Mickey Mantle Invents the Tape-Measure Home Run

On April 17, 1953, Mickey Mantle hit a ball off Chuck Stobbs at Griffith Stadium in Washington that left the park entirely. Batting right-handed against the left-handed Stobbs, Mantle connected in the fifth inning with Yogi Berra on first. The ball struck a beer sign on the scoreboard in left-center field, roughly 460 feet from home plate and 60 feet above the ground, then ricocheted over the back wall and out of the stadium.

Yankees publicist Red Patterson recognized the publicity opportunity and left the press box to track down the ball. He found a ten-year-old boy named Donald Dunaway in a backyard at 434 Oakdale Place, across Fifth Street from the stadium. Patterson paced off 105 feet from the edge of the ballpark to the spot where Dunaway said he had picked up the ball. Adding that distance to the 460 feet from home plate to the back wall, Patterson announced a measurement of 565 feet.

No tape measure was actually used. Patterson walked the distance and estimated it. The physics of the hit have been debated for decades, with modern analysts suggesting the ball likely traveled closer to 510 feet through the air before bouncing. But the number 565 stuck, and the term "tape-measure home run" entered the baseball vocabulary that afternoon.

The ball and bat were sent to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown that June. Mantle was twenty-one years old. He would hit longer home runs in other games, and so would other sluggers. But this was the one that gave distance its own category in the sport.