IN AS BIZZARE a manner as it began, baseball ended its great grammar debate last week when it took the asterisk off Roger Maris' name in the record book. When the next edition goes to print this fall the only name under "Most Home Runs, Season" will be "Roger E. Maris." His 61 in '61 will be the record all by itself. Alone at last. Thirty years later.
The asterisk came about - and, in truth, there has never been an actual asterisk in the record book, but rather a parenthetical annotation (162-game season) - on July 17, 1961 when Ford Frick, then the commissioner of baseball, ruled that if Maris, or anyone, were to break the existing home-run record of 60, held by Babe Ruth, hewould have to do it in 154 games or less - even though the season had been expanded, that very year, to 162 games. The reason was that Ruth, by then a baseball saint, had hit his 60 home runs in 1927 in a 154-game schedule. If anyone hit 60 or more homers in more games than 154 (Maris was on a tear; he already had 35 home runs when Frick made his emergency mid-July ruling), it would qualify only as a specialized 162-game record.
When Maris hit 61 home runs in 162 games - he got No. 61 in the final game of the 1961 season - Frick's asterisk came into play.
The asterisk died last Tuesday when an eight-member panel led by baseball commissioner Fay Vincent met in Manhattan and bludgeoned it into oblivion. Vincent had convened The Committee for Statistical Accuracy after he was inspired by an article written earlier in the summer in the New Yorker by Roger Angell.
Angell, the baseball poet who wrote The Summer Game and Late Innings, reminisced about home runs in the article, and home run hitters, and soon enough got around to Maris and his asterisk, noting, as thousands had before him, that it was curious that numerous other seasonal records that have been established since the beginning of the 162-game season - including stolen bases, at-bats and pitchers' strikeouts - do not bear, as he called it, "the ugly tick."
Frick's asterical campaign, Angell noted, "was not quite a disinterested one, since Frick, a former sportswriter himself, had been a coeval and an adulating biographer of the Babe."
It didn't help that the man challenging the Babe's sacred record was - Angell again - "a player who had been a Yankee for only two seasons. If Mickey Mantle, a Yankee hero almost from his first days as a pinstriped rookie, had swatted the magic blow, many old-timers still believe, the New York front office would have raised an ungodly fuss over any diminishment of the new record, and it would have stood unsmirched, as it deserved."
In his next paragraph - before he went on to other home run tales, spring training reviews and reminiscences of the DiMaggio/Williams Summer of '41 - Angell delivered the part that obviously jarred Vincent as he sat in his Central Park penthouse, trying to see beyond the Hudson River and settling into an after-dinner session with the New Yorker.
"There is no wish here to revive the shoutings and buzzings that accompanied the Maris achievement thirty years back," Angell wrote. "But I think the present commissioner and some brave committee should meet one of these days and quietly wield an eraser, instead of waiting for some young slugger to come along and do it for them with his bat."
Again it was proven, the pen is mightier than the swat. Even the Sultan of Swat.
"I'm inclined to support the single-record thesis, and that is Maris hit more home runs in a season than anyone else," Vincent said.The pronouncement came almost 30 years since Maris, his nerves shot and his hair falling out in clumps, hit No. 61 on Oct. 2, 1961, against the Boston Red Sox in the Yankees' last game of the season - a homer that, it's significant to note, came in Maris' 684th plate appearance of the year, as compared to the 689 plate appearances required by the Babe in 1927 when he hit his 60.
It also came almost six years since Maris died, at the age of 51, on Dec. 14, 1985. He had battled cancer of the lymph system for almost two years previous.
And it came almost four years since Jan. of 1988, the 15th and final year Maris' name was on the regular Hall of Fame ballot. Voters that season did what they'd done the 14 previous years: They didn't put Maris, who, in 12 seasons, hit 275 home runs, drove in 851 runs, won several gold gloves, was MVP of the American League twice, played in seven World Series, and hit the 61 in '61, into the Hall.
For whatever reasons, becoming the Man Who Beat Babe Ruth did not grease the wheels of good fortune for Roger Maris. If the asterisk had anything to do with it, at least it's finally finished.