This is a blast from the past...I believe it was posted on this site several years ago. A good read for those who were not around then...and those who are old enough to remember watching Mantle play for the Yanks...
The book is The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, by Jane Leavey. She also wrote an award-winning book entitled Sandy Koufax. After reading an excerpt from her book in Sports Illustated last month, and having grown up in New Jersey when all this was happening, I had to read the whole book. And I was pleasantly surprised to find this account of Mickey Mantle's visit to USC. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And if so, get the book---it's a fascinating read. And another historic moment for USC...
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March 26, 1951
Del Webb, the Yankees’ entrepreneurial co-owner, had contrived that spring to switch training camps with the New York Giants. Webb was a Phoenix real estate developer, ahead of his time in grasping the westward rush of postwar America… Bringing the Yankees to train in Phoenix allowed him to play the big shot in his hometown. Then he sent them barnstorming up and down the California coast in order to showcase Joe DiMaggio in the Clipper’s home state and whet their appetite for big league baseball. The schedule called for thirteen games in California, mostly against Class AAA Pacific Coast League teams…and finally at the University of Southern California against the Trojans, better known for their gridiron exploits. That spring was the last time the Yankees would train anywhere other than Florida…
…On March 26, the Yankees were back in Los Angeles again to play the Trojans at USC their last West Coast game. USC’s new coach Rod Dedeaux, had played two games for Stengel when he managed the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dedeaux got a bigger bonus in 1935 than Mantle got from the Yankees [in his rookie year, 1951]. Three of Dedeaux’s former players Hank Workman, Jim Brideweser, and Wally Hood?were Yankee rookies. He would continue to send talent to the majors for another 30 years: Tom Seaver, Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Fred Lynn, Dave Kingman, Bill Lee, and Ron Fairly, among others.
The Yankees arrived on campus in time for an 11:30 A.M. luncheon at the University Commons, where, according to pitcher Dave Rankin, “sorority girls played bridge all day and hoped for the best.” By then, snug Bovard Field was SRO. “Additional stands had been erected and the outfield roped off to accommodate any spillage of customers,” the Los Angeles Times reported?the crowd was later estimated at 3,000. Those unable to find seats could listen to a special broadcast on radio station KWKW.
Cozy, palm-draped Bovard Field (318 feet down the right field line, 307 feet down the line in left) was tucked into a corner of the campus near the Physical Education building, which sat along the third base line. Beyond the right field fence lay a practice field where the USC footballers were running spring drills. The impressionable [Mickey] Mantle [19 years old at the time] importuned USC’s senior team manager to point out the gridiron stars. Wise guy Phil Rizzuto sent the Trojans’ eight-year-old batboy, Dedeaux’s son, Justin, to keep Mantle company on the bench?“Hey, rook, I got somebody here your age.”
The temperature at game time was only 59 degrees, with a wind from the southeast at 6 miles per hour. Conditions were Southern California dry?it hadn’t rained in twenty days. The National Weather Service noted “some haze.” Smog had not yet entered the vocabulary. Tom Lovrich, the Trojans’ ace, had already beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Hollywood Stars that spring. A sidearming right-hander who threw a heavy, sinking fastball, he would go on to a respectable career in Triple A ball. When Mantle came to bat in the first inning, Lovrich didn’t even know that he was a switch-hitter. Dedeaux told him, “When in doubt, keep the ball low.”
The count, in Lovrich’s memory, went to two balls and two strikes. His intention was to throw the next pitch low and away, trying to entice Mantle to chase something off the plate, which he did. The pitch couldn’t have been more than eight inches off the ground. “Our catcher, John Burkhead, kind of dove or fell to his side to block a wild pitch,” Lovrich said. “Mantle actually stepped out of the box and reached across the plate. How he reached it, we never knew. You knew the ball was hit. It had that sound. A pitcher’s unfavorite sound.”
Dedeaux stood, mouth agape. “You heard the swish before you heard the sound of the bat as the ball disappeared into the day.”
In a 1986 letter to baseball researcher Paul E. Susman, thanking him for his “unrelenting interest” in the matter, the Trojans’ centerfielder Tom Riach described the play this way: “Riach ran just to the right of the 439 foot sign at the fence. I jumped up on the fence (approximately 8 feet) and watched the ball cross the practice football field and short-hop the fence on the north side of the football field.”
Among the football players preparing for the coming season on the adjacent field was Frank Gifford, who was also recruited by Dedeaux as a catcher. He watched the ball bisect the sky. “It went over the fence and into the middle of the football field where we were playing, which was probably another forty-five, fifty yards,” he said. “The ball came banging into the huddle. It bounced and hit my foot. I said, ‘Who the hell hit that?’ Somebody said, ‘Some kid named Mickey.’ We didn’t like baseball players. We thought they were gay. It was like, ‘Who are these freaks who would enter our domain?’ “
Gifford was the last man on the field to see the ball. “It was never retrieved,” Rod Dedeaux said. “We never saw it again.”
Mantle was greeted in the dugout with hooting and hollering unseemly for an exhibition game against a collegiate team. “They pounded him,” Justin Dedeaux said. “They knew they had seen something.”
The batboy regarded Mantle’s discarded bludgeon with wonder: “What’s in this bat?”
Another towering home run in the sixth landed on the porch of a house beyond the left field fence. In the seventh, a bases-clearing triple flew to the deepest part of center field. In the ninth inning he beat out an infield single on a common ground ball, well played by the shortstop, who, pitcher Dave Cesca said, “would have thrown out any normal human being.”
“The greatest show in history,” Rod Dedeaux called it later.
Ed Hookstratten, a relief pitcher not then on USC’s roster, recalls leading a search party out to the football field, looking for the spot where Mantle’s shot fell to earth. “We walked it off,” Hookstratten said. “A shoe is a foot. We got over the fence in the football field and paced it from there. I bet the whole team went out. We were all curious. Six hundred, six hundred fifty, going toward seven hundred feet, absolutely.”
Despite Gifford’s eyewitness testimony, reports circulated around campus that the ball had landed in a Methodist church behind the practice football field. Or over it. Or in a dentist’s office.
Six decades later, Bovard Field remains sacred ground in Mantleology. Though the field is long gone, grown men equipped with 1951 Sanborn Insurance maps, Google Earth satellite imagery, and lots of free time still try to calculate the precise distance theball flew when Mickey Mantle announced himself to the world. Estimates range from 551 to 660 feet, depending on whose diagrams, digital readouts, and trajectories you consult. Mantle himself claimed not to remember. Ralph Houk, the Yankees’ backup catcher and future manager, said, “I’ll say six hundred feet and I lie a lot.”
Years later Dedeaux told me he doubted that any ball could have traveled 600 feet science be damned given the placement of the diamond among the buildings and the athletic fields on campus. But to the day he died, Dedeaux swore he saw Mantle hit two 500-foot home runs on March 26, 1951, one left-handed, one right-handed…
The future was manifest in the March 26 box score: Mantle, 5 AB, 4 H, 2 HR, 1 3B, 1 1B, 7 RBI. More than a decade would pass before he drove in that many runs again. Houk and Berra looked at each other and said, “My God, whadda we got here?”…
The book is The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, by Jane Leavey. She also wrote an award-winning book entitled Sandy Koufax. After reading an excerpt from her book in Sports Illustated last month, and having grown up in New Jersey when all this was happening, I had to read the whole book. And I was pleasantly surprised to find this account of Mickey Mantle's visit to USC. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And if so, get the book---it's a fascinating read. And another historic moment for USC...
---------
March 26, 1951
Del Webb, the Yankees’ entrepreneurial co-owner, had contrived that spring to switch training camps with the New York Giants. Webb was a Phoenix real estate developer, ahead of his time in grasping the westward rush of postwar America… Bringing the Yankees to train in Phoenix allowed him to play the big shot in his hometown. Then he sent them barnstorming up and down the California coast in order to showcase Joe DiMaggio in the Clipper’s home state and whet their appetite for big league baseball. The schedule called for thirteen games in California, mostly against Class AAA Pacific Coast League teams…and finally at the University of Southern California against the Trojans, better known for their gridiron exploits. That spring was the last time the Yankees would train anywhere other than Florida…
…On March 26, the Yankees were back in Los Angeles again to play the Trojans at USC their last West Coast game. USC’s new coach Rod Dedeaux, had played two games for Stengel when he managed the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dedeaux got a bigger bonus in 1935 than Mantle got from the Yankees [in his rookie year, 1951]. Three of Dedeaux’s former players Hank Workman, Jim Brideweser, and Wally Hood?were Yankee rookies. He would continue to send talent to the majors for another 30 years: Tom Seaver, Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Fred Lynn, Dave Kingman, Bill Lee, and Ron Fairly, among others.
The Yankees arrived on campus in time for an 11:30 A.M. luncheon at the University Commons, where, according to pitcher Dave Rankin, “sorority girls played bridge all day and hoped for the best.” By then, snug Bovard Field was SRO. “Additional stands had been erected and the outfield roped off to accommodate any spillage of customers,” the Los Angeles Times reported?the crowd was later estimated at 3,000. Those unable to find seats could listen to a special broadcast on radio station KWKW.
Cozy, palm-draped Bovard Field (318 feet down the right field line, 307 feet down the line in left) was tucked into a corner of the campus near the Physical Education building, which sat along the third base line. Beyond the right field fence lay a practice field where the USC footballers were running spring drills. The impressionable [Mickey] Mantle [19 years old at the time] importuned USC’s senior team manager to point out the gridiron stars. Wise guy Phil Rizzuto sent the Trojans’ eight-year-old batboy, Dedeaux’s son, Justin, to keep Mantle company on the bench?“Hey, rook, I got somebody here your age.”
The temperature at game time was only 59 degrees, with a wind from the southeast at 6 miles per hour. Conditions were Southern California dry?it hadn’t rained in twenty days. The National Weather Service noted “some haze.” Smog had not yet entered the vocabulary. Tom Lovrich, the Trojans’ ace, had already beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Hollywood Stars that spring. A sidearming right-hander who threw a heavy, sinking fastball, he would go on to a respectable career in Triple A ball. When Mantle came to bat in the first inning, Lovrich didn’t even know that he was a switch-hitter. Dedeaux told him, “When in doubt, keep the ball low.”
The count, in Lovrich’s memory, went to two balls and two strikes. His intention was to throw the next pitch low and away, trying to entice Mantle to chase something off the plate, which he did. The pitch couldn’t have been more than eight inches off the ground. “Our catcher, John Burkhead, kind of dove or fell to his side to block a wild pitch,” Lovrich said. “Mantle actually stepped out of the box and reached across the plate. How he reached it, we never knew. You knew the ball was hit. It had that sound. A pitcher’s unfavorite sound.”
Dedeaux stood, mouth agape. “You heard the swish before you heard the sound of the bat as the ball disappeared into the day.”
In a 1986 letter to baseball researcher Paul E. Susman, thanking him for his “unrelenting interest” in the matter, the Trojans’ centerfielder Tom Riach described the play this way: “Riach ran just to the right of the 439 foot sign at the fence. I jumped up on the fence (approximately 8 feet) and watched the ball cross the practice football field and short-hop the fence on the north side of the football field.”
Among the football players preparing for the coming season on the adjacent field was Frank Gifford, who was also recruited by Dedeaux as a catcher. He watched the ball bisect the sky. “It went over the fence and into the middle of the football field where we were playing, which was probably another forty-five, fifty yards,” he said. “The ball came banging into the huddle. It bounced and hit my foot. I said, ‘Who the hell hit that?’ Somebody said, ‘Some kid named Mickey.’ We didn’t like baseball players. We thought they were gay. It was like, ‘Who are these freaks who would enter our domain?’ “
Gifford was the last man on the field to see the ball. “It was never retrieved,” Rod Dedeaux said. “We never saw it again.”
Mantle was greeted in the dugout with hooting and hollering unseemly for an exhibition game against a collegiate team. “They pounded him,” Justin Dedeaux said. “They knew they had seen something.”
The batboy regarded Mantle’s discarded bludgeon with wonder: “What’s in this bat?”
Another towering home run in the sixth landed on the porch of a house beyond the left field fence. In the seventh, a bases-clearing triple flew to the deepest part of center field. In the ninth inning he beat out an infield single on a common ground ball, well played by the shortstop, who, pitcher Dave Cesca said, “would have thrown out any normal human being.”
“The greatest show in history,” Rod Dedeaux called it later.
Ed Hookstratten, a relief pitcher not then on USC’s roster, recalls leading a search party out to the football field, looking for the spot where Mantle’s shot fell to earth. “We walked it off,” Hookstratten said. “A shoe is a foot. We got over the fence in the football field and paced it from there. I bet the whole team went out. We were all curious. Six hundred, six hundred fifty, going toward seven hundred feet, absolutely.”
Despite Gifford’s eyewitness testimony, reports circulated around campus that the ball had landed in a Methodist church behind the practice football field. Or over it. Or in a dentist’s office.
Six decades later, Bovard Field remains sacred ground in Mantleology. Though the field is long gone, grown men equipped with 1951 Sanborn Insurance maps, Google Earth satellite imagery, and lots of free time still try to calculate the precise distance theball flew when Mickey Mantle announced himself to the world. Estimates range from 551 to 660 feet, depending on whose diagrams, digital readouts, and trajectories you consult. Mantle himself claimed not to remember. Ralph Houk, the Yankees’ backup catcher and future manager, said, “I’ll say six hundred feet and I lie a lot.”
Years later Dedeaux told me he doubted that any ball could have traveled 600 feet science be damned given the placement of the diamond among the buildings and the athletic fields on campus. But to the day he died, Dedeaux swore he saw Mantle hit two 500-foot home runs on March 26, 1951, one left-handed, one right-handed…
The future was manifest in the March 26 box score: Mantle, 5 AB, 4 H, 2 HR, 1 3B, 1 1B, 7 RBI. More than a decade would pass before he drove in that many runs again. Houk and Berra looked at each other and said, “My God, whadda we got here?”…
