Griffey’s Season Is No Minor Feat

You can’t help but feel a grudging admiration for Seattle slugger Ken Griffey Jr. for benching himself in the last days of the divisional race to conserve his energies for the playoffs, sacrificing in the process all chance to catch up to the Babe Ruth-Roger Maris 60-61 homer totals.

On the other hand, it doesn’t appear to have done him or his team much good.

Besides, he was trifling with the single most glamorous sports record of all. Only a 57 by a golfer in a U.S. Open could match it.

The trouble is, baseball is not truly a team sport. As chronicled here before, it’s a series of solo performances. It’s like grand opera. You remember Caruso hitting a high C more than you remember the plot.

Homer stats have always fascinated baseball fans, the way knockouts awe fight fans, aces tennis fans, 80-yard runs (or passplays) football fans and 9.1 hundreds track fans.

Quick now, who is the greatest home run hitter in baseball history? Careful now. You have to say Henry Aaron and Babe Ruth lifetime. And you have to say Roger Maris and the Babe single season.

Or do you?

How about a slugger named Joe Hauser? Ever heard of him? Of course not. “Unser Choe,” as the fans in Minneapolis used to classify him, never shone in the grand old game because he came along too soon.

What if I told you youngsters out there that Unser Choe hit 69 home runs one season and 63 another? And he hit the 69 playing for Minneapolis and 63 playing for Baltimore?

That would certainly seem to black out Maris’ 61 and Ruth’s 60.

But it’s a trick. Because, back in 1933 when Joe hit 69 home runs there, Minneapolis was still in the minor leagues. So was Baltimore in 1930 when he hit 63 there.

Still, 132 home runs in two seasons is an awesome accomplishment. Consider that Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 and never hit more than 40 in any other season (39 was his high-water mark). Ruth, of course, hit more than 40 11 times and more than 50 four times. Aaron never hit 50 in a year.

The joke is that Our Joe was presumably hitting in bandbox ballparks against inferior pitching. He made it to the big leagues (Philadelphia Athletics) and, in 1924, he was second in the league in home runs with 27 (Babe Ruth had 46).

Joe always claimed that teammate Ty Cobb ruined him out of jealousy by deliberately cobbling up his home run stance in favor of Cobb’s Punch-and-Judy choke-up stance. No one believed his excuse till many years later when Cobb was perceived as the malevolent presence he had become and other players came forward to similarly complain.

Was Joe a fluke? Well, in a game at Philadelphia in 1924, he rapped out three homers and a double setting a (then) major league record for total bases in a game. He hit 399 homers in his minor league career, 79 in his brief big league career.

If Unser Choe doesn’t catch your eye, how about a guy who hit 72 homers in a single season? That would be Joe Bauman, who hit six dozen dingers for Roswell, N.M., in the Longhorn League in 1954.

Now, New Mexico is altitudinous, and this Joe not only had close fences but thin air going for him.

So did Tony Lazzeri when he hit 60 home runs for the Salt Lake City Bees in 1925. He broke that homer mark two years before Ruth, but Tony had a 197-game season going for him. He drove in 222 runs that year!

Dick Stuart hit 66 home runs for Lincoln, Neb., in 1956. He was to hit 42 in the big leagues (Boston, 1963) but Dick’s trouble was, he came with a glove attached.

Most of these players’ troubles came because they played before the designated-hitter rule.

The home run has a grip on the public imagination no base-stealing record, hardly any pitching record and no other batting record can match. The front offices wisely perceived the trend Ruth set. The home run was really the House That Ruth Built. The manufacturers started tailoring the ball to the new era. After Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920, he cracked that it was “like hitting a cantaloupe.” The American League changed it to a ball the pitchers said you could hear ticking.

The National League, poor lambs, countered by raising the seams on its baseball and became known as “the curveball league.” Didn’t sell many tickets. Didn’t win many World Series. In 1930, the Brooklyn slugger, Babe Herman, hit what he was sure was going to be a seat-breaking homer. The center fielder caught it in medium depth. Herman tracked down the ball. “It had a flat spot in it,” he was to recall.

In 1955, a new presence loomed in the National League. An infielder, of all things, a shortstop, at that, went from 19 home runs a year to 44, a few years later to 47. The spies of the sport went to work on the Chicago Cubs’ bat rack. They found that Mr. Ernie Banks, later Mr. Cub, was using a 30-ounce bat. No one had ever thought of that before as an aid to power. Babe Ruth’s bat was 50 ounces.

Ernie hit homers with speed, not strength. He went to the Hall of Fame. The home run went to epidemic.

So, Ken Griffey declined a part in this drama. It was like Clark Gable turning down Rhett Butler. When you’re that close to history, you don’t take the night off. Frank Howard once hit 10 home runs in six days. Babe Ruth once hit six in two days (four games). Griffey has almost 30 multiple-homer games in his career.

Junior blew it. Junior would be remembered far longer for 60-plus home runs a season than as one of 25 guys who made it to a Seattle World Series. Particularly if you don’t get there. If it comes up again, just hit the damn ball, Junior!