Of all the baseball players I’ve known and written about over the years, Major League or otherwise, and there have been a few, I don’t recall any as being as good natured, modest and low key as Felix Mantilla. Anyone connected to baseball will tell you much the same about him.

You perhaps may recall Felix as being a member of the old Milwaukee Braves back in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. He went on to play with the New York Mets in their inaugural season, followed by his greatest success with the Boston Red Sox before finishing his career with the Houston Astros.

What I like best about Felix is his outlook on life. He’s always upbeat and always sees the world as a wonderful place in which to live. I’ve never heard him utter a word in anger or knock anyone. It’s just not in his makeup.

Consider this: When Felix played ball, there was still considerable racial prejudice. But you’ll never hear him talk about the injustices he and others suffered in the old days. He’ll tell you instead of how proud he is that his roommates when he was with the Braves were the great Hank Aaron and later the young pitcher Juan Pizarro. He doesn’t mention that the unspoken rule in the Major Leagues back then was that whites and other minorities were not assigned rooms together. Whites roomed with whites and minorities roomed with minorities, and as someone said, never the twain shall meet. The reason Felix and Hank and Juan roomed together was all of them were minorities. If Felix had been the only minority on the Braves then, he’d have had to room alone.

Consider this too: When Felix came to the US from Puerto Rico, he didn’t speak a word of English. In Puerto Rico, the majority of people speak Spanish. The first minor league team he was assigned to was in Evansville, Indiana, and there wasn’t one player on the team or any of the coaches who spoke Spanish. Ask him about how he got along then and he’ll go into what a wonderful town Evansville was and how nice all the players and the fans were to him.

“Well Felix,” I asked, “how in the world did you manage out on the playing field if you couldn’t understand anyone and no one could understand you?”

He laughed. “No problem, we used hand signals, you know? Hand signals are the same in Spanish and in English.” He gave me one of those hand signals and laughed again. Felix laughs at all life’s little problems, and the big ones, too.

You may have read in recent years about the activities of the Milwaukee Braves Historical Association and their popular testimonial dinners honoring former Braves players. It was Felix and Johnny Logan, his long-time buddy and the old Braves shortstop, who started the organization. Over the ten years or so since it was formed, the MBHA has feted such former stars as Aaron, Warren Spahn, Eddie Mathews, Lew Burdette and more. But it has never honored its two founders, Logan and Felix. That will be corrected soon. On Friday, May 13, the MBHA will honor Felix and another old Brave, Stan Lopata, at their next testimonial dinner, which will be held at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino. It is probably sold out by now, but if you’re interested in attending you can check on availability by calling Tom Kaminski at 414-482-0045. Tickets are $75 each.

Here is something else about Felix. Although he is as easy going as there is, he will not back down from a challenge and isn’t afraid of anyone. In the recent issue of “The Tepee,” the newsletter of the Braves Historical Association, Bob Buege wrote about the time the Braves were playing Pittsburgh, and Dick Stuart, the Pirates’ first baseman who happened to be 6’4” tall and several inches bigger than Felix, had just singled with two out. Don Hoak hit a grounder toward Felix, but the ball took a crazy bounce and went into left field. Stuart came roaring around second, took a wide turn and smashed right into Felix.

Then the two got into it; fists began flying and they wrestled to the ground as both teams poured out on the field. After they were separated, the Pirates’ bullpen coach started yelling at Felix and they too began punching each other. None of that bothered Felix, and a couple of innings later, he singled ahead of slugger Eddie Mathews, who then hit a home run to win the game and give Warren Spahn his 20th win of the season. The next day, Felix and the two Pirates he’d been battling with got together and laughed off their previous day’s brawl. Felix never stays mad at anyone, and conversely, no one ever stays angry with him for long either. “It wasn’t really a problem,” he explained. “Stuart is a good guy. He just got mad because he thought I had jumped in his way. And the coach was just sticking up for one of his players. That’s baseball.” .

Felix was born on July 29, 1934 in Isabela, Puerto Rico, a little town up on the island’s northwest coast. There he lived with his parents Juan and Natividad Mantilla and his two sisters, Judy and Felicita. “My father drove a taxi,” Felix recalled, “and we never had much money. But you know, it never seemed to bother us.”

In Puerto Rico, unlike many of the other countries in the Caribbean and Central America, baseball was the favorite sport, and would you believe, boxing was second. Felix was only 15 when he took up baseball seriously, playing on local amateur teams. At 17, he began playing for pro teams in Caguas and San Juan. “One day this fellow, his name was Luis Olmo, came over and introduced himself. He told me he was a scout for the Milwaukee Braves baseball team. I found out later he had been a pretty good player himself once,” Felix said (Olmo had played for the old Brooklyn Dodgers, he hit over .300 three times and once led the league in triples with 13). “He said he liked the way I played and offered me a contract,” Felix recalled. “It was for $400, which seems paltry today, but back then, I can assure you, it was a fortune. Of course I grabbed it and signed.” I asked Felix what he did with all that money. “Are you kidding,” he said, “my mother got it.”

That was 1951, and young Felix was still in high school. He spent the next four and a half seasons in the Braves minor league organization, the first in Evansville, Indiana, the second in Jacksonville, and then two more with Toledo in the American Association before being moved out to Sacramento in the Pacific Coast League. “The PCL was a Triple A League, just like the American Association,” Felix said, “but they sort of regarded themselves as better than any of the other minor leagues. I enjoyed myself most in Jacksonville, as Aaron was also on the team and we became good friends. He was the terror of the league, leading in batting average, runs batted in, doubles and hits, the MVP of the league. You could tell even then he was going to be one of the great ones.” And he was. Aaron was brought up to the Braves in Milwaukee the next year and you know the rest of the story. It took Felix two and a half more years, however, to make it to the Big Top.

When that occurred, Felix was fortunate - or maybe unfortunate - to be added to one of the top teams of the day. In his first five years with Milwaukee, the Braves were always in first or next to it. In Felix’s rookie year, 1956, they went down to the wire with the Brooklyn Dodgers only to lose out by a single game; they won pennants in both ‘57 and ‘58, tied for first with the Dodgers, who by then had moved to Los Angeles, and lost in the playoff in ‘59; then dropped back to second in ‘60. So with just a smidgen of luck they could have had five championships in a row. In the history of Major League Baseball, only the powerful New York Yankees have ever managed to do that. What a beginning for Felix to jump into. “Sure, it was really great,” he said. “We were on top of the world. The fans treated us like heroes, as did many of the merchants who were always giving us gifts. Wally Rank gave us all new cars to use every year. It was perfect. But I still wanted to be more a part of the action.”

Everyone who’s not a starter wants to play more, it’s just natural. Over his six years with the Braves, Felix averaged only about 150 plate appearances a season. The full-time players are at the plate an average somewhere between 550 and 600. It’s understandable to ride the bench most of the time as a rookie or even for a couple of years, but with the Braves, it appeared as if things were never going to change.

The Braves then were solid in every position. Joe Adcock on first; Danny O’Connell and then Red Schoendienst on second; Johnny Logan at short; Eddie Mathews on third, in the outfield Hank Aaron, Billy Bruton and Wes Covington; and catching Del Crandall. Even in pitching, Milwaukee had the Big Three, Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette and Bobby Buhl every year.

Braves Manager Fred Haney tried to give Felix more playing time, and transformed him from a shortstop, which he had played in the minors, into an all-around utility man. An excellent athlete, Felix took to it like a duck to water, and was soon filling in at every infield and outfield position, except catcher and pitcher. But that didn’t completely ease the situation. All those regulars named in the paragraph above wanted to play every day; they never wanted to come out. So the only time Felix could come in was when one of them was hurt, got sick or was given a day off by Haney. “I never complained,” Felix said, “but I was beginning to wonder if I’d be better off somewhere else.”

He soon got that opportunity. In 1962 the National League was expanding, adding teams in New York, the Mets, and in Houston, the Astros. Drafts had to be set up to stock the new teams, and the existing teams had to designate a couple of players on their rosters who would be available. Felix was one of the players on the Braves’ availability list, and the Mets snapped him up.

Again, Felix was either fortunate or not, depending on how you looked at it. He was finally going to be given a chance to play every day, but he was also going from one of the greatest teams of all time to one that was, as it turned out, one of the worst. The Mets that year, under Manager Casey Stengel, managed to pick up a few proven players, such as Richie Ashburn, Charlie Neal and Frank Thomas, but they were all over the hill. Ashburn hit a respectable .306 and Thomas banged out 34 homers, and Felix had the second highest average on the team, .275. But the Mets were a joke, losing 120 of the 160 games they played that year, a whopping 62 games out of first. “I had to laugh,” Felix said. “Casey would bring out the lineup to the umps before the game, then would go back into the dugout and go to sleep. I guess he couldn’t bear watching.”

The Mets biggest need was pitching, and Felix was the only decent trading bait they had. So after the season was mercifully over, he was traded to the Red Sox for pitcher Tracy Stallard.

In Beantown, Felix really blossomed. Again, he played all over the field, but primarily at second base. In 1963, his first year there, he hit a rousing .315, the highest of his career and the second highest on the Red Sox that season. Then in ‘64, to the amazement of everyone, he turned into a slugger, pounding out 30 home runs. This was astounding because in that six years in Milwaukee he had hit a total of only 18 round trippers, an average of three a year. It was the most home runs by a second baseman in both the National and American Leagues that year, and second on his own team to Dick Stuart (who had also been traded to Boston - The former combatants were now teammates and buddies). Over in Milwaukee, Frank Bolling, who had taken over at second after Mantilla departed, had all of five home runs for the season.

Felix continued his surprising success at the plate in ‘65, leading the Sox with 92 runs batted in, the most he had ever produced. He made the All-Star team that year, and even got two votes for American League Most Valuable Player. With all of that going for him, it was quite a surprise when the Sox decided to trade him to the Houston Astros for Eddie Kasko. It was alleged at the time that the Boston powers that be were not satisfied with Felix’s fielding. Felix did have 13 errors in 1962, but was that all bad? Bobby Knoop, out in California and playing the same position, had 22 miscues; Glenn Becket of the Cubs had 23; Bobby Richardson of the Yankees had 15; and even in Milwaukee, Bolling had 17. Perhaps it was that Boston was setting things up for the future; Kasko eventually became Boston’s manager.

Felix’s career came to a not so happy end in Houston. Plagued by injuries, his average dropped to .219, and he played in only 77 games. Released by the Astros after the season, he signed on with the Chicago Cubs. But in spring training the next year he suffered an Achilles tendon injury, and that was it. His Major League career was over, and he was only 32.

The game most people remember in Felix’s career also involved an error. It wasn’t his, however, but someone else’s. It was on May 26, 1959, when he was still with the Braves. It was against the Pittsburgh Pirates, and it was one of the most famous games of all time, and one with one of the oddest endings. Through 12 innings, the Pirate hurler, Harvey Haddix, was superb, and had not allowed a Brave to reach first base. It was the longest stretch of perfect innings in history, but it wasn’t a perfect game yet. The score was still 0-0. Felix led off the 13th with a grounder to third, but the Pirate third baseman threw wild to first. The perfect game was over, but there still were no hits allowed by Haddix. Mathews sacrificed Felix to second, and Haddix purposely walked Aaron. The next hitter, Joe Adcock, then blasted a home run, the first hit by a Brave, to win the game. After Felix crossed home plate with the winning run, Aaron, thinking the game was over, didn’t continue on to home but instead ran into the dugout. Adcock then was ruled to have passed Aaron in the base paths, and he and Aaron were called out, and the home run changed to a double. Adcock was cheated out of a homer, but the Braves won the game, 1-0. Felix had scored the winning run in one of the greatest pitched games of all time. By the way, the Braves’ winning pitcher, Lew Burdette, had pitched the whole 13 innings and won the game. “Haddix was almost perfect,” Felix said, “but our Lewber was even better.”

Felix is in the Puerto Rican Sports Hall of Fame as well as in the Hall of Fame for his hometown, Isabela. Four years ago, he was also inducted into the Old Time Ballplayers of Wisconsin Hall.

Felix and his wife Kay have owned their home on Milwaukee’s northwest side for almost as long as they’ve been married.

Felix and Kay are very proud of his two sons (from his previous marriage), Felix Jr. and Jose. Felix Jr. is an attorney, and earned his degree from the University of Wisconsin - Madison; Jose is president of Milwaukee’s Legacy Bank and earned his degree from UW-M. Felix Jr. and his wife, Mary, have three children; Jose and his wife, Dorothy, have two children.

All things considered, it’s a good thing the kid from Puerto Rico decided he liked it here.