Seventy-six days until pitchers and catchers … and here’s your daily splash of joy.
Why do you love baseball?
Brilliant Reader Stephen: “A kid yelling to his buddies, ‘Hey, guys — it’s Salvy!’ when the all-star catcher stopped after spotting their backyard game while driving through their neighborhood and asked if he might join them.”
Brilliant Reader Ryan: “Dotting 99 on the black for a called strike three.”
Brilliant Reader Richard: “I believe in baseball, just like I believe in love, Christmas, and pineapple milkshakes.”
If you would like to send in the reason why you love baseball, we’d love to hear it. Send it along to [email protected].
Live PosCast today at noon!
Join Mike Schur and me as we talk about, well, I don’t know what we’ll talk about. We never plan these things, alas. We might answer questions!
1960 Frank Howard Rookie Card
In 1959, 22-year-old Frank Howard played for minor league teams in Victoria, Texas, and Spokane, Washington. He hit a combined .342 with 43 home runs and 126 RBI in 139 games.
But it wasn’t the number of home runs that left everyone breathless.
“Human beings just don’t hit baseballs that far,” Austin manager and former big league pitcher Ernie White said after Howard hit three home runs on three consecutive pitches, one of them at least 500 feet. “I’d never throw him a strike.”
He hit a 450-foot home run one-handed in Victoria (“My hand slipped off,” Howard said apologetically).
He hit one in Amarillo that they never found.
They say he hit 21 home runs in intrasquad Dodgers games during spring training, leaving teammates breathless.
“Oh, I didn’t hit that many,” he told a reporter. “I think that’s pretty exaggerated. And besides, err, those games don’t count, do they?”
As for games that did count, Howard was called up to the Dodgers very briefly as a 21-year-old in 1958. In his second big league at-bat — against Robin Roberts, no less — he hit a home run so hard that Richie Ashburn said when it hit the sign high above the wall at Connie Mack Stadium, it sounded like a cannonball, and he worried that the sign would fall on his head
“I only saw Babe Ruth a time or two, but I know about the tape measures they get out for some of Mickey Mantle’s homers,” Dodgers manager Walter Alston said. “This fellow hits ‘em as far as Mickey. Farther. I guarantee you he won’t miss.”
“Frank Howard will be the greatest thing since Ruth,” his Victoria manager added. This would be impressive if anybody in baseball said it. But his Victoria manager at the time was Pete Reiser, who, you know, was supposed to be the greatest thing since Ruth himself.
“I’ve never seen anything like him,” Reiser said. “One of his good drives will make Mickey Mantle’s tape-measure drives look like pop-ups.”
Frank Howard did not become Babe Ruth for various reasons. But he was awfully, awfully good … and one of my father’s two favorite players, along with Tony Oliva. I think there’s an argument that coming into 1960, he was the greatest baseball prospect in the history of the game.
