I remember when it was reported that Mantle could go home to first in 3.1 seconds. Mechanical stop watches were pretty accurate in those days, and fans at home could time his speed to first base while watching games on TV. Nobody at the time disputed the claim. Although people were much less jaded then, and would give such things a pass.
There is no reason to believe that Mantle did not have world class sprinter speed, but he could play baseball too, and for that reason, didn’t spent much time on the track.
Mantle’s speed dissipated quickly for a couple of reasons. He was one of those athletes that was so strong and played so hard, he literally tore his body apart, and was taped up from one injury or another during most of his career. Players played through injuries in those days. And, he was one of the Yankees well known to be a late night carouser, smoking and drinking and staying up all night.
I never saw Mantle play until his final year in the majors, 1966, and it was amazing. Even then, he stood out among the other players like Vanessa Redgrave at a flea market. You could sit down in your seat and look around the field and point and say “That must be Mickey Mantle”. (My wife actually did that, when I took her to a game and she picked out Ken Griffey. There are a few players who just have that statuesque magnificence, like they’re on a field with high school players.)
According to Mickey Mantle - Memories and Memorabilia Casey Stengel was amazed in spring training in 1951 that Mantle, then a shortstop, beat the fastest players in the team by a wide margin. Stengel timed him to run the bases in 13 seconds which is “a good speed for a world-class sprinter.” Within a week he had Tommy Henrich converting Mantle into an outfielder.
Richie Ashburn playing in the same era as Mantle and Mays was regularly making 40-50 putouts in center than they were (about 10% more). He also led in steals (usually around 25-30 a season). Of course, he caught a lot of flies hit off Robin Roberts, so you can’t make too much of his fielding records. He was notoriously weak of arm and hardly ever hit a HR. But he did have a number of inside the park HRs in his career.
Mantle’s first major knee injury was in the World Series his rookie year. Most of the talk about his speed is about what could have been if he didn’t step in that drain and blow out his knee. Quoting stats on how many stolen bases he had doesn’t answer the question since his injuries started right from the beginning of his career.
I’m sorry to be an asshole in a 15-year-old-thread, but… c’mon. In Mantle’s prime, how often did the average person have the opportunity to clearly see and time Mantle’s run to first base on a TV? Holding a stopwatch? Do we have a lot of verified times on that? Are mechanical stopwatches really trustworthy in the hands of some guy sitting at home to click the watch right at the right time?
3.1 seconds is not “fast.” 3.1 second is astonishing. It is effectively claiming that Mantle was indeed the fastest man to ever play professional baseball. Billy Hamilton (the modern one) has never been timed to first base that fast, and being fast is pretty much the only reason Billy is in the major leagues; Hamilton is, even by MLB standards, ludicrously fast. Anything under 4 is lightning - Rickey Henderson or Ty Cobb would have been very proud of 3.9. Hamilton has allegedly been timed under 3.5, which is considered “maybe the fastest person ever.”
Sources that Mantle hit first base in 3.1 seconds are rather few in number, and by “few” I mean there’s exactly one claim of it. Given that 3.1 is a near-superhuman speed, and given that such things in those days were often very fanciful, I think more evidence would be needed to make me think it’s likely.
Sure it does. Even if he was the absolute fastest player ever in the history of the game his first season, and then all that was derailed because of a fluke injury at the end of that season, you can’t make any meaningful statement about his speed during his career, if his pre-injury speed is your only point of reference.
A thought occurs to me: An amateur timing a run to first is going to stop the clock when they see the player touching the base, but they’re likely to start it when they hear the bat hitting the ball. Depending on where the microphones (or ears, if the timer is there in person) are located, that could shave off a good fraction of a second from the measured time.
No it doesn’t. The question was if he was the fastest or one of the fastest of all time. His stats when he was 40 don’t matter. His number of stolen bases after his injury don’t matter. Was he at one time very fast? Probably. We only have the accounts of those who measured his speed at the time. We can’t even take into account his first year stats since he was only up for part of the year and his batting average was low. For most of his career he still moved pretty well even with a lot of injuries.
I’d bet just about anything that Deion Sanders was faster than Mickey Mantle, but Deion never had outrageous stolen base numbers. In fact in his best year, 1994, he swiped 38 bags but was caught 16 times.
When this thread started there was no Billy Hamilton in MLB, but you can rest assured he’s faster than Mantle ever was. You can make a legit case that Hamilton is the fastest baseball player ever.
Well, I was too young to have seen Mantle even when he was washed up (I became interested in baseball about the time he retired, when I was seven or eight), let alone when he was a young speedburner. But I would have serious doubts about him being among the handful of fastest players ever. It’s entirely too reminiscent of lines like “Willie Mays never made a baserunning mistake.” More indicative of a frame of mind (in which the world was a better place back when *we *were kids, whoever *we *may happen to be) than of any objective reality.
Not to say Mantle wasn’t fast. He probably was, maybe even very fast. But that doesn’t imply faster than anybody else, ever.