Mickey Mantle (536 home runs)
The title of greatest Yankees’ slugger of all-time will forever rest with Babe Ruth, but Mickey Mantle did something the Great Bambino could never do: he hit more home runs as a switch hitter than any player in baseball history.
For 18 years, Mantle terrorized opposing pitching across the American League, hitting 536 home runs in his Hall of Fame career. The Mick won three MVP awards, made the all-star team 16 times, led the league in homers on four occasions, and had a ten-year span between 1955 and 1964 in which he had the top OPS+ in the game eight times.
In short, Mantle was the greatest power hitting switch hitter the game has ever known. Of his 536 home runs, 372 came left-handed and 161 came right-handed. He averaged 36 per 162 games, and twice hit more than 50 in a season, including his career-high of 54 during the epic summer of 1961 in which he battled with teammate Roger Maris to dethrone Ruth.
Mantle’s 500th home run was no easy matter, either. He went 11 days after hitting No. 499 before a seventh inning bomb off the Orioles’ Stu Miller on May 14, 1967, which happened to be Mother’s Day, found the right field seats. At the time, Mantle was just the sixth player to reach the 500 homer plateau.
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“It felt like when you win a World Series – a big load off your back,” Mantle said after the game that day. “I wasn’t really tense about hitting it, but about everybody writing about it. We weren’t doing well and everywhere you’d see, ‘when is Mantle going to hit 500’ instead of about the team winning or losing. Now maybe we can get back to getting straightened out.”