Roger Maris, revisited

When Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris's single-season home run record in 1998, he displayed great class in honoring the memory of the man whose record he broke. McGwire has become a pariah in the past few years, so it's convenient to forget what he did right, but in paying homage to Maris, he was making up for one of baseball's bigger sins.

There was no asterisk, but the record book did not list Maris as having broken Ruth's record. Instead, it listed 61 homers as the record for a 162 game season, and kept Ruth's 60 home runs on the books as the 154 game season mark.

Tony Scherman has written a nice piece about the controversy in 1961, and how Maris handled Ford Frick's record-book ruling, for the American Heritage Web site. He includes a great quote from Clete Boyer, another 1961 Yankee:

"There was an edge of sadness to the entire day," said Boyer. "The ruling by Commissioner Frick … took so much joy away from the feat. … Despite the crowd reaction, despite how much Roger enjoyed it, despite all the press, the entire day was a letdown, a disappointment.”

The HBO docudrama *61, directed by Billy Crystal, does a very good job of capturing the mixed feelings of that season. And perhaps the most telling stat of all is the attendance figure at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, Oct. 1, 1961, the day Maris broke Ruth's record, the day the Yankees won their 109th game of the season, the last day of the regular season: 23,154. The Yankees led the AL in attendance in 1961, averaging 21,577 per game. That means an awful lot of Yankee fans decided they had better things to do that day.