With all the launch angle (bleep) and exit velo (bleep) we are in the Era of the Home Run Derby. Some say the baseballs are harder these days or maybe it’s just the bats have more kick.
Nonetheless when a slugger drives a Rawlings 450 feet into the upper deck there are Multiple Orgasms in the broadcast booth. But no one ever Jumped the Yard farther than the ineffable Mickey Mantle.
POWER? THERE’S MICKEY AND EVERYONE ELSE
The Mick’s 600-Foot Rocket Shots
So you think Christian Yelich and Mike Trout and Cody Bellinger are blasting King Kong jacks?
Compared to Mickey Mantle they’re short about 200 feet.
Mantle is the greatest power hitter of all time. No one even comes close to the soaring, long range rocket shots he hammered from either side of the plate. Some of them still haven’t landed. He makes today’s Home Run Derby icons look like they’re bunting for a base hit.
How far did Mantle muscle his eruptions to jump the yard? Obviously, they didn’t have the high tech of this age so sometimes we have to trust eye ball estimates. But there were wrecking crew atomic blasts that could be easily measured. By all accounts his top 10 were as impressive as Mr. Olympia. The shortest is 530 feet.
And the longest was astronomical, estimated at 734 feet.
No, I don’t believe it, either. That’s obviously impossible.
But…this is Mickey Mantle we’re talking about. The high school football player with forearms of steel that made the 34 ounces feel like swinging a toothpick.
12 storeys up
In 1956 he blitzed a Pedro Ramos fastball that left the field at the 370 mark and came within inches of exiting Yankee Stadium. Now get this. The top of the façade was 117 feet high. That sonic explosion was 39 yards above terra firma when it drilled the wood. You don’t need to be an MIT grad to figure out it would have traveled at least 600 feet if it hadn’t gotten into an argument with the facade.
Take a look at the nearest high rise. And I mean HIGH rise. Count 12 storeys up. That’s where Mantle’s towering blitzkrieg caromed off the top of the stadium roof.
Roger Maris and The Mick. Take a long look at Mantle’s bulging forearm. That’s the genesis of power. 600-foot power. Forearms like that ignite rocket shots to Mars. I interviewed Maris years ago and I’ll share his thoughts in the near future.
The 734 shot off Bill Fischer in 1963?
No one ever hit a ball out of the Old Yankee Stadium in a game. But Mantle crushed the top of the roof three times.
This one rammed the sky high façade, only a few inches from freedom. And, for what it’s worth, there were multiple fans who swore it was still going UP when its flight was interrupted. Some Neanderthal math wiz calculated it’s trajectory would have carried it over 700 feet into the wild blue yonder. How he came up with 734 is anybody’s guess.
“The hardest ball I ever hit.”
That sounds as apocryphal as Big Foot but somehow it seems plausible and Mantle called it, “The hardest ball I ever hit.”
And here are two of Mantle’s most memorable jacks that were actually measured for austerity.
In a 1951 spring training game at USC he ripped a massive drive that not only left the ball park it also cleared the adjacent football field. It finally landed on the far sideline, 656 feet from the batter’s box, before hopping the fence bordering the field. And Boy Wonder Mantle, the Yankees answer to Ruth and Dimaggio, was still only 19 years old.
Mike Trout goes fishing. (Boy, is that line lame)
That was one of six of The Mick’s cannonades estimated at more than 600 feet, including a ballistic blast that skyrocketed out of Tiger Stadium and bombarded a lumberyard across the street, 643 feet from the plate.
There are also a horde of observers, including many players, who swore The Mick’s missiles left Yankee Stadium at least three times during batting practice.
Yes, I know, they didn’t have the computer software we have today. But if you’re a physics major punch in the numbers.
Over the wall at 370 and still rising faster than a NASA space ship.
Jumping the yard 117 feet in the air.
Exit speed at least 110 mph
500 feet? Easy.
600 feet? Odds on.
700 feet? We’ll never know. But for Mantle the impossible was possible.
Eat your heart out Mike Trout.
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Dave Talks Baseball 