Q I came across a 1952 baseball card of Mickey Mantle and wondered what happened to him. Can you tell me?
—Barbara Raines, Myrtle, Miss.
The legendary Baseball Hall of Fame member, who played his entire career for the New York Yankees, died in 1995 at age 63 after a liver transplant wasn't enough to save him from years of alcohol abuse. Mantle hit an impressive 536 home runs, but two were record-book spectacular: a monstrous, 565-foot blast in 1953 that left Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and had its distance calibrated based on where the ball was later located (giving rise to the term "tape-measure" homer), and another in 1960 that cleared the wall at Detroit's Tiger Stadium and was estimated to have traveled 643 feet.
