Sixty one in ’61. And now 61 years later, 62.
New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge has surpassed 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 had even Yankee haters rooting for him. (The Texas Ranger fans at Globe Field, where Judge hit his 62nd home run Tuesday, Oct. 4, were cheering so loudly, you would’ve thought it was Yankee Stadium.) 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’ rival in the home-run derby, centerfielder Mickey Mantle.
The M & M Boys — Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in 1961.
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*.”
As the movie also explores, 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, it should be a separate record. 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 idea of an 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, even 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 someone else holds the record he struggled so mightily to achieve. I won’t pretend that I don’t find that bittersweet. Maris and Mantle, Mantle and Maris – complementary corn-fed blond beauties from the Middle West – were that rarity, rivals who held each other in affection and esteem as they pushed each other toward greatness. The M & M Boys, as they were known, appeared in movies and on TV, endorsed a line of menswear, even roomed together in Queens with fellow outfielder Bob Cerv. There’s a great story of the M & M Boys in a local grocery, shopping for one of their cookouts. A stock boy on a ladder got so excited seeing them that he knocked down a whole row of canned goods. Who could blame him? It was an extraordinary time, when demigods strode the earth instead of being at a digital remove, and not the least of it was that when Mantle became injured and dropped out of the home-run race, he openly rooted for Maris to break the record.
But it is also a time now long gone. At the end of “61*,” we see Maris swing and take off to first base, beyond the screen and our gaze as an umpire and batboy fade from view. It’s a reminder that one day Judge will take off into baseball immortality as other challenge his record, and we, too, will fade from view.
Yet there will be others still who will remember Judge’s moment the way some of us remember Maris’ as one electric, unfading summer.