Tom Greenwade Signs Mickey Mantle (1949)

Baxter Springs, Kansas, summer of 1948. A dusty semipro field just over the state line from Oklahoma, a Sunday afternoon crowd that came for the Whiz Kids, and a Yankees scout named Tom Greenwade who'd actually driven out to look at somebody else. He left thinking about a scrawny 16-year-old shortstop instead. Eleven months later, at the Mantle family's home in Commerce, Oklahoma, Greenwade came back and made it official. The bonus check that resulted is now worth more than a quarter of a million dollars at auction. The player was worth a whole lot more than that.

The Kid Nobody Sent Him to See

Greenwade wasn't scouting Mickey Mantle that day. He'd come to Baxter Springs on a tip about Billy Johnson, the Whiz Kids' third baseman. It was Barney Barnett, the team's manager, who'd been trying for months to get a Yankees scout to look at his shortstop -- the miner's kid from nearby Commerce who kept hitting balls into the river past the outfield fence.

Mantle got Greenwade's attention the hard way: he hit two home runs that day, one from each side of the plate, both of them landing in the Spring River well beyond the fence. Greenwade turned to Mickey's father, Mutt, sitting nearby, and asked the obvious question.

He do that all the time?

Mutt's answer was even better than the question. He'd been the one drilling Mickey to bat lefty against right-handers and righty against lefties since the kid was old enough to hold a bat with two hands -- and it took Greenwade the better part of a year to fully appreciate what he'd just watched (the switch-hitting barely registered with him at first; the power was what stuck). Whether Barnett's tip or Mutt's home-plate experiment deserves more credit is a fair argument. Neither one gets left out of the story.

There was just one problem. Mantle was sixteen and still in high school, and signing him then would have violated the rules Organized Baseball had in place for amateurs. Greenwade told him to finish school. He'd be back.

Commerce, Graduation Night

He was true to his word. Mantle's graduation from Commerce High School, originally set for late May 1949, got pushed to that Thursday night for reasons lost to history, and Greenwade showed up in Commerce the next evening -- May 29, 1949 -- ready to close the deal he'd been sitting on for a year.

The two sides didn't need much time. Greenwade offered a contract to play out the rest of the season with the Yankees' Class D affiliate for $140 a week, plus a bonus that's been the subject of an argument ever since.

Mantle signed. Greenwade drove off with an autograph that would eventually be worth more than his entire scouting budget for the decade, and the kid from Commerce became property of the New York Yankees -- assigned to the Class D Independence Yankees of the Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri League, about 60 miles from home.

Down in the K-O-M League

The 1949 Yankees were busy winning a pennant under a rookie manager named Stengel while all this was happening two states away, with nobody in the Bronx paying the slightest attention to a Class D shortstop hitting balls into a Kansas river. Independence didn't ease that shortstop in gently. Mantle played shortstop -- a position the organization would eventually decide wasn't for him, same as it later decided with Bobby Murcer, the other Oklahoma kid Greenwade would sign off the same scouting territory fifteen years later. In 89 games that summer, Mantle hit .313. He also made 47 errors, the kind of defensive line that would get most 17-year-olds released outright.

It got rough enough that Mantle called home and told his father he wanted to quit. Mutt drove down to Independence, and instead of talking his son through it gently, he reportedly started packing Mickey's bags for him -- fine, quit, come dig in the mines with the rest of us. Mantle didn't quit. It's a scene that would repeat itself two years later in a much bigger way, when a 19-year-old Mantle called his father from the majors ready to walk away again, and got the same answer.

The bat was never the question. In 1950, promoted to the Class C Joplin Miners, Mantle won the Western Association batting title outright at .383 with 26 home runs and 136 RBI. The glove remained a genuine problem -- 55 more errors that year, 102 combined over his two minor league seasons at shortstop -- and it's the reason the Yankees eventually moved him to the outfield rather than trying to force a Hall of Fame bat to play out of position in the infield.

By spring 1951, Casey Stengel had seen enough in camp to skip Triple-A entirely. Mantle made the Opening Day roster, and the rest is a whole separate set of stories -- some of them a lot less charming than a scout falling for a kid who hit it out both ways.

Greenwade kept working that same stretch of Oklahoma and Missouri for another decade and a half, and Mantle wasn't the only future Yankee he pulled out of it. Elston Howard and Bill Virdon both signed with him too, and the scouting and farm operation that turned all of them into big leaguers was built under general manager George Weiss, who ran player development for the Yankees through the entire stretch. Weiss never swung a bat for the franchise. He just made sure guys like Greenwade had a job, a car, and a territory to drive around in.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Tom Greenwade sign Mickey Mantle?

Greenwade signed Mantle on May 29, 1949, the night after Mantle's graduation ceremony at Commerce High School in Commerce, Oklahoma. Greenwade had first seen Mantle play the year before, in the summer of 1948, but couldn't sign him until he finished high school.

How much was Mickey Mantle's signing bonus?

Most accounts cite a $1,500 signing bonus plus $140 a week for the rest of the 1949 season. But the actual bonus check that surfaced decades later -- issued by Independence State Bank and dated July 11, 1949 -- was written for $1,150. That check sold at auction in 2013 for $286,800, a record price for a Mantle document.

Where did the Yankees first send Mickey Mantle after signing him?

Mantle was assigned to the Class D Independence Yankees in Independence, Kansas, a member of the Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri (K-O-M) League. He played shortstop there in 1949, hitting .313 in 89 games while making 47 errors, before moving up to the Class C Joplin Miners in 1950.

What was the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids?

The Baxter Springs Whiz Kids were a semipro baseball team in Baxter Springs, Kansas, just across the state line from Mantle's hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma. Mantle played shortstop for the Whiz Kids as a teenager, and it was there in 1948 that Yankees scout Tom Greenwade first saw him hit home runs from both sides of the plate.