First he saw Mantle's 500th HR, then A-Rod's

Massapequa Park man witnesses home run history twice at Yankee Stadium

Jim Baumbach

12:05 PM EDT, August 10, 2007

When Alex Rodriguez recently joined Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle as the only players to hit their 500th career home run in a Yankee uniform, Larry Lapka of Massapequa Park was inducted into an even more exclusive group.

How many other people can say they were in Yankee Stadium and witnessed two of the three historic 500th home runs? The guess here is that only Lapka and longtime public address announcer Bob Sheppard was on hand for when Mantle did it in 1967 and then for A-Rod's a week ago.

"I'm not too lucky in other things," said Lapka, 50, a lifelong Yankees fan, "but with this, I was pretty lucky."

No kidding, because it's not like Lapka has season tickets. He just so happened to be at Mantle's 500th homer because his father decided to take him and two friends there for his 10th birthday (even though it was Mother's Day). And as for the A-Rod homer, his wife picked out that game months ago, and it very well may be the only one they get to this year.

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So it really was some amazing coincidence, and he saw it coming. It took Rodriguez eight homerless games before he hit 500, and as each game passed Lapka kept wondering. Could it be? He talked about it daily with his colleagues at the Long Island trade magazine he works at, wondering whether "lightning could strike twice," as he puts it.

On the hot Saturday afternoon that Rodriguez made history by becoming the youngest to hit home run No. 500, Lapka was sitting in the leftfield upper deck with his wife, Elena, and his 12-year-old son, Joshua. Lapka said their seats weren't too far from the foul pole, so they had a perfect birds-eye view of Rodriguez's first-inning home run.

The celebration in the crowd for A-Rod was raucous, but Lapka said it was a far different setting from when Mantle hit his big blast. "I remember that game pretty vividly," he said. "We were sitting in rightfield upper deck and I don't think the place was even half-filled. There were plenty of empty seats. But when he hit the home run, it sounded like 60,000 people yelling and screaming. It didn't stop. It just continued through the whole game no matter what he did."

His memory is correct. According to the boxscore of the Mantle game, available at baseballalmanac.com, only 18,872 people attended the Sunday afternoon game.

At A-Rod's game, the announced crowd was 54,056.

"It was different back then, because the Yankees were really bad," Lapka said. "At that point people just didn't go out and see them like they do now."

Lapka remembers Mantle making an error while playing first base the boxscore confirms that, as well "but people didn't care. They were just so appreciative of Mickey Mantle doing it that nobody really cared."

Lapka has no memorabilia from that game, except for the priceless memories. He said his father, who still drives a cab in the city at age 76, was constantly reminded for years by his mother for bringing him to a game on Mother's Day.

Lapka, of course, didn't mind. Not one bit. He called that game, "one of my greatest childhood memories." And thanks to a bit of luck and a memorable first-inning blast from A-Rod, he got to relive that memory all over again.

You might even say this whole experience is worth more to Lapka than whatever money that fan winds up getting for retrieving the ball.