The Last Boy by Jane Leavy Read Free Book Online

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,” Lovrichsaid. “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’ center fielder 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 whereMantle’s shot fell to the 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-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 the ball 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