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Message: [QUOTE="oldude, post: 2345203, member: 7511"] One of my fondest memories at the old Yankee Stadium happened in the late sixties. My family and I were sitting in the left field bleachers. By the late sixties the Yankees were a shell of their former greatness, and that was truer of no one more than Mickey Mantle who I idolized growing up. The Mick would hobble up to home plate on two bum knees like a 90 year old man. But he still swung the bat as hard as anyone in Baseball. On this particular day he hit a line drive over the shortstop's head for what looked like a single from where I sat. One of the really cool things about sitting in the bleachers is that you see the ball come off the bat before you hear the sound of the bat hitting the ball. A split second after I saw the ball headed over the shortstop, I heard the loudest crack of the bat on a ball I had ever heard. The ball just kept going in the air towards the gap in left center. It finally hit the ground several feet short of the 463 mark and with a giant bounce, hopped over the high wall into the stands. I immediately looked back to the base path and there was Mantle, on two bum knees, rounding 2nd base and heading for third where the umpire stopped him and sent him back to 2nd base with a ground rule double. Bad legs and all, Mantle was running as hard as his battered old body would allow, trying for an inside-the-park HR. A lot of fans, myself included, have always wondered just how good Mantle would have been had he not suffered several devastating knee injuries during his career. [/QUOTE]

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