April 17, 1953, 70 years ago: The New York Yankees beat the Washington Senators, 7-3 at Griffith Stadium. It was 2 days after Opening Day, when the new President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, threw out the ceremonial first ball. So instead of a sellout of around 30,000 people, only 4,206 fans attended.
Eddie Lopat went 8 innings to get the win for the Yankees. Billy Martin and Gene Woodling each had 2 hits. So did Mickey Mantle, the Yankees' 21-year-old center field phenom. One of Martin's hit's was a home run. So was one of Mantle's.
It was 2 years to the day after Mantle's major league debut, and he found a way to celebrate the anniversary. In the top of the 5th, with 2 out and Yogi Berra on 1st base, the switch-hitting Mantle batted righthanded against Chuck Stobbs, a lefthander.
Mantle admitted that he was a better hitter for average from the left side, but he clearly had more power from the right side. Stobbs threw him a fastball, and he hit one of the most powerful drives anyone had ever seen. It glanced off a scoreboard at the back of the bleachers, a 460-foot drive. The ball caromed off the board, and kept going.
Arthur "Red" Patterson, then the Yankees' public-relations director, noted that nobody had ever hit a ball out of the left side of Griffith Stadium. This probably was not true: Josh Gibson, whose Homestead Grays divided their Negro League home games between Washington and Pittsburgh, probably did it a few times.
Patterson left the ballpark, and looked for the ball. He finally found a 10-year-old boy, in the backyard of a house at 434 Oakdale Place NW, across 5th Street from the left-field bleachers. Patterson asked for the ball. The boy wanted 75 cents -- about the standard price at the time for a fresh baseball from a store. Patterson gave him a dollar and got the ball.
Then he paced off the distance to the wall of the bleachers. Then he got the width of the bleachers. Then he saw the 391-foot marker on the wall where the ball had crossed the fence. He put it all together, and decided that Mantle had hit the ball 565 feet.
He did not use a tape measure. But, later in the season, Mantle would also hit long home runs over the left field pavilion at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis and the double-decked left field bleachers at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Patterson did use a tape measure for those, and so, whenever Mantle hit a particularly long home run, it became known as a "tape measure home run."
The ball Mantle hit in Washington on this date went into The Guinness Book of World Records for the longest home run ever hit in a Major League Baseball game. In fact, he did not hit the ball 565 feet. A batted ball is supposed to be measured from home plate to where it first hit something. The ball made contact with the scoreboard, 460 feet away. Still, that is a very long drive, and it would remain the longest home run in that ballpark's history.
Did Mantle hit a baseball 565 feet, ever? Possibly: In addition to the preceding, he hit 2 drives over the left-field roof at Comiskey Park in Chicago, which probably exceeded 550 feet. He hit one over the right field roof at Tiger Stadium in Detroit that may have gone that far, although the 643-foot distance suggested by Mark Gallagher in Explosion!, a book about Mantle's home runs, is almost certainly a gross miscalculation. (Gallagher admitted he'd used trigonometry to determine the distance.)
And there were at least 3 occasions when Mantle hit the facade atop the right field roof at the old Yankee Stadium, which came close to clearing the roof. It's been suggested that, had those balls been just a little higher, they would have gone over 600 feet.
Did Mantle hit the longest home run in baseball history? The evidence is flimsy. Home runs were not measured in the 1920s and 1930s, when Babe Ruth was hitting them lefthanded, and Jimmie Foxx was hitting them righthanded -- in each case, further than anybody had that way until Mantle. Ruth has been suggested as having hit them further than 565, sometimes even 600.
One thing is for sure: At a time when pitching was paramount, but a few sluggers hit the ball over 500 feet -- including Luke Easter, Frank Howard, Frank Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Dick Allen, and the player most often compared to Mantle, Willie Mays -- Mickey Mantle hit the ball further than anybody. Despite a seemingly unending run of injuries, he played 18 seasons, and finished his career with 536 home runs. At the time, he was 3rd on the all-time list, behind Ruth and Mays.
Griffith Stadium was replaced by District of Columbia Stadium in 1961, and torn down in 1965. The Howard University Hospital was built on the site. D.C. Stadium became Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in 1969.
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