Having a Career Day by Stan Fischler

Author:Stan Fischler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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SOMEBODY ACTUALLY OUT-BABED THE GREAT RUTH [ROGER MARIS, 1961]

In 1961, Roger Maris assaulted the record books and took on two legends: one living, one dead; one his teammate, the other the greatest player ever to take the field for the greatest franchise in the history sports. The two men I am of course referring to are Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle.

Maris’ sixty-one homers in 1961 set the single-season record, breaking Ruth’s old mark of sixty, and in doing so, he outpaced Mantle—a legend in his own right—in the great home run chase of 1961, and overcame a deck that was very much stacked against him.

Maris was no Mantle or Ruth—neither in stature in the game of baseball, nor personality. He was the crew cut from Fargo, ND—a man often described as surly, quiet, or aloof—the anti-Ruth, and the opposite of the charming Mantle. Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby summed up the general sentiment in baseball toward Maris best when he said, “Maris has no right to break Ruth’s record.”

Adding to storm surrounding Maris was that 1961 was no normal season for Major League Baseball to begin with. The league expanded from eight teams to ten and lengthened the season from 154 games to the familiar 162, raising questions as to what would happen if any records were broken—would it count? Should there be separate records?

As the M&M boys neared Ruth and the affront to his record became serious, Commissioner Ford Frick spoke out on the matter and declared that any record set in more than 154 games would be a separate record—not the official mark. In other words, for Maris to be the “real” home run king, he would need to hit the record-breaking dinger by game 154.

Frick, who perhaps would best be described by replacing the first consonant in his name with the letter P, was a friend of Ruth’s and would’ve likely agreed with the aforementioned Hornsby’s remark.

Hitting sixty-one home runs is no small feat, even under normal circumstances—only eight times has that magical mark been met or equaled. The point is that hitting sixty home runs is phenomenally difficult, but to do it with the literal weight of the world on your shoulders and most of baseball rooting for you to fail? Seemingly impossible—and it’s this fact that makes Maris’ 1961 so remarkable.

Maris dealt with booing (even in his own ballpark), viscous hate mail, and sports writers who were intent on tearing him down. In fact, the pressure got to be so much, that Maris’ hair began to fall out from stress. Perhaps no fact describes just how lowly regarded he was, even by his own fans, than this sad but true anecdote:

When Maris finally did hit the record breaker in the final game of the season, he did so in a half-empty Yankee Stadium. The plaque in Yankee Stadium’s monument park saluting Roger Maris’ 1961 season reads “against all odds,” and it’s difficult to describe it any better than that—because in 1961, for all that Maris

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