"As the World Series approaches, fans might take a moment to appreciate an era that has given us baseball players, like the Yankees' slugger Aaron Judge and the Dodgers' pitcher-hitter Shohei Ohtani, who will go down in history with Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle. Some things have changed between the eras. Aaron earned about two million dollars in his career; Ohtani's current contract is worth seven hundred million."
"Yet, earlier this year, Ohtani was sued in a business deal gone wrong involving a luxury-housing project in Hawaii. (He moved to dismiss the lawsuit.) Why dabble in business? Ohtani was simply following baseball tradition, in which even the big stars always have side hustles. Just look at Mantle and his crew. In the early nineteen-nineties, a baseball-card dealer named Alan Rosen arranged for a few dozen members of the 1961 Yankees to appear at Trump Castle, the casino in Atlantic City."
"A few years later, a Mickey Mantle biographer described a call that Rosen had made to Mantle during the gathering. Mantle didn't seem to want to sign autographs that day, telling the card dealer, " 'Fuck your mother, fuck your show, and fuck Donald Trump!'" "Mickey had a mouth," Greer Johnson, Mantle's last girlfriend, said recently, at her house in a gated community near Atlanta, where she lives with her husband, Lem, a retired I.B.M. salesman."
Contemporary stars such as Shohei Ohtani earn massive contracts but continue to pursue business ventures and paid appearances, sometimes leading to legal disputes. Ohtani faced a lawsuit over a luxury-housing project in Hawaii, which he moved to dismiss. The practice of side hustles stretches back decades; in the early 1990s a dealer arranged for members of the 1961 Yankees to appear at Trump Castle. Mickey Mantle resisted some autograph requests and famously cursed at Donald Trump during one encounter. Greer Johnson, Mantle's later girlfriend and agent, handled his and teammates' business deals and helped him manage money and appearances.
Read at The New Yorker
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