Roger Maris: 61 in 61

1961 Topps Baseball card

     When the baseball season started in 1961, I was only seven years old and in the second grade.  I would turn eight in mid-season.  My Dad was a big sports fan of all Detroit and Boston teams.  I was still a few years away from become a serious Detroit Tigers and Red Wings fan.

I do believe I started to collect baseball cards about that year.  Many of my classmates were into it.  As it seemed fun, and all the guys were talking about it, I started doing it as well.   I believe it was a nickel for five cards and a piece of bubble gum.  The popular brand of that era was Topps.  There were also baseball cards on the back of certain Post cereal boxes.  I collected some of them as well.  The cereal box cards were a distant second to the Topps cards in terms of quality including not having that distinctive bubble-gum smell.  I never had a great collection, maybe thirty or so cards a year.   Many friends and classmates had many more.   This was all well before the collecting of baseball cards became an adult the crazy obsession it was in the 1980s and 90s.

It was through the collection of baseball cards that I got to know the names of the various baseball teams and players.  I got to know the big stars like Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Whitey Ford, and Willie Mays were because the guys were excited when they got one of these cards and they showed them off.   I especially got to know the stars of the hometown Detroit Tigers like Norm Cash, Frank Lary, Rocky Colavito, Jim Bunning, and Al Kaline who just passed away this year.  I was sure even then that Topps limited the number of Al Kaline cards in Michigan to keeps us buying cards in the hope of landing a coveted Kaline card.

Part of the second-grade guy talk about baseball cards was the lore and legend of whose older brother or uncle had a classic old card.  That is when I first learned about the likes of Ty Cobb, Hank Greenburg, Dizzy Dean, Lou Gehrig and, of course, Babe Ruth.  Babe Ruth, the sultan of swing, the man and legend, was the holder of the single season and lifetime home run record.

It was that year, 1961, that I learned who Roger Maris was and of the furious race between himand his Yankee teammate, Mickey Mantle, to break Babe Ruth’s single season home run record.  While Colavito is rarely mentioned in that race, he did slug an impressive 45 home runs that same year.  But, as we all know, it was Maris who broke Ruth’s single season home run record of 60.  Maris hit 61 in ’61. 

I recall we kids were proud of and kind of idolized Maris but that our parents’ generation weren’t impressed because of their reverence for Ruth.  It rubbed off on me to some degree when compounded with the fact that he never hit even half that number of home runs in a season.  Roger Maris fell off my radar as he played for the Yankees through 1966 and then finished-up with the Cardinals for the 1967 and ’68 seasons.

I was motivated to write this because I recently watched the 61* (2001).  It gave me a better perspective on the times, the fans, the New York sportswriters, and, of course, Maris and Mantle.  I learned that it was a myth that his single season home run record has an asterisk because Roger Maris set his record in an era where there were 162 games per season and Babe Ruth set his record in 1927 when there were only 154 games per season.  The notion of an asterisked record was suggested by the commissioner of baseball at the time, Ford Frick, who we later came learn was a ghost writer for Babe Ruth.

Maris and Mantle were friends.  The same cannot be said about Ruth and Gehrig when they battled for the home run title in 1927.  Mantle noted "Roger Maris was the best all-around baseball player I ever saw."  Was he?  His lifetime batting average was 260 which is not too special.  Consider his other achievements (Wikipedia):

• 7 time All-Star (1959 – 1962)
• 3 time World Series champion (1961, 1962, 1967)
• AL pennant champion team (1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964)
• NL pennant champion team (1967, 1968)
• 2 time AL MVP (1960, 1961)
• 2 time  AL RBI leader (1960, 1961)
• AL Gold Glove Award (1960)
• New York Yankees retired his #9
• MLB single season home run champion (1961–1998)
• AL leader in home runs, runs scored, and total bases (1961)
• AL leader in RBIs and extra base hits (1960, 1961)
• AL leader in slugging average (1960)
• AL leader in fielding average as right fielder (1960, 1964)
• NL leader in fielding average as right fielder (1967)
  

Those are some amazing accomplishments.  By all accounts, he was a very good player.  He experienced a lot of stress during 1961 that probably cut his career short and even his life.  Maris died too young, in 1983 at the age of 51, of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. 

Oddly, some say shockingly, Roger Maris is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  It is a shame.  His breaking Babe Ruth’s record and not being the kind of personality that the New York sportswriters wanted him to be, soured him to the sportswriters and hence the public.  Sportswriters vote for the Hall of Fame.  Here is an excerpt from Steve Buttry in his blog, Hated Yankees, posted in 2009:

Roger Maris is not in the Hall of Fame because he didn’t suck up to baseball writers during his chase of Babe Ruth. Period. Commissioner Ford Frick hated him for breaking Ruth’s record and baseball writers hated him for not being their buddy and not being Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth. Every other excuse anyone gives for him not being in the Hall of Fame is fiction.

In Quora, December 3, 2017, B. R. Beardon wrote:

I think the reason is he didn’t play long enough, not that he wasn’t good enough. Hitting 61 ruined Maris. He was so hated and taunted by the Yankee fans that year and following years that the pressure must have been enormous. The year he hit 61 his hair fell out from stress.

He said, "Every day I went to the ballpark in Yankee Stadium as well as on the road people were on my back. The last six years in the American League were mental hell for me. I was drained of all my desire to play baseball."

Mantle backed that up. In every book I’ve read on Mantle he said Maris was a really good ball player who was pounded unmercifully by the fans. It was Mickey Mantle’s opinion that given a fair shake, Maris would have been a great baseball player.

On NPR, July 17, 2013, Frank Deford said:

In 1961, the American League schedule was lengthened by eight games to 162, and it was on this date that summer that the commissioner, of whom it was once written: An empty cab drove up to the curb and Ford Frick got out - declared that even if some player broke Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs, it would not count if he needed more games than Ruth had had.

So, when Roger Maris hit his 61st in the last game of the longer season, the distinction did not displace Ruth in the record books, but was merely listed along with The Babe's lesser number. This all became moot in 1998 when Mark McGwire hit his 62nd homer, there to be graciously greeted by Maris' family survivors and, of course, Sammy Sosa then three-times topped Maris and Barry Bonds hit 73 in 2001.

Subsequently, McGwire admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs, and the only people who don't assume the same of Bonds and Sosa also believe that Neil Armstrong's Moon landing was a hoax and that Ford Frick was a wise man.

We may not have any Major League Baseball this year.  Next year, 2021, will mark the 60^th Anniversary of Maris’s 61 home run season.  I hope the baseball world recognizes and celebrates the breaking of that record by an excellent ballplayer by, from all counts, was a good and decent person.