Did Mickey Mantle Really Hit a 565-Foot Home Run?

That’s what the myth long has been. On the 25th anniversary of his death, here’s a look back.

Gene Woodling swore that Mickey Mantle’s prodigious 565-foot home run at Washington’s Griffith Stadium on April 17, 1953 — considered to be the longest homer in major league history — wasn’t the farthest ball he’d ever seen hit.

Woodling, who played six years with the New York Yankees (1949–54) and was a member of five consecutive World Series champions, told ex-teammate Phil Rizzuto that Mantle hit one even farther in 1954.

“I was there the day he hit that ball out of Griffith Stadium,” Woodling said in Rizzuto’s book The October Twelve, published in 1994. “He hit one farther the next year at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. But he got so much publicity the year before that they couldn’t surpass it. No one, including Babe Ruth, hit them consistently as far as Mantle did. Mantle was unbelievable. I don’t think he ever realized the talent he had. He was just a small-town boy who came to New York to swing a bat.”

It was 25 years ago today that Mantle died at the age of 63 from a heart attack which occurred a little more than two months after he’d received a liver transplant. He was one of baseball’s greatest stars, a hero to a…