Mickey Mantle Nearly Hits One Out of Yankee Stadium

On May 22, 1963, Mickey Mantle hit a walk-off home run off Bill Fischer of the Kansas City Athletics in the bottom of the 11th inning at Yankee Stadium, winning the game 8-7. The ball struck the right-field facade approximately 370 feet from home plate and 118 feet off the ground. It was still rising when it hit. Had the roof not been in the way, estimates suggest the ball would have traveled between 504 and 600 feet. Nobody had ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. Mantle came closer than anyone.

The game itself was a comeback thriller. The Yankees led 7-0 going into the eighth inning, then watched the Athletics score six runs in the eighth and tie the game in the ninth. The extra innings set the stage for Mantle's heroics. Fischer, a right-hander, threw a first-pitch slow curve that Mantle swung through so hard he nearly fell down. On the next pitch, a fastball, Mantle connected with the most ferocious swing of his career.

Mantle later said it was the hardest ball he ever hit. He had generated tape-measure home runs before, most famously a 565-foot blast at Griffith Stadium in 1953 that popularized the term. But the Yankee Stadium facade shot was different. The 1953 homer had distance. The 1963 homer had trajectory. The ball was climbing when it hit concrete.

Mantle was 31 years old and already playing on damaged knees that would shorten his career. He hit .314 with 15 home runs in just 65 games that season, missing significant time to injuries. The facade home run was a glimpse of the power that persisted even as the rest of his body broke down. It was the swing of a man who could still, on one pitch, do something that no other player in the stadium could do.