Of Mays’s ball, Mantle said: “I was running as hard as I could to get over to it because Casey had told me before the game about how Joe had slowed up a little bit, he thought. Well, anyway, when I get there, Joe is already standing under the ball. He said, ‘I got it.’ And you don’t want to run into Joe DiMaggio. So when I tried to stop — I was going as fast as I could — my back cleat in my spike stuck in a rubber drain, and when it did, my knee went right out through the front of my leg and I just folded up on the field.”

In some retellings, the drain is a sprinkler. Either way, Mantle was taken off on a stretcher, replaced by Hank Bauer. The accident led to a parade of knee operations and musings of what a Mantle with good knees — he had a history of osteomyelitis in his left one — would have been like. In an article on the Yankees’ victory in the next day’s New York Times, the injury was not described until the 10th paragraph, befitting the loss of a light-hitting rookie. It said that Mantle “in some unaccountable manner tripped as he came near DiMaggio and fell flat,” and that the diagnosis was a sprained knee.

Mantle’s injury endured in Yankees lore because of the what-ifs that the accident and his alcohol abuse attached to numbers that might have been better: 536 career home runs, 3 American League Most Valuable Player awards, the triple crown in 1956 with a .353 average, 52 home runs and 130 runs batted in.

In “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood,” published in 2010, the biographer Jane Leavy took a fresh look at his injuries through the lens of modern medicine and posited that the damage was serious, that he tore his meniscus, anterior cruciate ligament and medial collateral ligament, injuries that were never truly diagnosed — or repaired.