October 1964 (24 page)

A great sports team is always a surprisingly delicate mechanism, because it includes all kinds of egocentric, highly motivated people with a common objective: to win. Yet, at the same time, great teams demand enough talented players with similar goals and drives whose egos may very easily clash. On a great team such tensions are resolved because the idea of winning is so powerful. But they remain just beneath a thin veneer of unity, and they often surface when the idea of winning is not so powerful. With the Yankees in 1961, those tensions abounded even though both Mantle and Maris handled their personal rivalry with exceptional maturity. This was Mickey Mantle’s team, and Roger Maris never had any illusions about that. Mantle was a far greater player certainly than Maris, who saw himself quite realistically, and knew his own strengths and limitations better than most of his critics did. The two players were friends, it was true, and for a few months that season they even roomed together, along with Bob Cerv, who was a close friend of Maris’s. But it was, in the words of Julie Isaacson, a cool friendship, one of men who at once liked each other but were not close, and the fierce, unspoken competitiveness hovered always. There was no animosity, though, and no hard words. Later, when sportswriters claimed there was a considerable bitterness between them, they were wrong. The bitterness was between Maris and the fans, and subsequently the Yankee management. Though it should have been the easiest thing in the world to root for both men, that was not what happened. Everyone, it seemed, had to take sides that year, and almost everyone, of course, favored Mantle. Maris was made to feel the interloper, even by the Yankee organization. The problem, as Julie Isaacson later said, was that the wrong guy had broken the record.

Maris lacked the skill and the desire to win the fans over. His greatest sin, as far as the media contingent covering him was concerned, was that he not only was boring, he liked being boring. Worse, the larger the media contingent grew, the more determined he became to seem, if anything, even more boring than he really was. He was a man absolutely without pretense, and he wore no face save his own. He was not graceful or subtle. He was almost always blunt, sometimes unspeakably so. Late in the assault Al Kaline, the Detroit right fielder, retrieved a ball that Maris hit off Frank Lary for home run number fifty-seven—it had bounced back on the field and Kaline tossed it into the Yankee dugout as a souvenir for Maris. After the game, one of the Detroit writers suggested to Maris that what Kaline had done had been a very nice thing, and Maris, blunt as ever, curiously obtuse about how his words would later appear to readers, said no, it was something that anyone would have done, and that he would have done the same thing for Kaline. To the New York beat writers, that was simply Maris being Maris, but the Detroit writers were offended.

At the end of the season, when Maris wrote his authorized account of the home-run chase, he chose for his co-author Jim Ogle of the
Newark Star Ledger,
one of the least known beat reporters, but a true Yankee loyalist. He did this because he liked and trusted Ogle. The result was exactly the kind of book Maris wanted, almost completely devoid of color and humanity; it was written statistically, home run by home run, as if by an accountant. Maris could never summon up the heroic words and images to go with his heroic deeds. Writers described him in desperation as a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy who got along well with his teammates and wanted his team to win. So the reporters would gather around his locker and he would say that he had hit a low inside fastball or a hanging curve, or that he was just doing his job as best he could, or that he liked Mickey and they were good friends, or that he revered Babe Ruth and knew he was not as good a player as Ruth. (When he did that people wrote in complaining, Who was Maris to compare himself with Ruth?)

As the pressure closed in on him, he became more and more superstitious. Early in the season he had Julie Isaacson drive out to Queens to pick him up, and they went into Manhattan and ate a late breakfast at the Stage Deli, a famed New York Jewish deli in the theater district. Maris, who loved eggs and baloney, forced Big Julie Isaacson to have eggs with chopped-up baloney in it. “Roger, Jewish guys don’t eat baloney and eggs,” Isaacson protested, but Maris insisted that Isaacson eat his eggs in what he claimed was Fargo style. Isaacson, knowing how stubborn Maris could be, surrendered and ate his eggs with baloney. That day Maris hit two home runs. Clearly the eggs and baloney were an omen, and so from then on, they had to go to the Stage every day when the Yanks were home, and they had to have the same table, and the same waitress, and Big Julie had to eat his eggs with baloney.

As he got closer to the record, the reporters Maris knew and trusted became a minority, greatly outnumbered by others from publications he had never heard of, and who clearly had no interest in baseball. The more he became the story, the warier he became. The Yankees, completely unprepared for the media circus, gave him no help, offered him no protection, and set no guidelines. They let him, stubborn, suspicious and without guile, hang out there alone, utterly ill prepared for this ordeal; they never gave him a press officer to serve as a buffer between him and the media, or even set certain times when he would deal with the reporters, so that it would not be a constant burden. They did not filter requests, or tell him whom he might trust and whom he might not or which requests were legitimate and which were trivial.

Under all this pressure, Maris grew more and more irritable. He found that he could go nowhere without a phalanx of journalists. When, late in the season, after he had hit more than fifty home runs, a reporter asked him about the record, he answered, “What record? Am I close to it? I don’t want to talk about it. Do you want me to concede defeat? If you do, I’ll concede, all right?” But he tried all season to be a good teammate. On days when he did nothing, and when Elston Howard or another player won the game for the Yankees, the crowd of reporters would swarm around his locker anyway, and he would try to guide them to Howard’s locker instead. “Talk to Ellie,” he would say. “He won the game for us.” No one, of course, moved toward Howard’s locker. It got worse and worse: Maris’s hair began to fall out because of nerves, and he developed a number of rashes. His wife came to visit him in New York, looked at his hair, and told him he looked like a molting bird near the end of the season. The chase was made more difficult because the commissioner, a former Ruth ghostwriter, Ford Frick, noted that Ruth had set his record in a season of 154 games. Therefore, there should be an asterisk beside Maris’s name, Frick suggested. In effect, that left him with two deadlines: he could break the record within 154 games and enter the record book clean and unsoiled, or he could do it in 162 games and enter the book with an asterisk.

When he finally broke the record, it was extraordinary; hitting sixty-one home runs was a remarkable accomplishment under the best of circumstances, and Maris had done it under the worst of them. Ruth had never dealt with the comparable pressure. After the last game, when he had hit number sixty-one off Tracy Stallard, a radio reporter asked him if he had thought of Mickey Mantle while rounding the bases during his home-run trot. That struck him as the weirdest question of the day. That night he went to dinner in the city with a few friends, and when he saw a nearby Catholic church he left the dinner party to go over and pray. The priest noticed him in the back of the church, and announced to the other parishioners that Roger Maris was among them. Even here there was no moment of privacy, and he quickly fled the church.

As the Yankees did nothing to protect him during the assault, they did nothing to reward him after it was all over. “You know what I got from Topping for hitting those sixty-one homers that year?” Maris said to Maury Allen years later. “Nothing. Not a cent. Not a gift. Nothing. I don’t know what the Yankees drew [they had their largest attendance in ten years], but they gave me nothing.” He was bitter about that. He felt that, at the very least, he should have gotten a one-shot bonus of $50,000. When it came to contract time there was the usual squabble. Maris, who had made $37,500 the year before, wanted to double his salary to $75,000. The first contract from the club called for a salary of $50,000. Maris was enraged. The Yankees did not like the idea of doubling a salary, no matter how good a year a player had enjoyed: it was a dangerous precedent, but they were also nervous about being in an ugly negotiating war with a player who had just broken Ruth’s record. That gave Maris rare leverage in his contract talks. After some haggling, management came in at $72,500. But all in all the Yankee management had not behaved well; financially and emotionally it had not been generous and a huge wound had been left at the end of the season. In the following years, when he did not play at that level again, in part because he was often injured, in part because it had been a special season, one not easily recaptured, he was berated for not being Ruth or Mantle.

Maris’s frustration with the Yankee organization continued to grow. He felt they had signaled to him in a variety of ways that he was not a true Yankee, not a member of the inner group, and he resented that. He felt club officials minimized his injuries, and sometimes did not even seem to believe he was hurt. A year after the home-run assault Jake Gibbs, the young catcher, came up to join the team, and was with Maris on a swing through Boston. Gibbs was stunned to hear Maris suddenly utter a prolonged and bigger diatribe against the club, its medical practices, and its lack of trust in its players. Maris had been hurting and it was clear that management did not believe him, and suddenly it all poured out, etched in bitterness: “Jake, the next time I’m hurt, I hope the bone comes right through the skin and shows and there’s lots of blood so they’ll finally believe me. I’m so damn tired of being hurt and them thinking I’m faking it.”

The problem with the media, Maris said years later, was not in 1961 but in 1962. It would have been easier for him, given his nature and his love of privacy, if he had come close and just missed it. Then he would have been cast as an ordinary man who had come close in one magical summer to living the great baseball dream. In that case he would have been seen as a sympathetic figure who had just fallen short of an elusive goal. Instead, he was cast as an ordinary player who had the temerity to break a record of which he was not worthy. There was nowhere to go but down. The sports world was primed for his failure, that is, for him to fall short of that great season, and to prove himself unworthy of his extraordinary accomplishment. The spotlight followed him relentlessly. If, during the off-season, he left a sports dinner a little early to catch the last flight out to the next night’s dinner, that was news. If he did not handle an autograph session with young boys well, that was news. In spring training there was an incident when he was asked to pose with Rogers Hornsby, a great hitter but a notoriously churlish man from another age, who had frequently demeaned Maris during his home-run chase. Each man thought the other should come over to pose, and in the end, the picture was never taken. There were other incidents: a column by Oscar Fraley belittling Maris (because Maris had been unwilling to give his side of the Hornsby story), and then one by the very influential Jimmy Cannon, ripping Maris for having missed an appointment with him. Cannon had been very close to DiMaggio and was wary of Maris anyway, and his column widely influenced other writers in the press corps, not only in New York. Its ripple effect was considerable, and in other cities that the Yankees visited, Maris now found that sportswriters were prepared to judge him unsympathetically. His relations with the media, always fragile, grew bitter.

It was hard to believe in 1964, as the Yankees struggled to stay near the top of the American League, with Mantle, Maris, and Ford all coping with various injuries, that only three years earlier, the Yankees had been the mightiest team in baseball. Maris was still a good line-drive hitter, but his home-run power was in sharp decline.

T
O THE NEW YORK
writers there was something schizophrenic about New York players. They wanted the glory of playing in New York, and they knew playing there made them more famous and affected their income, but they were innately suspicious of dealing with the press. Such stars as Hank Aaron, playing in other cities, often felt they were shortchanged because they did not get the benefit of the New York media machinery. Part of the problem was the nature of the game itself, for even the best player hit only about .333, which meant that he went out two out of three times; in turn, that meant that no matter how enthusiastic a writer was about a player, he was, more often than not, describing the player’s limitations or even his failures. Casey Stengel was very much aware of that, and would point out to the writers that ballplayers were the only professionals who had their every mistake and failure scrutinized the next morning in print. It didn’t happen to Hollywood actors, Stengel said, no one wrote that they had done a bad take on a scene; and it didn’t happen to reporters themselves, no one graded them each day on their stories or published a list of their journalistic mistakes. “You guys wouldn’t like it if you had a box score on yourselves every day,” said Stengel.

Another part of the problem was cultural. The writers were, by and large, urban and college-educated; many of them were Jewish. They were verbal, not physical, men. The players were country boys, high school graduates, and often not even that. The writers sometimes seemed to be making fun of them at their expense. There was on occasion a resentment, albeit an unconscious one on the part of the writers, of being part of the instrument that brought fame and glory to men who did not even read books, and who in fact often did not read the stories written about them each day. If anything, the complaints that the players passed on to the writers seemed more often than not to be triggered not by what the players had read but by what some friend of theirs had said after reading a story. It was an ongoing complaint of the writers that if they wrote a long, essentially praiseworthy story about a player, they never heard about it. But if they wrote one negative sentence, a friend of the player would call him up, and there would be an unpleasant confrontation the next day. It took a rare athlete, such as Whitey Ford, tart and cocky, both ballplayer and New York City kid himself, to know the rhythms and the voices of the city and its newspapers. He, as far as most of the working journalists were concerned, was a model of what an athlete should be like in dealing with the press. Available to reporters on bad days as well as good, he was candid, often funny, and, above all, straight. There was a general feeling among the reporters that the one player on the Yankees who might have pulled off being subjected to the scrutiny that Roger Maris underwent was Whitey Ford.