seasons, all with the Yankees, and the shape it makes is a long rise to a high middle and a longer descent.