The Mick's "tape measure" shot ... On This Day (April 17th) In Baseball History

[shoelessjoelives]

 

In 1953 at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., Mickey Mantle connects on a pitch from the Senators Chuck Stobbs and sends it 565 feet, as the term "tape measure" is given a new meaning in Baseball.

The Yankees win 7-3 and Mantle's legend is growing.......

 

The Mick hit two homers in Yankee Stadium that hit the facade at the top of the stadium. One was on May 30, 1956 and the other was May 22, 1963.

 

The first one was off of Pedro Ramos of Washington and the second blast which was broadcast on "The Game of the Week" with Dizzy and Pee Wee, which I was watching, was off of Bill Fischer of the White Sox.

[TJC_fan]

The Mick ... my favorite baseball player growing up. He could hit them where they took his rounding 2nd base to come down "in or over" the stands.

 

What's amazing is that in 1963, Mantle's body was breaking down. And he still hit one that far in Yankee Stadium.

[cheaptrick77]

April 17, 1915

Dallas owner/president Joseph W. Gardner announces the arrival of the Texas League's first infield tarp (as noted by David O. Barker). The new covering reportedly contains 2,300 square yards of canvas.

April 17, 1916

At Fenway, Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson square off with the young Red Sox lefty emerging the winner, 5-1 over the Washington ace. Ruth scatters eight hits in six innings and strikes out 6, while Johnson gives up 11 hits. Rain starts falling in the 7th and the game is called.

April 17, 1929

Babe Ruth and actress Claire Hodgson are married at five A.M. to avoid crowds. The Yankee home opener with the Red Sox is again rained out so the wedding party continues uninterupted.

April 17, 1947

The Dodgers win 12-6 over the Braves at home, as Jackie Robinson gets his first Major League hit, a bunt single, off Glenn Elliot. Robinson will bunt 42 times, collecting 19 hits, during the year. The Brooklyn offense is lead by fellow rookie Johnny "Spider" Jorgensen, who drives in six runs.

April 17, 1968

The A's debut at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum by losing 4-1 to Baltimore. Dave McNally fires a two-hitter to beat Lew Krausse. During the game, the dirt covering a shallow metal dome under the pitching mound, is kicked aside exposing the steel frame, so the mound is covered between innings.

(from baseballlibrary.com)

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Even Santa believes in Mantle’s 565-foot blast

(by Jeff Passan | Yahoo! Sports)

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=jp-m...o&type=lgns

The longest home run ever hit did not go 565 feet. Not even close.

Actually, the longest home run ever hit isn’t even the longest home run ever hit.

“The truth hasn’t caught up to the original legend,” Bill Jenkinson says. He has been studying monster home runs for nearly three decades now, and he admits they’re a bit like Bigfoot or Nessie or any other great beast – untamable and apocryphal, fantasy getting one over on reality.

“Once a myth takes hold,” he says, “it very rarely is completely withdrawn.”

No home run carries the lore of the blast Mickey Mantle hit 55 years ago today, the one that still stands in the Guinness Book of World Records as the mightiest of all dating back to May 2, 1876, when Ross Barnes hit baseball’s first. Fact and fiction have blended Mantle’s shot off the Senators’ Chuck Stobbs and out of Washington’s Griffith Stadium into a grand tale, the kind that lasts more than half a century not because it’s true but because people want to believe it.

And who can blame them? The mammoth home run is the domain of gods, and Mantle, in his Yankee pinstripes, hitting from both sides with equanimity while nursing hangovers that would fell a man twice his size, was the kind in whom everyone believed. To think the Mick hit that ball 565 feet is to think that Santa Claus exists, and no one ever saw fault in that.

Only 4,206 people could actually vouch for Mantle’s home run, the attendance sparse even with the four-time defending champions in town. It was the fifth inning. Wind gusted toward left field, where a huge sea of bleachers backed into a sign advertising National Bohemian beer.

In stepped Mantle against Stobbs, a middling left-hander. Mantle hadn’t felt right the first three games of the season, so he borrowed a 33-ounce bat from teammate Loren Babe. Of course his name was Babe.

Mantle connected on a belt-high fastball from Stobbs, and the ball kept soaring, a shooting star in the afternoon sky. It clanged off the Natty Boh sign, estimated about 460 feet from home plate, and disappeared. The ball had broken the confines of the stadium, and with it went any chance of truly knowing how far it traveled.

Still, Arthur “Red” Patterson, the Yankees’ enterprising public relations man, wanted to find out. So he returned with the ball – and a tall tale.

Patterson said he retrieved the ball from a 10-year-old boy named Donald Dunaway, who stood with it in the back yard of 434 Oakdale Lane. Patterson said he paid Dunaway $1 and sent him a pair of autographed balls in exchange for Mantle’s home run. Finding any record of a man named Donald Dunaway who would have been 10 years old in 1953 has proven elusive.

Until his death, Patterson never wavered on the Dunaway portion of the story. He did admit later in life that his claim of using a tape measure to record the distance between the ball’s landing spot where Dunaway found it and the edge of the stadium was dubious. Though the term tape-measure home run stuck, Patterson in reality walked the space himself, added the guess to 460 and, voilà, Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot home run was born.

Almost instantly, Mantle’s home run was famous. In the next day’s The New York Times, Louis Effrat wrote: “It is true that a strong wind might have helped Mantle, but if the A.A.U. will not recognize the homer, all of Baseball will.” The Senators celebrated it by painting a baseball on the sign Mantle hit – at least until upper management removed it.

The more evidence surfaced to debunk it, the stronger the legend of 565 grew. Mantle himself said the home run he hit May 22, 1963, off Bill Fischer would have traveled farther had it not bounced off the right-field façade of Yankee Stadium. The work of physics professors, particularly Robert Adair, cast doubts on the ability of a ball to travel 500 feet, let alone 565.

“The ball could not have flown farther than 515 feet,” Jenkinson says, and even that, he believes, is a stretch. One physicist told him it went 498 feet. Jenkinson, whose book “Baseball’s Ultimate Power: The Kings of the Tape Measure” is set to come out next year, thinks it went 505 feet. A phenomenal home run, yes, one only a handful of players could hit. Not the best, though.

That, Jenkinson says, belongs to Babe Ruth. On June 8, 1926, at Navin Field in Detroit, Ruth hit a shot that traveled out of the stadium and, Jenkinson says, landed an estimated 575 feet away. The arc of Ruth’s swing, plus the speed he generated with a 44-ounce bat, gave him the extra 70 feet or so over Mantle’s.

Or another 121 feet, if you believe a different version of the story that says the ball jumped off the roofs of a few cars before landing. Turns out Mantle isn’t the only player whose home runs will cause a storyteller’s nose to grow, though his are the greatest culprits. Mantle hit so many prodigious drives that on one top 10 list, the 565-footer ranks sixth, and the Fischer home run is estimated at a truly impossible 734 feet.

Such nonsense bothers Jenkinson, because big home runs are his passion, and he figures the public is owed the truth. He’s right, of course, but he misses a point: There’s a piece of everyone that wants to think Mantle did hit his great home run 565 feet – that anyone could swing at a pitch and send it that far. The limits of credibility are only as big as we make them, and the inclination is to stretch them as far as the imagination allows.

"I buy into that,” Jenkinson says. “I was born in ‘47. All through the ’50s, this guy was like a golden child to me. I went on vacation with my family in August 1960, and by coincident, my great aunt, who I’d never met, lived in Oklahoma.

“I got there, and I remember seeing Mickey Mantle’s picture on her refrigerator and saying something. She said, ‘Well, do you want to meet his in-laws?’ It turns out (Mantle’s wife) Merlyn grew up next door. I was 13. Just the idea I was next door to a place where Mickey Mantle spent a lot of time gave me goosebumps.”

Mantle died almost 13 years ago. He was 63. He didn’t live to see the technological revolution that today allows the measurement of home runs to the tenth of a foot. Using everything from the temperature to the wind to the time the ball spent in the air to where it landed, Greg Rybarczyk created HitTracker, which charts every home run hit.

While the data is compelling, it’s also distressing. Part of the tape-measure home run’s beauty is the curiosity in how far it really went. Teams announce distances based off some chart, and it’s always just another guess, and you know, that’s all right. The longest home run ever hit did not go 565 feet. Maybe it went 505. Or 605. Or even longer.

Sometimes it’s OK to still believe in Santa Claus.

[shoelessjoelives]

Santa Claus and am I actually really in Heaven..........only to find out it was just Iowa........hey, a little "Heaven On Earth" can still happen to those who believe.

 

Still will never forget Ol' Diz going crazy when Mantle hit that ball off of Bill Fischer. He said something to the effect of "Oh Pee Wee, that ball is gone Podna, whoa.................!!"

[TJC_fan]

I remember listening to Dizzy and Pee Wee as they called the Game of the Week, sponsored by Falstaff.

 

And yes, Cheapy ... even Rock and Rock Snob believe in the Mick's mammoth home run..... and Yes, Virginia ... Mick did hit one that far.

[shoelessjoelives]

from TJC_fan

I remember listening to Dizzy and Pee Wee as they called the Game of the Week, sponsored by Falstaff.

 

Glad to know someone else saw the play. I was watching that game when Mantle hit the top of the right field facade. Just about 2 feet more in the upward flight of that ball and Mantle would be the only player to ever hit a fair ball out of the House That Ruth Built.

 

Dizzy would say whenever Mantle came to the plate on the Game of the Week that "you can see him squeezing the sawdust out of that bat, podna !!"

 

After a few Falstaff's, Dizzy could say anything, anytime.

[goldandwhite]

shoelessjoelives, my son was asking me about Mantle's homer at Griffin Stadium just a couple of days ago. I will show him your initial post. Thanks for the MLB trivia and history you post on Smoaky.com.

[cheaptrick77]

April 17, 1977

In Atlanta, the umpiring crew walks off the field to protest a controversial play being shown on the large instant replay screen. The 4th inning play involved the Astros Bob Watson scoring on a close play at the plate. Braves' executive Bill Lucas persuaded the umps to return, assuring them that no more close plays would be shown. The Braves won 5-4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CrankThatCrabtree]

hahaha that is awesome, what a bunch of little girls

[cheaptrick77]

<div align='center'><img src="http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/nn4/thin_lizzy_1977/billstoneman.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" /></div>

 

 

<b>APRIL 17, 1969</b>

Bill Stoneman's first win as a starter is a no-hitter for the expansion Montreal Expos at Philadelphia. Rusty Staub's home run, 3 doubles and 3 RBI pace a 5-0 win.

[shoelessjoelives]

Stoneman's first win was on August 28, 1967 versus the Houston Astros . He pitched 2 2/3 inning in relief of future Ranger Ferguson Jenkins while hurling for the Cubs. :D

[Stoney]

^ Kind of on topic off topic. Saw a show about a father and son baseball card/memorbillia store in Baltimore. A baseball "historian" comes in with a medallion that was of the old St. Louis Browns before you know they "became" the Cardinals. Guess being in Baltimore he never heard of the Orioles. :rolleyes:

 

If Y'all get a chance read The Last Boy about Mantle. With his childhood and events as an adult you can kind of understand him becoming dependent on alcohol. Also has a great piece on the tape measure shot. Interview with a guy who found the "actual" ball which went even farther than what was announced.

[shoelessjoelives]

A sad story about Mantle's life coming from a family that worked and died in the mines. Mantle always figured that since all of his family had died at a relatively young age he would meet the same fate. Then when he had that bone disease that sidelined him in football he probably figured he was doomed at that point.

[cheaptrick77]

 

April 17, 1945

Pete Gray, the one-armed OF, plays his Major League debut game with the St. Louis Browns. He singles once, off Les Mueller, in four at bats, and handles no chances in the outfield. St. Louis beats the Tigers 7-1, for their 9th straight Opening Day win, a Major League record that the 1975-83 Mets will tie.

[Hagar]

After a few Falstaff's, Dizzy could say anything, anytime.

Old Dizzy was a one of a kind. On a hard swing and a miss, I can still hear him say, "He had a ripple". And I always thot he loved his Falstaff lol

[Stoney]

If Y'all haven't read it yet find "The Last Boy". It has a full chapter with pictures on this homer alone. Mantle was a man with his demons who was just born in the wrong time.