A Rational Rebel In Pinstripes

"It's exciting just watching him play ball," Kubek says. "There are things about him I'll never forget. Like the time he came into the clubhouse crying after we lost the Series to Pittsburgh. The first thing he did was ask how I was. [The Yankees lost that one when Kubek got hit in the neck by a ground ball.] I remember sitting next to him on the bench in Cincinnati in '61 and seeing the blood ooze through his uniform. [Mantle was trying to play despite the recent removal of a deep abscess on his hip.] I'll always remember how he gets up on the top step of the dugout and yells to you when you're having trouble at the plate. A lot of guys yell, but his is the voice you hear. I don't think anybody who hasn't played with Mantle can know the kind of guy he is."

Still, Kubek has an intuitive grasp of what is important in life and his struggle to rise above his milieu has been remarkably successful. Not even Mantle, for example, is inspiration enough to keep him in the game indefinitely. In five seasons, Kubek says, when his firstborn has reached school age, he hopes to retire to the 27-year-old home he has bought in Wausau, a community of 34,000 about 200 miles north of Milwaukee. "I'm not going to leave my wife home while I play baseball," he says, "and once the boy starts school she won't be able to come with me."

What will he do?

"I don't know," he says. "I'll find something. Don't misunderstand me. I appreciate having the ability to be a baseball player. A lot of people would like to be in my position. I've seen kids break down and cry when they got their release. I love the game. But I'd like to do a lot more than I do. I regret not having a college education. Maybe because I don't have it, I understand how hard it was for people to get. There are devoted people, teachers, men in the government, scientists. The job they do isn't glamorous; they don't have 50,000 people cheering them. But what they do is valuable. They don't get the money and they're much more deserving of it than I am. They make a contribution to society. I play baseball."