Mickey Mantle - Honors

Honors

On Mickey Mantle Day, June 8, 1969, in addition to the retirement of his uniform Number 7, Mantle was given a plaque that would hang on the center field wall at Yankee Stadium, near the monuments to Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Miller Huggins. The plaque was given to him by Joe DiMaggio, and Mantle then gave DiMaggio a similar plaque, telling the crowd, "Joe DiMaggio's deserves to be higher." DiMaggio's plaque was hung one inch higher than Mantle's. When Yankee Stadium was reopened in 1976 following its renovation, the plaques and monuments were moved to Monument Park, behind the left-center field fence.

Shortly before his death, Mantle videotaped a message to be played on Old-Timers' Day, which he was too ill to attend. He said, "When I die, I wanted on my tombstone, 'A great teammate.' But I didn't think it would be this soon." The words were indeed carved on the plaque marking his resting place at the family mausoleum in Dallas. On August 25, 1996, about a year after his death, Mantle's Monument Park plaque was replaced with a monument, bearing the words "A great teammate" and keeping a phrase that had been included on the original plaque: "A magnificent Yankee who left a legacy of unequaled courage." Mantle's original plaque, along with DiMaggio's, are now on display at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center, with the DiMaggio plaque still hung a few inches higher than Mantle's.

Mantle and former teammate Whitey Ford were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame together in 1974, Mantle's first year of eligibility, Ford's second.

Beginning in 1997, the Topps Baseball Card company retired the card #7 in its base sets in tribute to Mantle, whose career was taking off just as Topps began producing baseball cards. Mantle's cards, especially his 1952 Topps card, are extremely popular and valuable among card collectors. Though Topps un-retired the #7 in 2006, the number is reserved for cards of Mantle, remade with each year's design.

In 1998, "The Sporting News" placed Mantle at 17th on its list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players". That same year, he was one of 100 nominees for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team, and was chosen by fan balloting as one of the team's outfielders. ESPN's SportsCentury series that ran in 1999 ranked him No. 37 on its "50 Greatest Athletes" series.

In 2006, Mantle was featured on a United States postage stamp. The stamp is one of a series of four honoring baseball sluggers, the others being Mel Ott, Roy Campanella, and Hank Greenberg.

Newcastle Field at Bricktown, the home stadium of the Triple-A Oklahoma City RedHawks, is located at 2 South Mickey Mantle Drive in Oklahoma City. A statue of Mantle is located at the Mickey Mantle Plaza at the stadium.