May 22, 1963: Mantle’s missile thwarts A’s comeback

Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper Jr. had a wonderful day on Wednesday, May 22, 1963. He was feted to a ticker-tape parade in New York City and an audience with President and First Lady John and Jacqueline Kennedy.1 A week earlier, Cooper had commanded the Faith 7 spacecraft and orbited Earth 22 times in the last of the Mercury Project missions. Fellow Oklahoman Mickey Mantle told the Associated Press that Cooper was his hero.2

Mantle hoped that Cooper, who was an Air Force test pilot before becoming one of America’s first astronauts, would be at that night’s game at Yankee Stadium, but Cooper and his wife instead attended a Broadway play, Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. 3

As it turned out, Mantle had his own experience with high flight in the game between his Yankees and the visiting Kansas City Athletics.

The game was played before a modest crowd of 10,312 despite pleasant 70-degree weather at game time. Coming into the game, the Yankees, who had won two straight World Series and three American League pennants in a row, were in third place with a 19-13 record. They were just a game back of the Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox, who were both 23-15.

The visiting A’s were 20-16 and two games out of first. They sent Ted Bowsfield (3-4 record with an earned-run average of 4.24) to the mound to square off against the Yankees’ Bill Stafford (2-2, 4.12).

Originally signed by the Boston Red Sox, Bowfield was sent to Cleveland with Marty Keough at the trading deadline in 1960 for Carroll Hardy and Russ Nixon, then selected by the Los Angeles Angels in the expansion draft later that year. He posted winning records in the Angels’ first two seasons, 1961 (11-8) and 1962 (9-8), but fought through arm problems in 1962 and was the “player to be named” to complete a trade with the A’s for Dan Osinski prior to the 1963 season. Bowsfield was coming off two strong complete-game road performances. On May 11, he handcuffed the slugging Minnesota Twins for eight hitless innings at Metropolitan Stadium before being touched for two hits and a run in the ninth inning of a 5-1 victory.4 On May 17 Bowsfield threw a three-hit shutout at Boston, winning 2-0 at Fenway Park, a venue supposedly unfriendly to left-handers because of the cozy “Green Monster” in left field.

Stafford had had identical 14-9 records for the Yankees in both 1961 and 1962 but was struggling with a rotator-cuff injury suffered earlier in the season pitching against the A’s at Kansas City.

The Yankees teed off on Bowsfield in the bottom of the second inning. The lefty gave up a double to Roger Maris on a ball played poorly by Manny Jiménez in right field, and a single to Joe Pepitone, sending Maris to third. Tony Kubek’s single scored Maris, sending Pepitone to third, with Kubek taking second on the throw to third. Pitcher Stafford, a .155 career hitter, singled to score Pepitone and Kubek. Clete Boyer’s grounder to shortstop forced Stafford, then Boyer advanced two bases on a wild pitch and scored on a triple by Bobby Richardson for a 4-0 Yankees lead.

After Tom Tresh drew a walk, A’s manager Eddie Lopat summoned Dave Thies, a 26-year-old rookie making his sixth of just nine appearances in the majors. When interviewed 60 years later, his relief appearance at Yankee Stadium was the outing Thies recalled most clearly.

The righty remembered thinking while walking from the bullpen to the mound that this was the “real deal”—these Yankees were not just names on baseball cards. He also noticed that the stadium lights were no better than those in the Class B Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League, where he’d played in 1959 and 1960. He assessed the situation: runners at the corners and a left-handed batter “windmilling” bats in the on-deck circle—Mickey Mantle.5

Lopat and catcher Haywood Sullivan, future A’s manager and minority owner of the Red Sox, awaited Thies on the mound. Lopat said, “Go get ’em.” Thies fired four fastballs and Mantle walked, loading the bases. Elston Howard was hit by a pitch, scoring Richardson from third. Maris was next. Thies threw a slider in on Maris’s hands and he hit a weak popup about 12 feet in the air just behind the plate. Thies remembered Maris smiling in embarrassment as Sullivan planted himself to make the catch—but dropped the ball!

Thies threw another slider. The ball carried to deep right field in the direction of an outfielder some of his teammates called “Stone Hands” Jiménez.6 This time, Jiménez caught the ball and Tresh scored on a sacrifice fly. Thies thought that if Maris could hit a ball that poorly but nearly over the 296-foot sign in right field, it was a wonder he didn’t hit 161 home runs in 1961! Thies allowed another run when Pepitone singled Mantle home, but he retired Kubek on a force out to end the seven-run inning.

Thies settled down and pitched four scoreless innings. He had a scare in the sixth when Mantle batted and he heard two loud cracks, the first when the ball hit Mantle’s bat, the second when it almost immediately landed in the glove of Jiménez, who had Mantle played perfectly in right. Thies pounded his glove and said to himself, “Take that, Mick.”7

Stafford was cruising with a three-hit shutout and a 7-0 lead after seven innings before a disastrous eighth inning when the A’s sent 11 men to the plate and scored six runs. Four hits, two walks and errors by the normally reliable Boyer at third and Kubek at shortstop led to four unearned runs. The big hits were a two-run home run by Gino Cimoli and a two-out, two-run single by Wayne Causey. Stafford gave way to Marshall Bridges, who himself was replaced by a 23-game winner from 1962, Ralph Terry, before the inning ended.

Rookie Dale Willis pitched a scoreless seventh inning for the A’s despite allowing a single to Joe Pepitone and hitting Tony Kubek with a pitch. Bill Fischer  (6-0, 1.74) pitched a scoreless eighth. Kansas City tied the game, 7-7, in dramatic fashion with two out in the ninth on a homer by Ed Charles off Terry, just beyond the grasp of a leaping Maris.8

The game remained 7-7 after 10 innings. Former Minneapolis Laker basketball player Steve Hamilton pitched a scoreless top of the 11th inning for the Yankees.

Mantle led off the 11th for the Yankees. He had received the third AL MVP Award of his career in 1962. A night earlier, the 31-year-old switch-hitter had slugged two home runs—giving him 412 for his career—and driven in five runs in a win over the A’s.

Batting lefty against the right-handed Fischer, Mantle swung and connected with a fastball from Fischer. The blast hit the façade of the Yankee Stadium roof in right field, approximately 370 feet from home plate and 120 feet high, barely missing leaving Yankee Stadium entirely.

The ball, which Mantle said was the hardest he ever hit, appeared to be rising when it hit the façade; unimpeded, it likely would have traveled approximately 600 feet.9 Thies remembered how the ball struck with such force that it bounced back near the infield.10

Hamilton received the win with Fischer taking the loss. New York Times sportswriter John Drebinger summarized, “The Yankees brought down the Kansas City Athletics, 8-7, in a torrid 11-inning struggle at the Stadium last night as Mickey Mantle belted one of the most powerful home run drives of his spectacular career.”11 Perhaps A’s coach Jimmie Dykes, whose career in baseball began in 1917, summed things up best when he said Mantle’s missile was the “hardest hit ball I have ever seen.”12    

On June 5, two weeks after his tape-measure home run beat the A’s, Mantle broke a bone in his left foot when his spikes caught on the fence at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium.13 He missed two months and finished the season with 15 home runs in just 65 games. The Yankees went on to win their fourth straight pennant with a 104-57 record before getting swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.14 Mantle’s home run against Sandy Koufax was New York’s only run in the Dodgers’ sweep-capping Game Four win.

Mantle retired after the 1968 season with 536 home runs, more than any other Yankee besides Babe Ruth.

Author’s Note

This article was developed from the author’s research for a SABR Baseball Biography Project biography of Dave Thies in 2023. The author gives special thanks to Thies for graciously providing him with interviews for the biography and this article. Thies and the author graduated from DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis. As of 2023, Thies is the only graduate of the school to play in the major leagues.

Thies recalled that manager Lopat, a former pitcher and teammate of Mantle’s in the early 1950s, had a rule that any pitcher giving Mantle “something to hit” would be fined $500. Nonetheless, six of Mantle’s 1963 home runs were hit against the A’s.  Thies said Fischer was not fined after the May 22 game and also remembered that he received a congratulatory telegram from Cleveland pitcher Pedro Ramos, who served up a Mantle home run that also hit the right-field roof façade, almost as far, while pitching for the original Washington Senators on May 30, 1956.15

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Trading Card DB.

Sources

In addition to the sources shown in the Notes, the author used the following:

Baseball-Reference.com

Retrosheet.org

SABR Biography Project

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA196305220.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1963/B05220NYA1963.htm

Notes

1 Foster Hailey, “City Roars Big ‘Well Done’ to Cooper,” New York Times May 23, 1963: 1.

2 Jim Becker (Associated Press), “Mantle’s Towering HR Wins for Yanks,” Troy (New York) Times Record, May 23, 1963: 46.

3 “Coopers Spend Night at ‘Stop the World,’” New York Times, May 23, 1963: 26.

4 The author attended this game at Metropolitan Stadium as a 12-year-old. Bowsfield had previously been successful at this ballpark in 1958 and 1959 as a member of Boston’s Minneapolis Millers Triple-A farm team.

5 Thies’s recollections are from a telephone interview with the author on March 27, 2023.

6 Jiménez, also known as “The Mule,” referencing his strength, leg kick while batting, and stubborn nature, while no more than serviceable in the field, was a good hitter with a .272 batting average in seven major-league seasons and over .300 in a long minor-league career. He led the American League in hitting for much of the 1962 season but was sent to the minors with a .235 average after this game, returning later in the season and finishing at .280.

7 Dave Thies, telephone interview with the author, March 27, 2023.

8 Joe McGuff, “Mantle Ruins A’s Rally/For Second Straight Night, Homer by Mickey Gives Yankees Victory, 8-7, in 11 Innings—Athletics Roar for Six Runs in Eighth,” Kansas City Times, May 23, 1963: 50.

9 Mickey Mantle, “The Hardest Ball I Ever Hit,” Themick.com, accessed June 21, 2023,

 https://www.themick.com/hardestball.html. 

10 Dave Thies, telephone interview with the author, March 27, 2023.  

11 John Drebinger, “Mantle’s Homer Subdues A’s, 8-7; Clout in 11th Almost Clears Stadium—Two-Out Drive in 9th Ties Yankees,” New York Times May 23, 1963: 59.

12 Becker, “Mantle’s Towering HR Wins for Yanks.”

13 George Vecsey, “Mantle on Crutch: ‘I Lived With ’Em,’” Newsday (Long Island, New York), June 6, 1963: 52C.

14 The A’s were above .500 until mid-June. They faded and finished in eighth place, 73-89, a one-game improvement over 1962.

15 Dave Thies, telephone interview with the author, March 27, 2023.