Roger Maris: Home Run King or Not?
Forty-five years ago, on October 1, 1961, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees smacked his sixty-first home run of the season, surpassing his fellow Yankee Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record of 60. Ruth’s mark had stood for 34 years; Maris’s lasted for 37. Both how he got it and how he lost it would prove controversial.
In 1998 Mark McGwire hit 70 homers and Sammy Sosa hit 66. In 2001 Barry Bonds hit 73. McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds are all suspected of having used performance-enhancing drugs to boost their home-run totals. Maris’s own accomplishment was diminished not by drugs—the steroids scandals were decades away in 1961—but by another circumstance. When Ruth swatted his 60 four-baggers, major-league baseball was on a 154-game season. In 1961, the American League went to a 162 games. It took Maris all 162 to reach his total; after 154 games, he’d hit only 59. So for many, including Ford Frick, the then-commissioner of baseball, Maris’s record didn’t replace Ruth’s. The Babe’s record stood; Maris had merely set a separate mark. Frick’s ruling would rankle Maris for the rest of his life.
A shy, not very articulate Midwesterner, Maris was 26 and in his fifth major-league season when the 1961 campaign began. He’d had a stellar 1960, his first year with the Yanks, clouting 39 homers and winning the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. But he got off to a rotten start in ’61, batting below .200 for much of April. He didn’t hit his first home run until April 26, weeks into the season. Meanwhile his teammate Mickey Mantle began slugging homers right away. Maris finally kicked into gear in May; by the end of the month he had 12 home runs to Mantle’s 14. Envisioning a stadium-filling rivalry, the Yankees’ owner, Dan Topping, called Maris into his office and told him to stop worrying about his mediocre batting average and concentrate on hitting homers.
By early June and the Yanks’ forty-fifth game, Maris had 15 homers to Mantle’s 14. The press began to notice the pair’s numbers and compare them with Ruth’s; after 45 games in 1927, Ruth had hit 16. Fans took sides, supporting Maris, Mantle, or Ruth. “I’d hate to see a bum like Maris break Babe’s great record,” one fan wrote to The Sporting News. A generational factor emerged: Young fans more often rooted for Maris or Mantle or both, older ones for Ruth.
Between Maris and Mantle, the latter was the sentimental favorite. A career Yankee, the Mick was already a legend, a larger-than-life character capable of hitting 450-foot home runs after a night of drinking or womanizing. Except when hung-over, he was a good interview, chummy with the baseball-writing fraternity. Maris, on the other hand, was ill at ease and monosyllabic. The press did its best to create a rivalry between the two, although in fact they shared a Queens apartment that season and were good friends.
On July 17 Maris had 34 homers, Mantle 33. The “M and M boys,” as the press now called them, were both ahead of Ruth’s 1927 pace. Referring to Maris, Ruth’s widow told reporters, “I hope he doesn’t do it. Babe loved that record above all.”
Ford Frick had been close to Ruth as a sportswriter in the 1920s and ’30s, and he “could hardly be described as an impartial man when it came to protecting the glory of the Babe,” in the words of the baseball writer Maury Allen. In July Frick held a press conference announcing that Ruth’s record would stand unless it was broken within 154 games. If a player took more than that, “there would have to be a distinctive mark in the record book,” he said. The sportswriter Dick Young suggested an asterisk, which launched the myth that baseball’s record books always marked Maris’s record with an asterisk. In fact (in what amounts to the same thing), the record books simply listed Ruth’s and Maris’s records separately.
Frick’s ruling, Allen fulminated in a 1986 book on Maris, was “outrageous . . . clearly a biased decision.” Neither Hank Aaron, who broke Ruth’s career home run record, nor Pete Rose, who broke Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record, “ever had to contend with the length of their season. Baseball clearly recognizes Rose as the career hit leader, Aaron as the career home run leader—and should, by all tests of fairness, recognize Maris as the single season home run leader.”
By July 25 Maris had 40, Mantle 38; Ruth at that point had had only 33. America’s sports fans were in a dither. Baseball writers began getting orders from their editors: Write about Maris and Mantle every day, regardless of what else happened during the game. Mantle and Maris were daily backed up against their lockers by dozens of reporters yelling questions. The unassuming Maris couldn’t have been less comfortable. “No matter what he said, he seemed to get in trouble,” said the Yankee Bob Turley. “If he said he wasn’t going for the record, they didn’t believe him. If he said he was, it came out as saying he was attacking Babe Ruth. People portrayed him in the press as public enemy number one because he wasn’t Mickey Mantle.”
On August 6 the M and M boys were tied at 41. On August 22 Maris had 50, Mantle 46. Maris was the first player in baseball to hit 50 homers before the end of August, and only the ninth to hit 50 at all. Fans were now booing him whenever he failed to hit a home run. He broke out in an angry facial rash, and his hair started falling out in clumps.
On September 7 Maris had 55 homers, Mantle 51. Three days later Mantle, who had come down with a bad cold, said to reporters, “I’m finished. I can’t do it. I hope Roger can.” He told Maris to take some of the younger players to Toots Shor’s restaurant, ask for Mantle’s table, sign the check over to him, and try to relax.
Game 154 came on September 20, the Yankees against the Orioles in Baltimore. Maris had 58 home runs. It was his last chance to catch Ruth on the Babe’s terms. “In more than 25 years as a sportswriter,” Allen recalled, “it was the most dramatic, exciting, tension-filled game I have ever witnessed.” In the third inning, Maris hit Number 59. In the seventh he hit a fly ball to the warning track, and it was caught by his friend Whitey Herzog. In the ninth he grounded to the pitcher. As he jogged into the outfield for the bottom of the ninth, the second-base umpire murmured to him, “You gave it a good try, son.”
On September 26, again facing Baltimore, Maris hit Number 60. Mrs. Babe Ruth let him kiss her for the cameras and said she was happy for him. Her graciousness evidently touched him. He told reporters, “I’m glad I didn’t break the Babe’s record in 154 games.” Hitting 60, period, he said, was good enough for him.
Yet lots of suspense remained. Regardless of the number of games it took, could Maris set a new single-season record? On October 1, the last day of the season, the Yankees faced Boston and the rookie pitcher Tracy Stallard at Yankee Stadium. In the fourth inning Maris hit Stallard’s third pitch into the right-field seats for the long-awaited, ambiguous No. 61. After he’d circled the bases, his teammates blocked his way into the dugout, forcing him to stand on the steps and wave to the fans. A 19-year-old from Brooklyn named Sal Durante caught the ball; he was paid $5,000 for it by a Sacramento, California, restaurateur who mounted it in his establishment and later returned it to Maris.
Another ’61 Yankee, Clete Boyer, captured the day’s mixed emotions. Even though Maris was “obviously happy and smiling a lot when he hit it,” Boyer said, “there was an edge of sadness to the entire day. The ruling by Commissioner Frick . . . took so much joy away from the feat. . . . Roger was never one to discuss those kinds of things, but I always had the feeling he was hurt, and hurt badly, by that ruling. It just gave us all, especially Roger, some feeling of emptiness about the final homer. . . . It was more than any man had ever hit, but despite the crowd reaction, despite how much Roger enjoyed it, despite all the press, the entire day was a letdown, a disappointment.”
The Yankees gave Maris no bonus for his feat, although he earned some $150,000 after the season from endorsements and personal appearances. After much haggling, management raised his salary from $37,500 to $72,500. (Mantle’s 1962 salary was $82,000.)
Maris played five more years for the Yankees, was traded to St. Louis, and retired after the 1968 season. The sportswriters’ general verdict was that he was a good ballplayer who had had one spectacular season, and that he couldn’t be ranked with Ruth, Cobb, Aaron, or the other all-time greats. His memories of 1961 were largely bitter. Many fans, he always felt, hadn’t wanted him to break Ruth’s record. As for the Yankee organization, it “always favored Mickey to break the record,” he said in 1971. “I was never the fair-haired boy over there.”
Frick’s ruling kept Maris from an unqualified enjoyment of his home-run mark; as the record books had it, he hadn’t bested Ruth but merely benefited from the expanded season. As late as 1980 he lashed out, “They acted as though I was doing something wrong, poisoning the record books or something. Do you know what I have to show for 61 home runs? Nothing. Exactly nothing.”
Ruth’s and Maris’s records were listed separately until 1991, when, at baseball commissioner Fay Vincent’s behest, the distinction was eliminated. That year, three decades after the fact, the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball’s official statisticians, began listing Roger Maris’s single-season home-run record as the only one. Sadly, Maris was not there to savor his delayed recognition. He had died in 1985 of lymph cancer, only 51 years old.