As Scotland took the pitch, I asked one of my new friends at Biddie Early’s if they sing God Save The King or Flower of Scotland.
“Flower of Scotland,” he said as he put his arm around me. “Lizzie’s in a box.”
Very rare "L" for you, but the weather conditions say we had the perfect ingredients for it to happen:
1) Daily gusts were not recorded back in the 1940s (so the 20 to 25mph winds reported were just the sustained number, and that's only at the ground).
2) The nature of the conditions that day were well aligned to produce MUCH higher gusts once you get more than 30 or 40 feet in the air with the dry line pushing through before the surface cold front. So if that ball caught a good gust, it was probably being pushed by 50mph+ winds in the exact direction it was hit.
3) There was no 600 club at the time to block the burly breeze.
4) Dew points plunged 20 degrees in the hours before the HR was hit, but temperatures kept rising. This meant you not only had ideal conditions for the ball to carry more, but it also lends more evidence to the idea that gusts would have been MUCH higher just off the ground.
5) The humidity also fell from 87% in the pre dawn hours that day to 25% by 2:00pm in that afternoon.
If there's a day in the record book where that HR was mostly likely to be hit, it was that one.