October 1964 (23 page)

Life is filled with self-fulfilling prophecies, and, fittingly enough, the longer Maris played in New York, the less he liked it. He was a small-town boy raised in Fargo, North Dakota, and he remained a small-town boy the rest of his life. He did not lightly accommodate to anything that was different, nor was he ever anxious to change his ways. He was what he was, and the world of New York owners, New York sportswriters, New York fans, and even New York baseball players would have to take him for that or find someone else. The more he was pressured to change, the more he resented that very pressure, and the less flexible he became. Confronted with any kind of resistance, he tended to bristle and pull in. He was a player, said one teammate who never heard the cheers but always remembered the boos. Late into his tour in New York, he bought a memento from a novelty store which he placed on the stool by his locker: it was a plastic hand with the middle finger extended upward into the air.

It was part of the irony of Maris’s celebrated but painful career in the big city that he was made to order for Yankee Stadium and its short right-field fence. He was a great pull hitter—in fact, Mike Shannon thought that he never saw a hitter who was as good at pulling an outside pitch as Roger Maris. A lot of hitters, Shannon thought, could pull the inside pitch, but pulling a ball outside was much harder; it demanded a very good eye and a very, very quick bat and no wasted motion in the swing. Maris was not a particularly big man at six feet tall and 190 pounds, but he was a superb all-around athlete and he had a short, sweet swing. Few baseball players channeled their power and muscle through their bodies as successfully as Roger Maris did. To this day the photos of him swinging at a ball are unusually striking, because his entire body is fused so perfectly: shoulders, arms, and legs, leveraged as one piece, nothing wasted. Because his swing was shorter and more compact than Mantle’s, his home runs were not as majestic; instead of being carried ever higher and higher, going toward the third tier, they were line shots that had extra distance but not that much loft to them. The difference in their swings can be measured by their strikeouts in 1961: in that season Maris came up 590 times, hit 61 home runs, and struck out only
67
times, whereas Mantle came up 514 times, hit 54 home runs, and, with that huge swing, which surrendered contact for power, struck out
112
times.

Maris, who had thought for a time of playing college football, was fast and had an exceptionally strong and accurate arm. Baseball professionals in those days rated him as almost the equal of Al Kaline, then considered the best defensive right fielder in the league. The threat his arm posed to enemy base runners was considerable, and it had kept Matty Alou on third in the crucial play of the 1962 World Series. Maris also ran the bases exceptionally well; in 1961, even though he was pursuing Ruth’s record, he still played hard on defense and went into second base hard, risking personal injury for the good of the team.

He was quiet and reserved, far more introverted than Mantle, with whom he was invariably compared. His had not been an easy childhood; his father had worked for the railroad for small pay and was a hard and unsparing man. Boyhood friends thought Maris’s childhood had never been easy, and there was a time when he had even lived with another family for part of a year. He had none of Mantle’s exuberance, gregariousness, or, for that matter, his mood swings. In the locker room, he was never the show that Mantle was. Mantle, for all his reservations about the press, his moodiness and his modesty, was always aware of his role in baseball history as the star of the Yankees. Even if on occasion he felt burdened by it, he quite liked being on center stage at Yankee Stadium, the heir to the tradition of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, with all the challenge and all the glory implicit in that role. Mantle was, thought Jim Bouton, like a long-running Broadway show all his own—funny and tragic, difficult and engaging, but always well acted. It was a rare performance by a player who always understood the special glory of being the star. If Mantle had any regrets about his role, they were momentary, and in the end the glory far outweighed the burden.

Maris was completely different. He liked to play baseball, and he was good at it, but he pulled back from the theatrics associated with the game. Most ballplayers, thought Maury Allen, a talented sportswriter who covered Maris in those years and knew him exceptionally well, liked to
say
that they did not care about getting their names in the papers or their faces on television; but Roger Maris, more than any other player Allen knew, truly felt that way. He liked playing the game, but everything else was extraneous. He disliked dealing with the media—not necessarily the media people themselves but the daily byplay. “I’m not a good talker, get someone else,” he would usually say when reporters tried to grab him for interviews. He was a physical man, not a verbal one: he was skilled in the use of his body, not in the use of words. Social encounters were difficult for him and left him distinctly uncomfortable. In that 1961 season, when he hit his twenty-seventh home run and seemed to be on a record pace, a reporter asked him the big question for the first time: did he think he had a chance to break Ruth’s record. His answer was pure Maris: “How the fuck do I know?”

Since he was a man who did his job, he understood to some degree that the beat reporters had their jobs to do as well, and he would try to be reasonably accommodating with them. He was better with reporters he knew than with strangers, and he had a reputation with the Yankee beat reporters as being unusually fair, straight, and consistent in his moods. But his answers were always as short as he could make them. He would talk about what pitch he had hit and how he had played a hitter, but he never allowed the writers to get inside his mind or his personality. When they tried to do that, and in 1961 they tried little else, a curtain came down immediately. There was a certain edginess and defensiveness about Maris. He was quick to find and, on occasion, to hold resentments, and even those men who were fond of him were aware that if, for some reason, Maris felt he had been let down, he never forgave it. In his first two years on the Yankees, most of the reporters, especially some of the younger ones, quite liked him. They felt themselves outsiders in the world of the Yankees, and, thanks to his competition with Mickey Mantle, Maris was always going to be cast by the fans and even his teammates as an outsider as well. There was to him, thought the writer Larry Merchant, who quite liked him, a wonderful kind of indigenous American populist sourness, handed down in a family that had never known success or wealth, and where there was an innate conviction that those who had wealth and power always screwed those who did not. Maris reminded Merchant very much of men he had met in the army, constantly griping, constantly irritable, and yet surprisingly tough and good at everything to which they were assigned. In 1961, Whitey Ford had joked that he was going to form a cabinet just like Jack Kennedy’s, except he was going to assign his ballplayers to the cabinet positions. Maris’s job, he noted, was going to be Secretary of Grievances.

Maris gave his trust slowly and reluctantly. He was much better in one-on-one interviews than he was when a group gathered around his locker, for then he was sure reporters he did not know would quote something out of context, or in some way cause him harm. “Shit-stirrers,” he and some of the other players called such reporters, that is, men who were out to cause trouble by exaggerating some small tension or problem in their articles. What an irony, then, that Roger Maris involuntarily became one of the first modern athletes caught in the glare of the new media society. As the power of television grew in the late fifties and early sixties, those who were propelled forward in sports and other walks of life began to find themselves under a new, relentless scrutiny. In many cases they loved the fame, in some cases they were indifferent to it, and in some cases, such as that of Roger Maris, they truly hated it. In the past, sports had been sports, and while it is true that it was also a form of entertainment, the athletes themselves, with few exceptions, were first and foremost athletes, not entertainers, and by and large that was the way they thought of themselves. They were supposed to go out there, play hard, and win, and if they did, that was enough. But with the coming of television, things began to change: the
show
was now as important as the event—the athlete was supposed to be not just someone who did his job but someone who was a star as well.

Maris, a man of old-fashioned values and loyalties, an honorable man who tried to live within his own code, was completely unprepared for this new definition of the athlete. Unfortunately, his assault upon Ruth’s record was probably the first great sustained sports story in the age of modern media. At first print reporters seized on it, which soon whetted an appetite for television coverage, and as television coverage followed the chase with an ever more watchful eye, that inspired even greater print coverage. In addition, it had continuity, something the media loved, and became, day after day, a great running story. As the interest in him grew, he encountered a changing definition of what his fellow Americans wanted to know about him. They did not, it now appeared, care whether or not he had hit an inside curveball or a low fastball; instead, they wanted to know what he thought and what he felt about a vast number of things, including a good many about which he had no thoughts or feelings at all. Millions of Americans wanted to know what Roger Maris was really like, and they wanted to know every day for more than two months. It was a sea change in the nature of media, and it foretold the coming of a media-obsessed society, a society that would culminate almost three decades later when
People
magazine sold more advertising than its older and more traditional sibling,
Time
magazine.

Perhaps even three years earlier, he might have chased Ruth’s record with far less commotion, and he would have been covered under the old rules, the simpler rules of print. But in 1961, Americans were watching live televised press conferences of their president, dazzling performances really, and they watched Alan Shepard, the first astronaut, lift off live from Cape Canaveral. In the next year the networks, responding to better and better technology and a great hunger for news, went from fifteen-minute news shows to half-hour ones. For John Kennedy the coming of television was a great boon, and it had greatly aided his campaign; when Kennedy had debated his opponent, live, on television the year before—the first time that had ever been done—it had greatly enhanced his candidacy. In addition, it made him a star. The American people wanted to know not just about his policies, but about his family, and what he ate, and what he wore, and what he read. Kennedy was perfectly comfortable with this new entertainment-driven definition of politics, certain always that he could use it to his advantage. At about the same time, a brilliant young heavyweight boxer named Cassius Clay understood intuitively that he was as much star and entertainer as boxer, and that he was engaged in theater of a high order. He gloried in his new role and orchestrated the show as no athlete had ever done before him. His weigh-ins became as exciting as some of his fights, and he began to write poems in which he predicted when his opponent would fall.

What Clay and soon Joe Namath pursued with zest and brilliance, Roger Maris pulled back from with fear and loathing. He was being pulled before a spotlight he never sought, the likes of which had never been turned on a baseball player before. It permitted others, strangers, to examine him in a way he did not want to be examined. So it was that he faced a terrible dilemma in that fateful season, for every time he hit a home run, and every time he came a little closer to breaking Ruth’s record, he lost just a little more of his most precious commodity, his privacy. As he neared the record, the crowd of reporters grew larger, and the questions became more and more personal. “Do you play around on the road?” a reporter from
Time
magazine asked. “I’m a married man,” Maris answered. “I’m a married man, too,” said the reporter, “but I play around on the road.” Worse, there were to be heroes and villains in this, as in every great story, and Maris, somewhat to his surprise (for he was only doing what he was paid to do), became a villain. Not everyone, it turned out, wanted Babe Ruth’s record broken, especially older fans. Many younger fans, on the other hand, were quite willing to see it fall, but only if it fell to Mantle, whose team this rightfully was.

In 1960, Maris had played in the Stadium regularly for the first time, and he had hit 25 home runs in less than half a season; at one point he was slightly ahead of Ruth. For the first time there had been mention of his name in connection with the Ruth record. Even though he injured himself, he had still ended up with 39 home runs in only 136 games and had been the Most Valuable Player in the American League. Mantle had led the league with 40 home runs in 153 games, and 28 more at bats. Maris later told his friend Mike Shannon that the ambition to beat Mantle in 1961 had been a calculated affair. He had been goaded into it, he told Shannon, by the fans. In 1960, they had begun to cheer Mantle and boo him, and he decided quietly to get even by beating Mantle out for the club home-run championship. If they wanted to boo, he would give them something to boo about. He set out to lead the club, an amused Shannon said years later, as much as anything else, out of spite. This was a rare admission by Maris, for again and again, both during and after that season, when the subject of the home-run derby came up and reporters asked about the apparent competition with Mantle, Maris would shrug it off and say that he was just having a good season. In truth, he thought he could do it because of the short right-field porch, which was a target for him far more often than it was for Mantle. So it was that both of them had gone at the home-run title with a vengeance that season. If Mickey was going to hit two, Maris told Shannon, then he was damn well going to hit two as well. As far as he was concerned, it was all about home runs, and his batting average (for he was a .260 to .280 hitter in those days) did not matter. That offended some purists, who favored Mantle, in part, because he was a .300 hitter as well. Theirs was an unspoken competition, for Mantle, proud and every bit as competitive, understood the game from the start. For Maris, it was a year in which everything went right for him on the field. He seemed to be in a groove for most of the season, he saw the ball exceptionally well, and it just seemed to jump off his bat that year. His health was good for the entire season, which was rare for him. Because Mantle was hitting behind him, Maris knew he was likely to see a lot of good pitches, and it became clear early in the season that he had a genuine shot at the Ruth record.