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It's the home run that coined the term "tape measure home run" and is listed in the Guinness Book of Sports Records as the longest home run to be hit in a regular-season major league game. Mickey came to the plate in the fifth with the score tied at 3-3 and a man on base. Mickey launched another left-handed homer, this one into the right-field bleachers, a 450-foot blast. The Yankees swept the doubleheader, much in thanks to Mickey and his prodigious home runs.
Jose Canseco's upper-deck blast helped the Oakland Athletics defeat the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1989 American League Championship Series. It did not, however, journey 540 feet as have some suggested. ESPN's Home Run Tracker yielded a projected true distance of 443 feet. In the example above, we assumed that the ball was at its apex when it struck the façade.
Detroit – Pitcher: Art Houteman, Detroit Tigers –
No ever will repeat the feat, not that many seemingly had the ability to make such connections on that ball like McGwire could. This was just one of his 52 blasts on the campaign, a career high at that point for Mark. Mo Vaughn was a solid middle of the order man throughout his career and even topped 40 homers a pair of times while with Boston.
Here are the longest homers hit by each of the 30 MLB clubs since Statcast began tracking home run distances at the start of the 2015 season. Meyer reared back and connected with a breaking ball from reliever Mike Murphy -- sending it deep into the Denver darkness. The ball kept going up and up until it hit halfway up the second deck of Mile High Stadium -- a place very few baseballs go. If you watch the video, the camera can't even follow it that high. Maybe it's the Sultan of Swat, the King of Crash.
Stadium,
Statcast data, however, is still a relatively new tool. Sánchez's dinger echoed throughout Coors Field as soon as his bat made contact with the ball. And after that, very little could be detected audibly, as the home crowd watched the ball sail upwards to the third deck in a hushed awe. The blast placed Sánchez in the top-five longest HRs of the last five years. FOX Sports baseball analyst Ben Verlander called Álvarez the best hitter in baseball this summer .
That plus the fact that spectacular Mantle home runs were becoming somewhat commonplace. So much so that Yankees' PR director Bob Fishel (Red Patterson's successor), who had many other duties, couldn't keep up with every tape measure blast Mantle hit. For that matter, Fishel wasn't with the Yankees in Detroit on that trip, so there was no one to emphasize to the press what Mickey had accomplished, and the Tigers certainly had no motivation to point it out. Only Ted Williams had ever hit one over the roof in Detroit. Mickey's roof clearing blasts would come later in his career. This blast was yet another tape measure shot, continuing what Mickey started in April that year.
feet (7/6/53,
Although it was measured after the fact, the point of impact was well-known and we believe this distance to be completely reliable. This is the distance the ball traveled in the air from home plate to the place where it landed. Considered along with the Bovard Field homer, it demonstrates that Mickey's unheard of home run distances are no flukes. Bovard Field at the University of Southern California is a small baseball diamond with a football field adjacent to right-field and right-center-field. A street runs outside and parallel to the left-field wall, with a number of houses in the neighborhood across from the park.
A 575-foot dinger at Navin Field in Detroit isn't the most interesting of the tales, but it'd top this list. Bob Moore said the ball would have carried 525 feet if not for hitting the lights. July 3, 1999, the Cleveland Indians star sent a ball screaming an estimated 511 feet. "I think we like seeing it fly like that, especially if it's our guys hitting it," Marlins manager Don Mattingly told Weinrib. "Balls with that trajectory, for a lot of guys it doesn't go out. He hits balls that just keep carrying. He hits them a long way." The ball soared out of Wrigley Field and landed on the rooftop of a building across the street.
Babe Ruth had a bunch of moonshots over his baseball-wrecking career. Some ended up in alligator ponds, some cleared fence after fence after fence until there were no more fences left to clear. The Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati isn’t a classic hitter’s field, statistically at least, but Adam Dunn sure tamed it. The Big Donkey, as he is known, hit 270 home runs for his original club, and none longer than the deep, deep bomb he drilled off a high Jose Lima fast ball in 2004. He could just have easily struck out, given his penchant for swinging freely, but the gamble paid off in a big way.
Meyer's high school coach in Honolulu still raves about his power, saying he could come out right now and still hit homers. The first baseman was even given the Barry Bonds treatment in his school days, getting intentionally walked with the bases loaded. One big advantage of being a slugger for the Colorado Rockies are the friendly confines — and thin air — of Coors Field. However, the longest home run in Rockies history came in a road game against the Florida Marlins in May, 1997. This particular homer came courtesy of “The Big Cat” Andres Galarraga, who absolutely smoked an inside pitch from Marlins’ ace Kevin Brown into the top deck of the old Pro Players Stadium. Brown wasn’t known for giving up a lot of home runs, but the Cat sure lit him up.
Cron deserved a ballpark treat after this well-placed blast near a third-deck hot dog stand in June. "El Gary" had revenge on his mind when he visited his old ballpark this past weekend, and the Yanks aren't going to forget this slingshot anytime soon. Buxton's been considered a five-tool athlete since he was baseball's No. 1 prospect nearly a decade ago, but long-balls were likely his least-heralded attribute. That has changed, as he's smacked 28 and counting this season, his first time above 20 HRs.
Unlike some other mammoth homers in baseball history, there are only a handful of stories on Meyer's blast -- the longest ever according to the internet. He seems content with that -- helping out a little bit at MLB clinics on the island and really not talking about his baseball career unless somebody finds out about it. However, as the game has grown and evolved, so have the players, the styles and the love of the game. Yes, baseball has also had its lesser moments. The ‘steroid era’ has made us question a lot of the purity of the game, as well as the credit that we should be giving the athletes who were proven to have cheated.
In the twin bill played on May 30, 1956 Mickey faced both Pascual and Ramos, and he pounded a long shot off each of them. Mickey was on another longball tear, having bounced a ball off the right-field façade on May 5th off Kansas City's Moe Burtschy. He ended up with 52, one of the few players to hit over 50 homers in a season. This was the first ball to ever go over Griffith Stadium's left-field bleachers.
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