Mickey, Minnie and the Gump

Mickey Mantle as a rookie in 1951

Big game 74 years ago today at Chicago's Comiskey Park, where Mickey Mantle launches his first career homer for the Yankees and Minnie Minoso becomes the first Black player in White Sox history on the day after arriving in a trade with Cleveland.

Minnie Minoso

Serving up the first of Mantle’s 536 career homers is right-hander Randy Gumpert.

Historians note that Mantle’s homer — a two-run shot to deep right field — comes in the sixth inning, giving the Yankees a 5-3 lead in a game they eventually win 8-3 before a Tuesday afternoon crowd of 14,776 on the South Side.

The Yankees need to rally from an early 2-0 deficit that comes on Minoso’s two-run homer to center field in the bottom of the first inning off New York starter Vic Raschi.

As for Gumpert, he enters the game in the sixth inning, just in time to give up Mantle’s first homer.

Gumpert actually makes a habit of serving up homers only to the best.

Randy Gumpert

During his time in the majors from 1935-52, Gumpert – photographed here with the Philadelphia A’s in the late 1930s by the late, great Charles Conlon – gives up 92 homers in his career with 21 of them going to Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra, Hank Greenberg, Joe DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Mize, George Kell, Larry Doby, Hal Newhouser and, of course, Mickey Mantle.

Mantle does well enough, too, against Hall of Famers, hitting 6.7 percent of his 536 career homers off the septet of Early Wynn, Jim Kaat, Bob Lemon, Jim Bunning, Hoyt Wilhelm, Jim Palmer and Bob Feller.

As for Minnie Minoso, he does even better – at least percentage wise – than Mantle against Hall of Famers as 12.4 percent of his career homers (23 of 185) in the American League come off a near-identical group of Hall of Famers in Bunning, Wynn, Lemon, Feller, Kaat, Whitey Ford and Hal Newhouser.