Mantle’s Condition Worsens : Baseball: Hall of Famer’s cancer has spread. Doctors say his condition has gone from stable to serious.

Former New York Yankee great Mickey Mantle is fighting for his life at the Baylor University Medical Center.

Doctors said Wednesday that Mantle’s cancer has spread beyond his liver and right lung and that his condition has been downgraded from stable to serious.

At Mantle’s request, however, doctors would not talk about his case.

“Mr. Mantle is spending time with his family and wants his friends to know he continues to fight,” the hospital said in a statement.

Dr. Isaac Djerassi, a research oncologist at Mercy Catholic Medical Center who flew to Dallas from Philadelphia late last week to examine the Hall of Fame center fielder, said he would not discuss specifics, “but this particular cancer can go anywhere . . . usually the lungs, the abdomen and sometimes the bones. It just makes it clear that he’s in big trouble. It’s not important where it is.”

Mantle’s gastroenterologist, Daniel DeMarco, had said last week that doctors were afraid the disease would spread.

Mantle had been receiving chemotherapy since undergoing what doctors said at the time was a life-saving transplant on June 8 to replace his liver, eroded by cancer, hepatitis C and cirrhosis. The doctors have since said they would not have given Mantle the donor liver, found within 48 hours after the search began, if they had known the cancer had spread.

Mantle, 63, re-entered the hospital in Dallas on July 28 because of complications from the chemotherapy used to fight several spots of cancer that had spread to his right lung from the diseased liver.

He had received several blood transfusions because of anemia, a common side effect of chemotherapy, and had told his doctors, who had hoped to release him Monday, that he wanted to remain in the hospital until he felt better.

Mantle, who lives in Dallas, replaced Joe DiMaggio as the Yankees’ center fielder in 1951, was the American League’s most valuable player three times and retired in 1968 with 536 home runs, not counting a record 18 in the World Series.

Despite his Hall of Fame accomplishments, Mantle has said he did not fulfill his potential or the great expectations accompanying his debut because of five knee operations and many years of heavy drinking, contributing to the deterioration of his liver.