This old footage of Mickey Mantle contains your dad's new favorite bat flip

Before Jose Bautista's epic punctuation mark in the postseason ... before Yasiel Puig made it his signature move (and then decided to withhold the goods) ... before you spent every morning scouring the depths of YouTube for random Korean homers just in the hopes of catching a glimpse of some twirling lumber ... some guy named Mickey Mantle was king of the bat flip:

Twitter user Scott Horsfield recently pointed out one of Mantle's flips in some old Yankees footage, which sent us clamoring back into the archives to unearth more of that sweet, sweet nectar. Turns out that The Mick employed the bat flip with some regularity, though most of those came out of his frustration with himself for having hit into an out.

Bat flips ... they're not just for celebrating anymore. Call us overly optimistic, but if we take the evolution of the bat flip and apply it to other acts of frustration, we're really hoping that in the next 15-20 years, batters will start excitedly snapping bats over their knees after going yard.