Trajectory of a true Ballantine Blast. Another photo re-creation (below) shows the moonshot (yes, it was a night game) soaring, wafting a little, bending to the right of the lights (if not bending the light itself, even in the dark of night), which would not have been cleared in the present photo. A launch angle of 50 degrees is considered extraordinary (90 degrees would be a home run in an elevator-shaft).

May 22, 1963, Yankee Stadium (the original of course), a night game, batting left-handed, switch-hitter Mickey Mantle almost bombs a home run clear out of the park. In subsequent interviews, Mantle considered this the hardest he ever hit a baseball. (He said the same about one in 1956, a six-of-one-thing-half-a-dozen-of-another surely: see below.) Bill Fischer was the pitcher off whom the satellite was launched, long before analytics, before Launch Angle was a gleam in Sabermetricians’ eyes.

Eyewitnesses agree: the ball hadn’t reached its apex when it struck the Stadium facade.

Magically this evening followed, by almost exactly seven years (May 30, 1956: though this date and aspects of “the tail” become questionable, in the telling, in several ways), an afternoon featuring a similar wallop that clipped the iconic facade on its descent. Billy Crystal—who quips that, out of his Mantle-fandom, he’d read from the Torah in an Oklahoma drawl at his Bar Mitzvah a handful of years after 1956—recounts being at that game with his dad.

According to Mantle himself in My Favorite Summer 1956, during the fifth inning of the first game of a Memorial Day (May 30: yes, a Wednesday, a practice ended in 1971) doubleheader, with the score tied 2-2, he smacked “the best ball I ever hit left-handed [see the first paragraph, above]. It was a high drive that came eighteen inches away from going out of the Stadium. Nobody ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium and the reporters made a big deal of the shot I hit off [Pedro] Ramos.”

Other sources indicate the spectacular home run was knocked off  Camilo Pascual, though in his book Mantle places Pascual in the dugout waving a towel at Ramos (who’d memorably “save” a Yankees season eight years later).

Here’s the box score, which substantiates Mantle’s memoir. (He was batting .430 [!] at the time and even stole a base during that game.)

Surely announcer Mel Allen, the Voice of the Yankees, would have almost fallen out of the broadcast booth. Both times.

Again in My Favorite Summer 1956, Mantle notes that the 1963 ball cleared the wall 370 feet away from home plate, and that the Stadium roof was 117-feet high.

The so-called tape-measure home run had already followed Mickey Mantle. Washington, D.C., April 17, 1953: This time batting right-handed as he would against a southpaw like Chuck Stobbs, and using a bat borrowed from Loren Babe, Mantle connected with a self-described “chest-high fastball.” The baseball sailed over the left-centerfield wall, 391 feet from home plate, over the 55-foot-high leftfield bleachers, first time that had happened since these stands were built almost twenty years before. The ball’s also described nicking the National Bohemia Beer sign, fifteen feet higher. Only 4,206 fans are recorded in attendance. But the press corps made much of “the tape-measure” batted-ball.

Various other Mantle homers were also “like a shot off a shovel.” A 1987 book, Explosion! The Legendary Home Runs of Mickey Mantle, by biographer Mark Gallagher, covers all the bases.

Back to May 22, 1963: Estimates of a 600-foot or even 734(!)-foot blast had the Stadium facade not got in the way as the ball was still rising are possibly “over the top.” But this certainly was a shot heard round the world—or at least The Bronx. It is the stuff Legends (and Dreams) are made on.