This was once the week that was in baseball. The week that the nation was, by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, in a way it never could be today by Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Ironically, the target for all four, in the last week of their regular seasons: 60 home runs.
Maris and Mantle were New York Yankees teammates known as the M&M Boys. That wasn’t exactly original, because the company founded by chocolatiers Forrest Mars (Mars) and Bruce Murrie (Hershey) was by then 20 years old.
Maris and Mantle were chasing the ghost of Babe Ruth, whose home-run record had stood for 34 years. It was a time when newspapers ruled the media, and there were 15 New York dailies. The printed word was king and the home-run race dominated sports coverage — when Mantle hit his 48th, President Kennedy interrupted a press conference to announce the news.
Yet the chase was devalued by Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, who declared all new records in 1961 would count only if broken in 154 games — the majors had just expanded to 162. “I’m afraid its integrity will be compromised,” Frick said of the record, while pundits noted this one-time sportswriter had been Babe Ruth’s ghost writer.
By this week of that season, Maris was alone. A hip abscess hospitalized Mantle, at 54 home runs. After 154 games, Maris had 59 home runs. He broke Ruth’s record five games later, in the final game of the season, prompting Frick to attach sport’s most famous asterisk. It stayed there, linked to 61, for 30 years…five years after Maris died. His record stood for 37 years, longer than The Babe’s.
As an avid teenage fan who depended on sports pages for news of the home-run chase, I remember reading Mantle’s “elimination” from the newspaper. Included were black-and-white photos of the last two Maris home runs, his 60th and 61st, with dotted lines showing the trajectory.
Forty years later, in 2001, the movie 61* (note the asterisk) was the brainchild of comedian Billy Crystal. A lifelong Yankees fan, Crystal was dedicated to making it authentic and accurate, or as authentic and accurate as movies are allowed to be. For me, he succeeded, injecting typical Crystal humour to the human story on two super stars. Authenticity included salty language, Mantle’s well-known problems with alcohol and women who weren’t his wife, and the very real trauma it all had on Maris.
Neither of them saw the movie about their season for the ages. Neither Maris nor Mantle hit more than 35 home runs again. The Yankees won the World Series and 113 games; only the hallowed 1927 Yankees of Babe Ruth had won more. The M&M Boys’ home-run total was 115, still a record for teammates.
Mantle, already a Yankees legend, was the favourite of fans and writers. For Maris, the crushing attention and repetitive interrogation was new. He lost not only his temper but his hair, in an era when sportswriters had home addresses and phone numbers, along with unlimited locker-room access.
Ohtani and Judge today? Their availability is arranged. They’re not teammates. Their feats are seen by all…and not just in newspaper pictures with dotted lines.
