July Acquisitions...Show Your Sparklers

Replacement. Label is parsed using google's tesseract ocr (I use mode 7 for labels).

This photo may look familiar to some…I’ll include why after the jump…

565 foot Home Run
4/17/53
Griffith Stadium
Washington – Pitcher: Chuck Stobbs Washington Senators

(hit right handed)

This ranks as one of, if not the, most famous home run in history. It's the home run that coined the term "tape measure home run" and is listed in the Guinness Book of Sports Records as the longest home run to be hit in a regular-season major league game.
The Yankees were playing the Senators at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC. Griffith Stadium was a little bandbox of a ballpark but, as Mickey said, "It wasn't that easy to hit a home run there. There was a 90-foot wall in center-field, and there always seemed to be a breeze blowing in." Lefty Chuck Stobbs was on the mound. A light wind was blowing out from home plate for a change. It was two years to the day since Mickey's first major league game. Mickey stepped up to the plate. Stobbs fired a fastball just below the letters, right where the Mick liked them, and he connected full-on with it. The ball took off toward the 391-foot sign in left-center-field. It soared past the fence, over the bleachers and was headed out of the park when it ricocheted off a beer sign on the auxiliary football scoreboard. Although slightly impeded, it continued its flight over neighboring Fifth Street and landed in the backyard of 434 Oakdale Street, several houses up the block.
Billy Martin was on third when Mickey connected and, as a joke, he pretended to tag up like it was just a long fly ball. Mickey didn't notice Billy's shenanigans ("I used to keep my head down as I rounded the bases after a home run. I didn't want to show up the pitcher. I figured he felt bad enough already.") and almost ran into Billy! If not for third base coach Frank Crosetti he would have. Had Mickey touched Billy he would have automatically been declared out and would have been credited only with a double.
Meanwhile up in the press box Yankees PR director Red Patterson cried out, "That one's got to be measured!" He raced out of the park and around to the far side of the park where he found 10-year-old Donald Dunaway with the ball. Dunaway showed Red the ball's impact in the yard and Red paced off the distance to the outside wall of Griffith Stadium. Contrary to popular myth, he did not use a tape measure, although he and Mickey were photographed together with a giant tape measure shortly after the historic blast. Using the dimensions of the park, its walls and the distance he paced off, Patterson calculated the ball traveled 565 feet. However, sportswriter Joe Trimble, when adding together the distances, failed to account for the three foot width of the wall and came up with the 562-foot figure often cited. However, 565 feet is the correct number.
This was the first ball to ever go over Griffith Stadium's left-field bleachers. Most believe the ball would have gone even further had it not hit the scoreboard. At any rate, it became one of the most famous home runs ever. It was headline news in a number of newspapers and a major story across the country. From that date forward long home runs were referred to as "tape measure" home runs. That this home run is ranked as #7 on Mickey's top ten says an awful lot about Mickey's incredible power. For most players it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime shot if they were lucky enough to even come close to this distance.

Simply incredible.