The Mick!

Pretty nice summary article on my favorite baseball player of all time, Mickey fucking Mantle, including DiMaggio being a dick to him which prompted Mickey into deciding to be the opposite to his teammates (his Hall of Fame plaque refers to him as "a great teammate"):

The cold shoulder from fellow outfielder DiMaggio also made the rookie’s life unnecessarily tough. In their first game against the Red Sox, photographers ushered DiMaggio and Mantle together with Ted Williams for a picture. DiMaggio greeted Williams but consciously neglected to introduce Mickey. After an awkward and wholly unnecessary silence, Williams took it upon himself to put out his hand and make the new kid’s acquaintance.  

And when his father called him on his self-pity bullshit:

Each night he sat in his hotel room and poured over the Yankee box scores. The longer he stayed in the minors, the less sportswriters mentioned him in the papers. He was fading away, and in Mantle’s teenage mind he was sure he’d blown his chance with New York. At some point during a Blues homestand, depressed and suffering from what must have been severe anxiety over his future, Mickey called his father and told him he wanted to quit. The way Mickey himself often told the story is that after his call home, his father Mutt jumped in his truck and drove half a day to Kansas City. If Mickey was expecting a pat on the back and encouraging words, he was in for a rude surprise. In his son’s hotel room after the day’s game was rained out, Mutt listened stoically as his boy explained how he was a failure and wanted to quit and go home to Oklahoma. Mutt Mantle stood up and started packing his son’s clothes, telling him that he thought he’d raised a man. “I see I raised a coward.” Dumping contents of the dresser drawers into a suitcase, Mutt told his son he could come home and work in the mines with him. The shock treatment did the trick. Mickey realized that if he quit now, that would be the real failure. He begged his father to stop packing and resolved himself to stick it out. 

Thank god he did! :)