His Home Run Traveled 573 Feet
The Orioles thought record-setting bonus baby Dave Nicholson was the next Mickey Mantle, and he did clout some mammoth homers. Just not very many.
The pitch was a meatball, a slider hanging right over the plate. Dave Nicholson swung hard, as always, and his bat met the ball squarely, launching it toward left field on a soaring arc.
Oh, did he launch this one.
The ball not only cleared the fence for a home run, it also cleared the double-deck stands beyond left field.
Nicholson literally hit the ball out of Chicago’s Comiskey Park on May 6, 1964.
In the history of the ballpark, a major league venue since 1910, only three other players had done it — sluggers Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx and Eddie Robinson.
The ball Nicholson hit landed across the street, bounced into a park, rolled and finally came to rest near a 12-year-old boy watching his dad play softball. Whether the ball had skipped off the grandstand roof or cleared the roof entirely wasn’t clear, but regardless, officials later determined the ball had traveled 573 feet before it landed, making it the second-longest home run in major league history. Mantle had famously hit one 585 feet for the Yankees in a game in Washington, against the Senators, in 1953. (Babe Ruth had reportedly hit one 600 feet in 1926, but as with much about Ruth, it was hard to know where legend ended and reality began.)
Nicholson’s mammoth clout was exactly what the Orioles envisioned him doing when they made him the bonus baby of all bonus babies in early 1958, giving him a then-record signing bonus of $105,000. Fourteen of the 15 other teams in the major leagues also had scouted him at Southwest High School in St. Louis and bid for him, sending his price skyrocketing. Nicholson had it all, the scouts said. He was big and fast, strong and confident. He might be the next Mickey Mantle, the scouts said.
To beat out the other bids, the Orioles threw in a scouting job for Nicholson’s dad and not one but two new cars. Nicholson was worth it, said Paul Richards, the Orioles manager-GM, boasting the teenager “could hit a ball farther than any man alive.”
But the Orioles’ dream of having Nicholson lead them to glory with long home runs didn’t materialize. After watching him do a lot more striking out than homering for a few years, the Orioles traded him to the White Sox in the deal that brought Luis Aparicio to Baltimore.
Nicholson was with the White Sox, not the Orioles, when he hit the ball entirely out of Comiskey Park in 1964.
The musclebound slugger who fails to deliver is a classic baseball archetype, of course. Mighty Casey struck out in 1888 — the year the poem “Casey At the Bat” was published — and countless of his ilk have followed. After Richards joined the Orioles in 1955 with full control of the front office, including the scouting department, one of his first major “gets” was Bob “Tex” Nelson, a high school slugger nicknamed “The Babe Ruth of Texas.” Alas, Nelson’s career home run total (0) fell short of Ruth’s (714).
That didn’t stop the Orioles from pursuing Nicholson a few years later. The sight of a prospect hitting a ball out of sight was and still is an irresistible lure. Indeed, a year after they signed Nicholson, the Orioles pursued another promising high school slugger, this one from Florida. “I was touted as ‘the next Dave Nicholson,’” Boog Powell told me in his Bird Tapes interview. His price tag plummeted when he slumped in a state tournament, enabling the Orioles to sign him for far less than Nicholson made. At any price, Powell wound up being a better investment.
In hindsight, the Orioles’ handling of Nicholson included mistake after mistake. Just weeks after they signed him in 1958, they brought him to their major league spring training camp and put him in the batters’ box.
“He had a lot of talent, but they screwed him up,” said Barry Shetrone, another top Orioles prospect from that era, in a 1999 interview for my book on Orioles history. “Maybe he’d have got screwed up anyway, but at least let him do it on his own. They brought him to spring training and he was scared to death. You could just look at him and know. Who wouldn’t be? You’re 19; you’re the biggest bonus baby; your father got a scouting job and two cars. Now you’re in a major league camp with players you’ve heard of, and they start messing with your batting stance because you aren’t making contact. The very first day, they had guys working with him. I felt sorry for him. It didn’t make sense. They had to see something special in the guy to give him all that money. Why change it?”
Nicholson’s confidence was surely already an issue when he began his pro career with the Orioles’ Class A affiliate in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the spring of 1958. It quickly became clear curveballs gave him trouble as he struggled to make consistent contact, the classic issue for doomed/failed sluggers. After he hit just two home runs while piling up 33 strikeouts early in the Class A season, he was demoted to a Class B affiliate in Wilson, North Carolina. A Sports Illustrated reporter found him there, hitting .220 and lamenting, “I can’t hit anything.” Before the season was over, he would be demoted again, this time to Class D, the lowest level in the minors.
His poor season had ramifications at the highest levels of the Orioles’ organization. The owners had already thought Richards, with his unchecked authority, was wasting too much money on failed prospects before he signed Nicholson. After watching Nicholson’s downward arc through the minors in 1958, the owners took away Richards’ control of the front office and hired a GM, Lee MacPhail. (Richards remained the Orioles’ manager through the 1961 season.)
The Orioles still believed in Nicholson. “He was scouted. We know what he can do; give him time,” his Class B manager told Sports Illustrated. Sure enough, he improved in 1959, hitting 35 home runs at Class C.
“Dave was probably the single greatest talent I’ve ever seen,” Orioles pitcher Steve Barber said in his Bird Tapes interview. “People asked me what I thought of him, and I said I’d have given him the money in a minute. His potential was unreal. He was 6-2, 220, with a rifle for an arm. A real nice guy, very sincere person. He just couldn’t hit the breaking ball.”
Even though he wasn’t dominating opponents at Class A in 1960, the Orioles brought him up to the majors in May. Nicholson was in Baltimore for the rest of the season, but he hit just five home runs and struck out 55 times as a reserve outfielder.
“We used to sit in amazement and watch him swing,” said Shetrone, a Baltimorean who’d attended Southern High School. “I couldn’t believe it. Everything was perfect, except he never made contact. You’d be sitting in the dugout with a side view, and you’d go, ‘How did he miss it?’ His head was right on it and everything. When he hit ‘em, he hit ‘em hard. But not enough.”
The Orioles sent him to Triple A to start the 1961 season as part of a platoon, but Nicholson asked to go a level lower, to Double A, so he could play every day. “I keep trying,” he said, according to the website RIP Baseball. He stayed in Double A all year, delivering mixed results. His .248 average and 149 strikeouts in 121 games were ominous, but he did hit 20 homers, drive in 73 runs and produce an .810 OPS figure.
Finally, in 1962 — his fifth year in pro ball — he made the Orioles’ roster and spent a full year in Baltimore. But he couldn’t crack the everyday lineup as the younger Powell shot by him and earned a starting job. Forty-three percent of Nicholson’s at-bats resulted in a strikeout, and he hit just .173. Months after the season, the Orioles traded him to Chicago.
His first year in Chicago was his best in the majors, which was saying something because he led the American League in striking out. But he did hit 22 homers and drive in 70 runs. The White Sox saw enough to keep him around for a few more years, but his production diminished, and in general, his nays outweighed his yays. On the day he hit the ball out of Comiskey Park, he also struck out three times. The White Sox traded him, and after brief stops with the Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves, he was out of the major leagues for good at age 27. Over parts of seven seasons in the majors, he’d batted .212 with 61 home runs and 573 strikeouts.
“Looking back, it was disappointing because I wanted so bad to do better,” Nicholson told The Baltimore Evening Sun in 1982, according to RIP Baseball. “If you think you can shoot 70 in golf, and you shoot 80, you’re not happy. But I always hustled and played good defense. I did the best I could.”