Homer-Happy

Home runs are sailing out of big-league ball parks like pigeons. Sharp-eyed sluggers on Memorial Day set an alltime high by belting out a total of 50 homers in that one day of eight major-league doubleheaders. In Chicago, where the Milwaukee Braves split with the Cubs, the two teams set a record of 15 homers in two games, the Braves' Bobby Thomson accounting for a pair in each game.

It might have gone into the record books as one of those special days--but the homer-hitters kept right on connecting. After letting his record string of home runs in successive games run out at eight, the Pirates' First Baseman Dale Long came back four days later and banged out his 15th of the season. The Yankees' Centerfielder Mickey Mantle, his batting average running well above .400, hit his 19th and 20th -- and two days later the Yanks were punished in kind by a grand-slam belt off the bat of Detroit's Leftfielder Bob Kennedy.

Sportswriters, while speculating on the possibility of some new kind of rabbit ball, began to say out loud--and with fewer qualifications than usual--that this may be the year that tops Babe Ruth's 1927 record of 60 home runs, and Mickey might be the lad to do it. Can he beat the Babe? This is certainly a season for shattering sports records, and homer-happy club owners have done their bit by pulling in their outfield fences. With such help and such a hot start (at week's end nine games ahead of Ruth's 1927 pace), Mantle looks like the man to cross the 60-homer barrier and set the sentimentalists to keening John Kieran's farewell:

My voice may be loud above the crowd and my words just a bit uncouth,

But I'll stand and shout till the last man's out: There was never a guy like Ruth!

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