re: Mickey Mantle hit a ball 565 feet

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Toward the end of the second game, Sheridan whacked a fastball, thrown right down Broadway by the Seals’ Ted Shandor, over the left center-field fence at Edmonds Field. Solon ballboy Gary McDowell, sitting in the dugout, remembers it started as a frozen rope that might have been snagged if the shortstop had been a foot taller. He said when it flew over the 356-foot mark of the barricade it continued up on an incline, heading toward the Sierra Nevada Mountains.1 Solon third baseman, Eddie Bockman, who also watched it that night, concurred, saying, “I never saw one still going up as it left the ballpark, until that point.”2

Everyone in the ballpark who witnessed the blast knew it was one for the ages. But not until the next day did they appreciate the distance

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Pat Kelly—told him after last night’s game he found the rear window of his automobile had been demolished and inside on the rear bench seat was a baseball. When Kelly spied the baseball and a seat full of shattered glass, he presumed it to be the work of the titanic Sheridan shot. When asked where his car was parked, Kelly told them on Burnett Way, which was beyond the left-field wall and the Solons parking lot. Sheridan and his teammates were stunned.

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Dave Kelley (no relation), the team’s publicist, had Kelly show him the spot where the car had been parked and he then stepped off the distance. The publicist charged into the Solons’ offices and reported to team president Eddie Mulligan that he’d come up with 600-plus feet. Mulligan ordered groundskeeper Horace Smith to get his tape measure and together the trio met on the other side of the left-field wall at the spot where they gauged the ball left the park. From there they marched across the parking lot on a diagonal line until they came to the place where Kelly’s car had been parked on Burnett Way. They came up with an additional 294 feet beyond the outfield fence. Which meant the ball traveled an approximate distance of 620 feet

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It’s clear that the ebullient team officials then reported their findings to the local beat writers, because on Friday, July 10, both papers picked up on the distance of Sheridan’s blast, reporting it was the longest home run ever measured, surpassing Babe Ruth’s 600-foot clout struck in a spring training game in Tampa, Florida, April 4, 1919.8 The writers also dutifully noted that it traveled much farther than the 565-foot home run clubbed by Mickey Mantle out of Washington’s Griffith Stadium in April.

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Train and Muir together measured the distance using a standard surveyor’s steel tape with another member of their firm there to certify their findings. (Muir was the firm’s civil engineer and Train the land surveyor.) When the assignment was finished, they arrived at a slightly shorter, though more precise measurement of 613.8 feet.

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Finally, on Monday, July 13, when the Union reported the Muir & Train measurement of 613.8 feet, the article also noted that an unnamed Solons’ parking lot attendant “heard the impact of shattered glass when the epic circuit clout soared over the left-field wall and entered Kelly’s parked auto by way of the rear window.”16 That doesn’t prove that Kelly’s vehicle was parked on Burnett Way, however, it does lend credence to his story. On July 14 Muir & Train produced a letter and a notarized Plat of Survey verifying that the exact distance amounted to 613.80 feet (where “corrections have been made in standard tape length at a temperature of 68 degrees F.”).17 With the notarized documents, Sheridan’s feat had been certified to be the longest home run ever recorded.

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