The Agony of Roger Maris

I was seven in 1961 when Roger Maris pursued the major league home run record and was hounded by sportswriters for the crime of challenging Babe Ruth.

His teammate, Micky Mantle, who had already won a triple crown and was also chasing Ruth, was the fan favorite. Although Maris had won the MVP award in 1960 with 39 home runs, he was considered a Yankee usurper, an import from Kansas City.

The fans in right field threw at him: chairs, bolts, half-empty soda bottles. Maris retreated into himself. One writer burned him, after which Maris pretty much stopped talking to the rest. “Roger is a beautiful person, believe me. There is no more honorable man,” Sandy Koufax told the New York Daily News columnist Dick Young. But off the field, Maris, who was 26, shut down. Writers painted him as sullen, not the story-book athlete, not grateful (like Ruth) to be playing a boys’ game. Coming to the ballpark stopped being fun. Clumps of his hair fell out. Whatever he felt as he chased a record held by the most worshiped player ever he did not express in public.

Sportswriters invented a story that he and Mantle (his roommate) were quarreling. One day, Maris was reading the sports page while Mantle slept on the other bed. Roger rolled up the paper and gave his friend a whack. “Wake up Mick, we’re fightin’ again.” The fans didn’t see that playful side, not ever.

In 1961, the season had been expanded; Commissioner Ford Frick, keeping the torch for Ruth, declared in midseason that if a player broke the home run record (and only that record) during the final eight games “there would have to be some distinctive mark in the record books.” What could have been a glorious quest became a controversy.

My father took me to Yankee Stadium Sept.1, a Friday night, when the Bombers faced a second-place Tigers team that trailed New York by only two. Maris had 51 homers going in, three ahead of Mantle. Al Kaline tripled for the visitors in the first inning but Whitey Ford kept him from scoring. In the bottom of the first, Maris and Mantle were each retired. It went on like that, 0-0. Going into the bottom of the ninth. Maris was due to lead off.

Fans sitting near us debated whether Maris or Mantle would end it. I secretly rooted for my namesake, as I had all season. I didn’t know his history, how he had been born a Maras in Hibbing, Mn. (with cosmic weirdness, also the hometown of Bob Dylan), into a turbulent family. Roger’s father changed the spelling and moved the family to Fargo, North Dakota, where in high school Roger played baseball and was a football star and met his future wife. All I knew was what I saw: when Maris connected, forearms extended so fully they seemed part of a single parallel beam with the wooden bat, no one had more power. He failed in the ninth, as did Mantle, though two-out singles by Elston Howard, Yogi Berra and Moose Skowron won it.

Maris hit number 61 on the season’s final day, off Tracy Stallard of the Red Sox. The next year he hit 33, after that never more than 26. After the 1966 season, the Yankees, believing that Maris, who had been slowed by injuries, was planning to retire, traded the home run king to the Cardinals for a journeyman third baseman. Two years later he was through.

He finished his 12-year career with 275 round trippers, impressive but not enough today to rank among the top 100 players. Thanks to August Busch Jr., the Cardinals owner and chairman of Anheuser-Busch Cos., Maris acquired a beer distributorship in Florida. In retirement, he was less known and less remembered than other Yankee icons. He died in 1985, only 51.

Although Maris played in seven World Series’, was regularly an All-Star and won two MVP awards, his 61-homerun season was an aberration. He was a solid player who had several standout years and a single season in which he triumphed over adversity and set a record for the ages. What Salieri could dream of a finer moment on a brighter stage?

I wonder today about the relationship that never was, what the modest Yankee might have said had the fans and the writers been willing to listen. Perhaps he would have concurred with the Yankees’ current right fielder, Aaron Judge, another seemingly humble star, who has been stalled at 60 home runs, one short of Maris, for a week now.

With the tension mounting and his at-bats slipping away, Judge, who is 30, betrayed a surprising stoicism. “They kind of happen by accident,” Judge said of the most thrilling play in American sports. “I think homers are more thrown than hit, to be honest. It really takes the right pitch, the right situation. It’s tough to describe, it just kind of happens.”

Judge has the fans on his side, and he has seemed to enjoy his singular season. But he must be feeling the pressure now. I’m rooting for him, a worthy successor to my early hero.