Despite Frick, Roger Maris Left His Mark

It does not seem possible that we could earmark the life of a man with a single, simple piece of punctuation. He existed for 51 years, got married, made friends, played baseball. His life did not end when he put down his bat. It ended Saturday in a Houston hospital’s cancer ward, nearly a quarter of a century since the damnable asterisk was first attached to his name.

There was no shaking it once it was there. It clung to him like a leech. Throughout the ages, in the archives of baseball and in the ledgers of those meticulous little deed recorders who commemorate the glories of the game, he would go down on the record as Roger Maris*, the man who (sort of) hit more home runs in a single season than Babe Ruth. It was a brand forever burned into his hide.

Nothing else the man ever did was distracting enough to make the world forget the 61 of ’61. He did not break any other significant records. He did not do anything amazing in a World Series. He never did hit .350 or 700 home runs. Unlike all the Mantles, Mayses and Musials who made their way to baseball’s Hall of Fame, poor Roger Maris* did not ever model for a marble bust of himself, and is, in fact, still eligible on Cooperstown’s ballot. He was king for a year, not for a career.

It is too late to make it up to him now. His record was cheapened, it was said, because it took him 162 games to stroke his 61st home run, whereas Ruth had required only 154 to hit 60. When the commissioner of baseball, Ford Frick, ruled in 1961 that Maris’ “record” must be accompanied by an asterisk, perhaps he imagined that with an expanded schedule, sluggers would be breaking the 61 barrier every couple of years. They never did.

Worse yet, Frick issued this proclamation while the already-burdened right fielder of the New York Yankees was still trying to catch the Babe. The record had to fall in 154 games or it would not truly be the record.

“What he did, in that one brilliant stroke,” Bill Veeck wrote in his autobiography, “Veeck as in Wreck,” “was to build the interest up to that 154th game and throw the final eight games out in the wash with the baby. What he did was to turn what should have been a thrilling cliff-hanger lasting over the full final week of the season into a crashing anticlimax.”

Years later, there would be comparatively little exception taken to Henry Aaron’s breaking of Ruth’s career home run record with many more turns at bat. Aaron was a worthy successor, by virtue of his many other accomplishments. This guy Roger Maris*, on the other hand, seemed little more than a guy who got lucky. His pursuit of the Babe envenomed much of the public, as if Nikita Khrushchev had just announced imminent plans to put a cosmonaut on the moon.

If Mickey Mantle wanted to smack 61 home runs in a season, that was one thing, but not this other guy. He was somehow undeserving. It was as though neither Pete Rose nor George Brett nor Wade Boggs took aim at Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak, but Buddy Biancalana or Julio Cruz or Dale Berra did. As if precious baseball records should be broken only by baseball players of distinction.

As his season wound down, and the anxiety grew worse, it was all Roger Maris* could do to hang onto his hair and his sanity. The former was coming out in clumps. Years later, two decades’ worth, he was sitting in a dugout at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., watching a Yankee spring practice, when a young sportswriter spotted his familiar sandpapered hairdo.

“Do the young players ever get on you about wearing your hair that way?” the kid asked.

“I doubt if most of them know who I am,” the man said.

“Do you ever think about wearing it long?” the kid asked.

“I’m just glad I’ve got some left,” Roger Maris* said.

What a mixture of joy and torture that 1961 season must have been. As Veeck recalled in his book, the Yankee outfielder was challenging Ruth’s record, “which is the record the same way that Mt. Everest is the mountain.” There was the pressure of beating a deadline. There was the pressure of being in New York. There was the pressure of Ruth’s popularity. And then Frick made an asterisk out of him.

Only 23,154 fans bothered to show up at Yankee Stadium on the day the record fell. “Frick taught the schoolchildren of the nation the meaning of the word ‘asterisk’ (just as) the CIA taught them the meaning of the word ‘fiasco’,” Veeck wrote. “The comparison is apt.”

It is. Roger Maris needs no asterisk. He may not have been a great man, but he was a man who did something great. The time has come to put a different punctuation mark beside his name. Let us do it now, or forever hold our peace. Roger Maris!