By Edwin Cooney
Yes, indeed, the cost of fame is sometimes higher than the actual achievement, effort or money. Sometimes the price is your very individual dignity. On Wednesday, September 20th, 1961 (exactly 60 years ago today), Roger Eugene Maris of Hibbing, Minnesota and Fargo, North Dakota hit home run Number 59 and barely missed Number 60, thus falling short of Babe Ruth's season home run record from 1927. Back in July of 1961, Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, a personal friend and former ghostwriter for the Babe, ruled that both Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle would have to hit 60 or 61 home runs in 154 games in order to be recognized as the new single season home run king of Major League Baseball. That was the last time the number of games would be an aspect of official record keeping. (The most stark example of this is that 13 years later when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run thus breaking the Babe's career record, baseball rightfully ignored the fact that Henry Aaron had 12,364 career at bats while the Babe had only 8,399 at bats for a difference of 3,965 to "Hammering Henry’s" advantage. (Most modern baseball record holders have a “games played” advantage over their predecessors!)
Nineteen sixty-one was a fresh new year throughout America. We had a new young President, Jack Kennedy, and his lovely wife Jackie. Despite crises in Cuba and Berlin, despite the evil and godless Khrushchev, things were getting freer and perhaps a bit easier in America. Winston Churchill was still alive and in Parliament in Britain, Elvis was out of the army singing and making movies, The Beatles were performing in Germany and the Yankees were still pennant contenders even though they'd just lost the 1960 World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Unlike George Herman (Babe) Ruth, Roger Maris was not naturally lovable! Roger was shy and often moody. He hated to talk about himself or his achievements. Maris came from a somewhat dysfunctional Minnesota and North Dakota family. An outstanding high school athlete, he considered playing football for coach Bud Wilkinson's University of Oklahoma Sooners but decided after visiting the college that he could earn much needed money almost immediately in professional baseball. Initially turned down by the Chicago Cubs, Maris’ next stop with his dad Rudy, Sr., was Cleveland and there they hit pay dirt!
Roger was about 6 feet tall and weighed around 200 pounds. He possessed a strong right throwing arm akin to those of Rocky Colavito (a Cleveland Indians teammate) and Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Even more, Roger Maris possessed a quick left-handed bat. His swing was short and quick and he had power to all fields, although much of it, as a left-handed hitter, was to right field — which was vitally important at Yankee Stadium with the low four foot wall being only 296 feet from home plate!
Roger was a pretty typical Midwestern boy. Like The Babe, his family roots were in the Roman Catholic Church and the Democratic Party. The family's name was originally spelled "MARAS" until Roger substituted the second A with the letter I because he was sensitive to the altogether too typical and deliberate mispronunciation of his last name by fellow players, unfriendly fans, and members of the press. He was tall and muscular, with short blonde hair and hazel eyes. (Some said he looked facially a little like Elvis Presley minus the sideburns.) Although he had typical baseball ambitions to win a World Series, Roger would have been content to never go to New York City in search of big time fame. However, on Friday, December 11th, 1959, the Kansas City Athletics, to whom he'd been traded by the Cleveland Indians in June of 1958, sent him to the New York Yankees. To Maris, the differences between the two teams were as stark as the definition of success. Most important, in K.C. a player could develop on his own. In New York, players were not only pressured but too often followed by detectives to ensure their behavior and Yankee worthiness. In Kansas City, the press was benign while in New York, it was anything but! The truth was that Maris was content in Kansas City. The team, after all, was improving and he was a vital part of that improvement. His home was in Raytown, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. There he resided with his wife Patricia Ann (Carvel) Maris, two-year-old Susan, and one-year-old Roger, Jr. However, New York was where much of baseball's money and World Series success was, so, with misgivings, Roger joined the Yankees.
Roger Maris would spend seven seasons in New York from 1960 through 1966. In the first two seasons, he hit exactly 100 home runs, 39 in 1960 and 61 in 1961.
In 1960, Maris got a mere taste of big time fame when he hit 39 homers, second to Mickey Mantle's league-leading 40, and batted .285 with 112 RBIs. Roger Maris is one of only a few players to hit a home run in his first World Series at bat.
Maris's 61 homers, .269 batting average and 142 RBIs, important and significant as they ultimately were insofar as his earning power was concerned, constituted the shallowest part of his season. The unfortunate substance of his season was his discomfort with the press and their discomfort with him. He'd patiently answer questions about how he hit or the conditions under which he failed or succeeded, but he hated personal questions such as those having to do with his marriage. One reporter wondered if Roger "played"" while on the road. When Maris responded that "I'm a married man," the reporter is said to have responded to Maris saying: "I am too, but I'm not a radical about it!” Maris found questions like that presumptive and offensive. During the season, Roger and Mickey got a room with teammate Bob Cerv who had been a star with Maris in Kansas City in 1958. Near the end of the season, the pressure was such that Maris was losing handfuls of his hair. At the close of the season Maris was, for the second time in two seasons, the American League's Most Valuable Player. In addition to his 61 homers, he carried the Yankees through the 1961 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. There would be a meeting with President Kennedy. He also received the diamond-studded Hickok Belt as Outstanding Professional Athlete of the year 1961. The following February, Maris signed a contract for $72,000 and, along with Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, starred in a forgettable movie called "Safe At Home!” However, at about that time, all the glory suddenly stopped.
Reporters grew tired of Maris and he grew tired and even less cooperative with them. Old-timers such as Rogers Hornsby, the great National League batting star and Ruth contemporary, called Maris a “bush leaguer” and wrote stories about his rudeness toward fans and, even worse, toward children. (A young boy was reported to have asked Maris for his "John Hancock” on a baseball and Maris wrote that name. Reporters who witnessed that incident failed to report that Maris got the ball back and signed his full name to it.)
Maris had respectable years in 1962 and 1963 and, again, in 1964, but in 1965 he hurt his hand and was almost nonproductive for the rest of that year. Even worse, Yankee doctor Sidney Gaynor reported to Yankee General Manager Ralph Houk that he could find nothing wrong with Maris's hand. So, for the first time in his athletic life, he was suspected, to his resentment of "jaking." Additionally, as Mickey Mantle's career began to end and Yankee officials and fans began celebrating "The Mick", Maris's reputation began to plummet into press and fan contempt. Finally, on December 7th, 1966, the Yankees sent Roger Maris to the Saint Louis Cardinals for a journeyman third baseman, Charley Smith.
Roger Maris's temperament and background were ultimately unsuited to New York as was the stardom his achievements during the first two years earned him. Years later, contemporaries generally agreed that one of the reasons Roger Maris couldn't entirely enjoy his success was due to the fact that his older brother Rudolph, who'd been the superior athlete of the two brothers, had suffered a polio attack in 1951 that ended all likelihood of athletic success. Roger would often insist that his older brother was the superior athlete and family and friends agreed that Roger could never be really comfortable with his success.
During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, due to the efforts of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, Roger Maris, New York fans, and even the press would make peace. In 1978 and in 1984, Roger Maris would return to Yankee Stadium to the cheers of fans to be recognized and, in 1984, to have his Yankee Number 9 retired. Still, fame, at its warmest and most profitable, was beyond Maris's capacity to enjoy. Hence, even those who loved him best (me included) are forced to admit that he spurned his fame up until April 13th, 1978 when he and Mickey Mantle raised the Yankees World Championship flag at Yankee Stadium.
On Saturday, December 14th, 1985 at age 51 Roger Maris died in Houston, Texas of lymphoma cancer also known as Hodgkins Disease.
The date of his death was the same as teammate Elston Howard who died on Sunday, December 14th, 1980. Yankee teammates Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Johnny Blanchard, Bill Skowron, and Bobby Richardson braved the below zero temperatures of Fargo, North Dakota, where Maris was raised, to pay tribute and to bury him. Later that month, services were held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, attended by George Steinbrenner and former President Richard M. Nixon who was especially attentive to Roger Maris's grandson who was in attendance.
Roger Maris didn't exactly ignore fame as he certainly derived much, although not all of the pecuniary benefits available, but the heart of fame is fickle and even jealous and Maris certainly failed to properly nurture it as fame inevitably demands.
His career statistics will, and perhaps shouldn't, be enough to put him into baseball's Hall of Fame. However, if you ask me, it's hard to identify Roger Maris's achievement of hitting 61 home runs in 1961 as being less famous than most achievements that are glorified in baseball's Valhalla!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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