Sixty one in ”™61. And now 61 years later, 61.
New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge has tied the American League record of onetime New York Yankees right fielder Roger Maris for most home runs in a single season, which Maris set on Oct. 1, 1961, against Tracy Stallard of the archrival Boston Red Sox. (The Major League Baseball record is held by Barry Bonds, who hit 73 in 2001 amid the steroids era.)
There”™s a symmetry in some of the Judge-Maris numbers ”“ Judge wears 99 on his jersey; Maris wore 9 — but not in their narratives. Judge is a media and fan darling who has even Yankee haters rooting for him. Maris was a despised, unsupported player, an interloper in the eyes of many fans and sportswriters who thought he should not have been the one to break Babe Ruth”™s single season record of 60 homers. That honor should”™ve gone, they said, to Maris”™ friendly rival and roommate, centerfielder Mickey Mantle.
This perception had less to do with Maris, a decent family man, than with the reality that the glamorous Mantle was already inured in the public and media”™s minds as the successor to Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. There wasn”™t room for two. Call it a failure of the imagination, poignantly captured in Billy Crystal”™s brilliant film valentine to Mantle and Maris”™ home-run chase that magical summer, “61*.”
Then there were those, like baseball commissioner Ford C. Frick ”“ the Babe”™s ghostwriter ”“ who didn”™t want to see anyone break Ruth”™s record. He announced that unless the record could be broken in the span of the 154 games that constituted the regular season when Ruth played, then it would have an asterisk after it. Maris broke the record in the 162nd game in the first year of the expanded, 162-game schedule. (Though Maris played more games than Ruth, he actually broke the record in fewer at bats.)
The asterisk after that 61 was the scarlet letter that encapsulated everything Maris endured en route to one of baseball”™s greatest achievements. Chasing a ghost and the public”™s notion of a heroic Yankee, Maris was hounded, threatened with death and the kidnapping of his children. He had objects thrown at him. His hair fell out, something that New York Post columnist Jon Heyman doubts ever happened. Even in death ”“ Maris died in 1985 of non-Hodgkin”™s lymphoma, six years before Commissioner Fay Vincent removed the asterisk from his record ”“ he still can”™t get any respect.
Now he shares the record he struggled so mightily to achieve with a man who also has until Oct. 1 to surpass him. Judge, of course, has far surpassed Maris in that other statistic ”“ dollars earned. While the M & M Boys, as Mantle and Maris were known, formed a corporation to deal with all the offers that came their way as they chased the Babe ”“ appearing on TV and in commercials and movies ”“ Maris made $38,000 in 1961, or $360,356 in today”™s money, and $70,000 the next year. Judge, who makes $19 million a year, rejected a seven-year, $213.5 million contract extension from the Yanks to test the free market at the end of the season.
The Bronx Bombers, the most successful sports franchise in North American history with a $6 billion value second in the world only to the Dallas Cowboys, would be foolish to let him walk.
Photograph by Keith Allison / Flickr Creative Commons
