Willie, Mickey and Nathan Detroit

By Tom Callahan

Pardoning Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays for their ongoing gambling connections, Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth was as munificent last week as a tax man forgiving the debts of Joe Louis. "The world changes," Ueberroth explained, leaving admirers of Buck Weaver and Shoeless Joe Jackson to wonder if those Chicago miscreants of 1919 had merely been born too soon. (Say it ain't so, Joe Pepitone.) "I don't think," Ueberroth continued, "that we can start dictating who you can play golf with." So baseball is open again to shills.

For Bally's Park Place and Del Webb's Claridge Casino Hotel--Atlantic City establishments striving to be known for their good works--Mays and Mantle serve as paid companions to significant gamblers, whom the gaming industry prefers to call good customers. "I'm not denying that he plays golf with customers," Bally's Alan Rosenzweig says of Mays, "but he spends more time with charities and schools." Either radiating altruism or blushing from embarrassment, retired athletes as distinguished as Brooks Robinson, Johnny Unitas, Walt Frazier and Phil Esposito have danced around in crap-game commercials, like so many Sky Mastersons in a velveteen sewer, warbling "Bal- ly's, Bal-ly's . . ."

This is depressing only to those who saw them play and troubling merely to everyone who has difficulty believing that a few horse races and several 1979 Boston College basketball games were the sole sports events worth fixing over the past 20 years. "Ballplayers gamble," says Sharyn McLain, who should know about ballplayers, being the daughter of Hall-of-Famer Lou Boudreau and the wife of Denny McLain. "You go to the dog track, you see ballplayers. They play cards. What else do you do with all that free time?"

With his free time, her pitching husband, the only 30-game winner since Dizzy Dean in 1934, made a little book. During the 1970 season in Detroit, when McLain was the two-time Cy Young Award winner, he brought much hilarity to the sporting scene by confessing to having bankrolled a betting shop that lost money. Gambling data was just starting to appear in the sports pages and on pregame television shows. But betting had long since been classified as high jinks by Damon Runyon, and this was the rollicking spirit in which McLain was viewed, even when he was suspended for carrying a pistol six months later, two years before his big-league life wore out at 28. He is in a Florida jail now, awaiting sentencing for racketeering, extortion and cocaine possession, 41 years old and facing possibly 75 years in prison. The two Cy Young Awards have been sold. In recent years he tried to make his living gambling on golf courses. "I learned what Lee Trevino meant when he said, 'Pressure is playing for $50 a hole when you have $5 in your pocket.' " Consider a similar desperation in active players: If gambling problems can lead to drugs, what about the reverse?

McLain's 31st victory of 1968 was the definitive moment of his baseball career, and the precise instant that defined him occurred when Mickey Mantle came to the plate late in that game for the final time in Detroit. Feverishly, Mantle had been needing a 535th home run to outwrest Jimmy Foxx for the third rung on the ladder of saints. In a perverse parody of Babe Ruth calling his shot, Mantle motioned with the barrel of his bat for a pitch belt-high. Then, while Mickey trotted around the bases for the second-tolast time, McLain nodded benevolently. Too simple to feel demeaned and dishonest, Mantle later exulted in the prank and acknowledged that Denny had served him a gopher ball "out of the goodness of his heart."

As Mantle has observed, "I wasn't known for my brains," and his analogy for last week's redemption may be marked as an exhibit and placed in evidence: "You don't want to get thrown out of your favorite bar," he said. The image of baseball as his favorite bar broadens the subject of sport's shadows and recalls one of the earliest of those charming Lite beer commercials, a saloon sketch featuring Mantle and his Yankee running mate, Pitcher Whitey Ford. Ford: "When Mickey and I played together, we were known to have a beer or two on special occasions." Mantle: "Yeah, like after every game." The genius of this advertising campaign is that no matter how many athletes check themselves into detoxification centers, Billy Martin and Bob Uecker never stop laughing.

From the Brooklyn Dodgers' Don Newcombe to the Cleveland Indians' Sam McDowell to the Los Angeles Dodgers' Bob Welch, baseball has never lost the hop on its highball. "I was the biggest, most hopeless and most violent drunk in baseball," said McDowell last week. "That is a fair statement, I think, until some other lush comes out of the closet with his own story to tell." In this business, confessions seem to be handed down with the regularity of indictments, and has anyone ever identified himself to an arresting officer more pathetically than to whisper, "I'm Joe Pepitone, formerly of the Yankees"? The flamboyant first baseman of the '60s was released on $15,000 bail last week after he and two other men ran a stoplight in a car alleged to contain cocaine, heroin and a firearm. According to baseball's guardian of integrity, the world changes, but handcuffed men still hide their faces, and casino glad-handing remains a brutal bitter waste of life.