Forgotten Hero: A Tribute To Baseball’s Roger Maris

I was inspired to create this illustration after reading 61*: The Story of Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and One Magical Summer, written by Ron Smith and published by The Sporting News.

I was 12 years old in 1961, and I can vividly recall the excitement that summer as Yankee teammates Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle slugged homer after homer, both on a pace to break Babe Ruth’s long-standing record of 60 home runs in a single season (1927).

Mantle finished with 54, Maris hit his 61st and final homer in the last game of the season.

Many fans, including Yankee fans, rooted against Maris for one of two reasons:

1) they didn’t want anyone to break the great Bambino’s record, or 2) they wanted it to be Mantle who’d replaced Yankee centerfielder Joe DiMaggio in 1951, not Maris, a relative unknown who’d only been acquired from Kansas City before the start of the 1960 season.

Complicating matters was the fact that the American League had expanded from 8 to 10 teams in 1961, and simultaneously, the playing season had been extended from 154 to 162 games.

Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick— who had been a friend of Ruth’s– ruled that any new home run record would have to be set in 154 games. This became known as the “asterisk ruling.”

Maris hit his 58th homer in Game 151, his 59th in Game 154, and his 6oth in Game 158. In 1961, the seating capacity of Yankee Stadium was a little over 67,000. Incredibly, only 23,154 New York fans turned out to see Maris hit his historic 61st homer on the last day of the season.

Maris never hit more than 33 homers in a single season after 1961. He was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals after the 1966 season. Plagued by injuries, he retired from baseball in 1968. He died of lymphatic cancer in 1985 at age 51. He is not in the Baseball Hall Of Fame.

But one magic summer almost 50 years ago, at a time when steroids were unknown in the game, Roger Maris persevered despite intense media scrutiny and fan hostility, and did something truly remarkable: he hit 61 in ’61.

A personal tribute to Roger Maris. Scroll down for the entire construction sequence. (You can view a previous post which shows all the “steroid guy” caricatures, and another which shows the steps in creating the Barry Bonds caricature.)