Nobody Had Ever RUN After A Home Run Before — Mickey Mantle Made It Necessary
Red Patterson was sitting in the stands when Chuck Stobbs threw the pitch. He heard the sound first, Mickey Mantle’s bat, then he stood up, then he started running down from the stands, through the corridor, out of the stadium, and into the street. He didn’t have a tape measure. He was going to need one. To understand what happened at Griffith Stadium on April 17th, 1953, you have to understand what Mickey Mantle was at 21 years old, not what he would become, not the triple crown winner, not the three-time MVP, not the
man who would one day hold Babe Ruth’s World Series home run record. That Mickey Mantle was still being assembled, still being revealed, still in the process of becoming the thing that the baseball world would spend the next 15 years trying and failing to adequately describe. In April of 1953, Mickey Mantle was a kid from Commerce, Oklahoma, in his third year with the New York Yankees, still figuring out what the major leagues were going to ask of him, and whether he had the answers.
Commerce was a zinc mining town in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, the kind of place that produced men who worked hard and expected nothing to be given to them, and were right about that expectation. Mickey’s father, Mutt Mantle, worked in the mines and loved baseball with the specific, consuming love of a man who knew he would never play it at the level he dreamed of, and had transferred that dream completely and without reservation onto his son.
Mutt taught Mickey to switch hit before he taught him anything else about the game. Standing in the dirt yard behind their house, Mutt would pitch from the right side while Mickey’s grandfather pitched from the left, and Mickey would alternate, learning to hit from both sides before most kids his age had learned to hit from one.
By the time Mickey arrived at Yankee Stadium in 1951, the scouts had already run out of superlatives. They had watched him hit balls in the minor leagues that made experienced baseball men stop what they were doing and look at each other with expressions that said, “Are we seeing this?” They had clocked his speed from home to first and checked their stopwatches twice because the number didn’t seem possible.
Casey Stengel, who had managed Babe Ruth and had seen everything the game had to offer over four decades, watched Mickey take batting practice in the spring of 1951 and said, “This is the best prospect I have ever seen in baseball.” That was the 20-year-old version. The ceiling, if there was one, had not yet been located.
Chuck Stobbs was about to help locate it. Here is what you need to know about Chuck Stobbs. He was 23 years old in April of 1953, a left-handed pitcher with a fastball that moved, a decent curve, and the kind of steady, reliable presence on the mound that made him a serviceable starter for a team that needed starters. He had been traded to the Senators from the Boston Red Sox the previous year, and he had settled into the Washington rotation without much fanfare in either direction.
Stobbs was not a star. He knew he was not a star, but he was a professional, and professionals have theories, and Stobbs had one about Mickey Mantle. He had faced Mickey before. Most American League pitchers had by the spring of 1953, and most of them had come to the same conclusion.
The kid was dangerous, but young, still learning, still making the mistakes that young hitters make, chasing breaking balls off the plate, getting tied up inside, expanding the zone when the situation put pressure on him. Stobbs had a plan. Fastball up and in. Young hitters don’t handle it. Too much to think about. Too little time to adjust.
What Stobbs hadn’t fully understood yet, what the entire baseball world was still in the process of learning, was that young didn’t mean what it usually meant when applied to Mickey Mantle. With Mickey, young meant dangerous in a way that experience hadn’t yet refined into something manageable.
It meant the 21-year-old body generating force that the sport had no framework to measure. Stobbs took the mound in the fifth inning. He looked at Mickey in the on-deck circle. “Just a kid,” Stobbs told himself. “Fastball up and in. He’ll tie himself up.” Mickey stepped into the batter’s box. He did not look at Stobbs.
He never looked at the pitcher. Mickey’s eyes went somewhere else entirely, that specific internal place where his body and the incoming ball conducted a conversation that didn’t require the conscious mind to participate. Stobbs took his sign. Fastball up and in. He set his feet on the rubber. The stadium went quiet.
The crowd at Griffith Stadium that afternoon was modest. Washington was not a great baseball town in 1953, and the Senators were not giving their fans much reason to show up. The afternoon had settled into that particular April rhythm. Cold enough to remind you that winter hadn’t fully surrendered, the game moving at its own pace, nothing suggesting that what was about to happen was about to happen.
Red Patterson was in the stands doing what PR directors do at road games, watching, taking notes, preparing for a routine afternoon. He had covered hundreds of games. He knew the sounds of baseball the way a musician knows an orchestra, individually, distinctly, without needing to look to identify each one.
The crack of a routine ground ball, the flat thud of a foul tip, the sharp, clean sound of a well-hit fly ball. He thought he knew all of them. On the mound, Stobbs went into his windup. Mickey coiled. That coil, the loading of the hips, the gathering of the hands, the barely perceptible rocking backward before the explosion forward, was something batting coaches still put on film today.
You could analyze every mechanical element rationally, and yet the whole of it was more than the parts, something that made you understand why certain things can be taught and certain things can only be born. Stobbs released the ball. Fastball up and in, exactly where he wanted it. The contact happened in a fraction of a second. Mickey’s hips rotated.
The bat came through the zone, and then the sound arrived, and it was not any sound Red Patterson had heard before at a baseball game. Not louder, not sharper, different in kind. The sound of a collision conducted at a level of force that the equipment involved was barely designed to handle. The sound of something being hit as hard as it is physically possible to hit something.
Patterson’s head came up. He found the ball in the sky above left field. The ball was rising, not in the gentle arc of a routine home run, not in the steep climb of a very good home run, but at an angle that made the calculation instantaneous and absolute. This baseball was leaving the premises. It cleared the left field wall.
It cleared Fifth Street Northwest, the road running beyond the wall. It cleared the houses on the far side of Fifth Street. Patterson was already moving. He didn’t think about it consciously, didn’t make a decision in the way that decisions are normally made. He simply stood up and started running because something in him understood, without requiring deliberate thought, that what he had just seen needed to be documented, that this was his job, that standing still was not an option. He went down from the stands,
through the corridor, out of Griffith Stadium, into the street. He didn’t have a tape measure. Near where the ball had landed, in the backyard of a house at 434 Oakdale Place, a young boy was holding the baseball. He’d picked it up after it bounced. Patterson offered him a dollar for it. The boy handed it over.
A neighbor had come outside to see what the commotion was about. He had a tape measure. Patterson borrowed it. He measured from the point of landing back toward the stadium, calculating the distance with the focus of a man who understood that the number he was about to produce would matter, would matter in ways he couldn’t fully articulate standing in someone’s backyard on a Friday afternoon, but would matter nonetheless.
The number was 565 feet. 565 feet from home plate at Griffith Stadium to the backyard of a house on Oakdale Place, Washington, D.C. Patterson stood there with the borrowed tape measure and understood two things simultaneously. First, no one had ever officially measured a home run before. Ruth had hit balls that challenged the outer limits of what seemed possible.
DiMaggio had hit them. Players going back to the earliest days of the professional game had hit balls that traveled extraordinary distances, but no one had ever chased one down with an actual instrument, and produced an actual number. No one had thought to until Mickey Mantle made it impossible not to. Second, from this day forward, someone would always measure.
Because once you knew it could be done, once you had a real number attached to what had it previously been described only in approximations and superlatives, you could never go back to not knowing. Patterson walked back to the stadium. He had a press release to write and a phrase to coin. The press release Patterson wrote that afternoon used a phrase he invented on the spot, standing in that backyard with a borrowed tape measure and a baseball a young boy had sold him for a dollar.
Tape measure home run. He needed something to describe what the measurement represented, not just the distance, but the act of measuring itself. The deliberateness of going out there with an actual instrument and producing an actual number. The phrase came to him the way good phrases come, not through careful construction, but through the sudden recognition that this combination of words was exactly right and no other combination would do.
Tape measure home run. He put it in the press release. The newspapers used it. By the end of 1953, it was standard usage in baseball coverage across America. By the time Mickey retired in 1969, it had been in use for 16 years and had become so embedded in the language of the game that most people who used it had no idea where it came from.
They didn’t know about Patterson running through the streets of Washington. They didn’t know about the borrowed tape measure. They didn’t know about the backyard on Oakdale Place. They just knew the phrase, the way you know words, completely, intuitively, without needing to know their origins. But the origin was Mickey Mantle, a 21-year-old kid from a zinc mining town in Oklahoma on a cold April afternoon hitting a baseball so far that the English language had to add a new phrase to describe it.
And Chuck Stobbs, standing on the mound watching the ball travel to a neighborhood he couldn’t see from 60 ft away, became, without choosing it, the answer to a trivia question that baseball fans would be asking for the next 70 years. Who threw the pitch that invented the tape measure home run? Chuck Stobbs, April 17th, 1953.
A fastball up and in, thrown exactly where he wanted it. He had done his job correctly. Mickey had simply done his job at a level that required the invention of new language to describe. The phrase tape measure home run has been used hundreds of thousands of times since Red Patterson coined it in that Washington, D.C. backyard.
It has been used to describe Reggie Jackson’s home runs, Jim Rice’s, Mark McGwire’s. Every generation of baseball has produced hitters who hit balls that travel extraordinary distances, and every generation has reached for the same phrase, Patterson’s phrase, Mickey’s phrase, to describe them. The phrase outlasted Griffith Stadium, which was demolished in 1965.
It outlasted the Washington Senators, who moved to Texas in 1971. It outlasted the entire era of baseball that was born in, the flannel uniforms, the day games, the radio broadcasts, the black and white photographs. It is still in use today. In every broadcast booth, in every major league city, when a ball leaves the park at an angle that suggests something extraordinary, the broadcaster reaches for those two words, tape measure.
Mickey Mantle gave baseball that phrase. Not intentionally. Mickey never did anything for the purpose of legacy or mythology. He stood in the batter’s box and hit the ball as hard as he could and went back to the dugout. The mythology was what other people made of it afterward. But the phrase is real.
The measurement is real. The backyard on Oakdale Place is real, or was real. The real location of a real event that really happened on a real April afternoon when a 21-year-old kid from Oklahoma hit a baseball so hard that a grown man dropped everything he was doing and ran through the streets of Washington to find out how far it went.
Red Patterson found his number. 565 ft. And the sport has been measuring ever since. Every time you hear those two words, tape measure, know where they came from. A Friday afternoon, a borrowed measuring tape, a young boy and a dollar, and Mickey Mantle’s bat. That’s where the language of greatness begins. If this story gave you something, the specific feeling of realizing that a phrase you’ve heard your whole life came from a single swing on a single April afternoon, hit the like button.
Subscribe. There are more stories like this one. Stories about a man who didn’t just play baseball, he changed the way we talk about it. Number seven, one of a kind, forever.
