They said you could read Mickey Mantle's life in his face. There are the photos of the young baseball wunderkind which show his boyish grin (they said he was a person who smiled a lot). His was a fresh, unlined face, clean and bright, recently come from Oklahoma; the face of a boy from the Sooner State, awed by Gotham's skyscrapers and pace unheard of in Commerce. Those who knew his prowess said that this was the face they would one day chisel on baseball's Mt. Rushmore, right next to Ruth, Gerhig, and the great DiMaggio.

He and his baseball-loving father practiced in their Oklahoma yard for hours; they quit only when it was too dark to see. People noticed back then how far he could hit a baseball, how strong he was, and how fast he could run. Someone later said that if you were to build a baseball player, you'd build Mickey Mantle.

But there was something about his father, something that haunted his baseball-built son all his life. No matter what Mickey did, no matter how far or how many he hit; no matter how fast he ran, his father would say, "You could've done better."

No matter how far, Mickey heard: "You could've hit it farther." No matter how fast he ran: "You could've run faster." No matter how many he hit: "You could've hit more." "You could've" became the words that he would take to his grave. Almost.

At the end of his life, Mickey Mantle sits at a table for a press conference and again you can read his life in his face. This time it's a different face, a face straight from the pages of "The Portrait of Dorian Grey." His face is a traffic jam of intersecting lines etched deep and far beyond his years.

Behind him are years of bitterness and anger. He left baseball broke, financially and physically. His face was still showing his life. As he sits at the table, he publicly begs people not to "end up like me." His years of New York's good life had dragged him face-down on an Oklahoma gravel road, each tiny piece of rock carving away with the mileage. You could see it.

You could see the lines birthed by the times when he said he was drunk many a day when he left the Yankee clubhouse. You could see the creases born of the wildness lived in New York City's night life. You could see the facial furrows of a man who admitted that the only way he knew to get close to his sons was to get drunk with them.

His wife saw the craggy face of the legend she loved and said, "Along the way, things got out of control." By the 1980's Mickey Mantle's life was a mess and his face showed it.

The fresh-faced boy from Oklahoma had now become a mean man. He was mean to a public he never understood. Grown men would come up to him and cry when they met Mickey Mantle, they were so in awe. But Mantle resented them, each and every one. A young adult came up to Mickey and said, "I just want you to know that I'm probably the first person ever named after you." Mantle's reply? "Get lost." Not only was he rude, he was broken and bitter.

He thought often of dying. His father and his father's father and other men in the family all died before reaching 45. "The family curse," they called it. Mantle often joked as he reached middle age, "If I'd have known I was going to live this long, I would've taken better care of myself." And thereby hangs a tale.

Whether Mantle knew it or not as he put on the affable façade, his statement was a Biblical one, right out of the book of James. In James 1:21, James puts quill to papyrus and writes, "Therefore, get rid of all moral filth, and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the Word planted in you, which can save you." (NIV)

The only problem is that James didn't write, "that can save you." He wrote, "that can save your life.*" The Bible can lead to the preservation of a person's life? Certainly. James has just pointed out the death-dealing consequences of sin in 1:14-15. James is saying that although sin, "when it is full-grown," can lead to physical death, the Word of God, properly received, can preserve life. This is a major theme of the book of Proverbs (10:27 and 11:19). James is consistent with the rest of biblical teaching.

James isn't using the Bible in some mystical sense. He's not referring to the Bible as some magic charm. Some sins do have death-dealing consequences, even though we don't talk about it. Drunkenness is a death-dealer. (A drunken Mickey Mantle almost killed his wife one night in New York. Yankee catcher Yogi Berra had warned her not to get in the car with him.) Promiscuity is a dread disease-bringer and a death-dealer. (We don't talk about that; instead, we glamorize it.) The list could go on.

The sixty-three -year old Mantle sits at that table before the assembled press in Dallas, Texas. He's going public with his guilt, his face showing wear and tear beyond its years and says, "I'm a role model. Look at me. Don't be like me. It was wasted years. I blew it. Don't live like I did." A modern-real-life Greek tragedy lived out before the eyes of an adoring, but saddened public. End of story? No.

There is the "rest of the story." Inside the Yankee clubhouse all those playing years was a believer in Jesus, a believer like we all are, strategically placed by God in space and time. During those years, Mantle made fun of him. Called him "Milk Drinker." "Come over here and play some cards, Milk Drinker," Mantle would taunt. The thing about Milk Drinker was that he wasn't silent about his faith alone in Christ alone.

Forty years later, when Mantle learns he was desperately ill because of his alcoholism, he calls Milk Drinker from his hospital room. He asks Milk Drinker to pray for him. Later, as the end is drawing near, Mantle calls him again, this time he asks him if he'd come to the hospital. When the former Yankee second baseman entered the room, Mantle told him, "Bobby, I just wanted you to know that I've accepted Jesus as my Savior."

Mickey Mantle who, in the eyes of his earthly father, could never do enough, had come to understand and simply believe that Jesus did it all for him and that was enough. Like the thief on the Cross, the dying Mantle in the hospital room, unable to do a single good work, unable to live out and up his father's "do betters," believes in Jesus, and goes into the presence of the Lord, Christ's righteousness credited to his account.

I don't know, but we might imagine Mickey Mantle's face at that moment with the Milk Drinker; a face, now, at long, long last, at peace.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

*Although the King James Version says, "that can save your soul," the Greek phrase always means "save one's life" in a physical, not spiritual sense. His readers are already believers (James 1:2; 1:18); they are in no need of being saved from hell. In the Old Testament Greek (the Septuagint), in the entire Greek New Testament, this phrase never refers to deliverance from hell, but always refers to physical life. This is the same phrase James uses in 5:20, where it's obvious that James uses the word to refer to physical life (q. v.).