Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

**allstarsplus** · 09-04-2006, 08:11 AM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Interesting article and always open for debate.

Ryan Howard's signed and game used items are going crazy.

Check out this auction for a signed/inscribed Ryan Howard ball at over $400

403 Forbidden

http://auction.mlb.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prrfnbr=73518534&prmenbr=33072944&aunbr=73865244

Here is my list of the Top 5 up to 1961!

Roger Maris 61 Home Runs (L)

1961 New York Yankees AL

Babe Ruth 60 Home Runs (L)

1927 New York Yankees AL

Babe Ruth 59 Home Runs (L)

1921 New York Yankees AL

Hank Greenberg 58 Home Runs (R)

1938 Detroit Tigers AL

Jimmie Foxx 58 Home Runs (R)

1932 Philadelphia Athletics AL

**sportscentury** · 09-04-2006, 11:42 AM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Ruth hitting 60 in 1927, in that era and in the number of games that they played back then, is by far the most impressive single season homerun accomplishment in my eyes. Nothing else comes close to comparing.

With that said, the accomplishments of Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire do not compare to Maris' accomplishment in 1961 either.

On a related note, I am one of the few people who thought the hype about Ichiro's single season hit record was utterly ridiculous. Give me a season of 8000 games and even I would break the single season hit record. Ichiro's a tremendous hitter, don't get me wrong, but to me he is only the single season hit record-holder for the modern era.

Reid

**encinorick** · 09-04-2006, 12:46 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Reid: I think I can beat that one. I read somewhere that circa 1917, when Ruth was with the Boston Red Sox's, he hit more homeruns than most MLB teams (let alone individual players) and won more games as a pitcher (including against Walter Johnson) than anyone else, and, if I not mistaken, won a couple of games as a pitcher in the World Series, as well. The facts get a little hazy in this 100 degree LA weather, but I think that's right.

**sportscentury** · 09-04-2006, 01:35 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Rick,

There has never been anyone close to the Babe. You are preaching to the choir. I rank him above all other athletes from any sport, any era.

Best,

Reid

**encinorick** · 09-04-2006, 02:06 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Reid: Yup. Despite being a die-hard Dodger fan, I must admit it. And don't forget, he was always gracious to his fans and would sign anything. I'd take a drunk, overweight, hot dog ingested Ruth over a "juiced" Bonds any day.

**geoff** · 09-04-2006, 02:29 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

I don't think Howard is fan friendly.When i was at the Orioles game at Camden Yards earlier this year against the Phillies where you go to get autographs on the visitors side Ryan Howard was warming up close too the field.There was a rope up too 3 rows so you could not even get close too the field.When he left without looking or giving away any autographs the usher walked over and took down the rope.I thought that was very strange as you can always walk up too the wall around there.It could have been for something else but i don't think so.Just a thought about Howard.He is a rising star and fun too watch.Geoff

**suave1477** · 09-04-2006, 06:47 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Well I have to play devils advocate on this one again!!!

I am a fan of Maris and Ruth. I think everyone tends to forget the record books and that the records have been broken a long time ago. If memory serves me correct Josh Gibson Broke Ruths Record along time ago with over 70 home runs and he is still know to this day to hit the longest home run out of Yankee Stadium.

Even though it was the Negro Leagues players such as himself played against a lot of the top picthers in Major League baseball when they were in there prime. Not when they were at a desending point of there prime in the Majors.

**trsent** · 09-04-2006, 07:23 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

I'll chime in also.

A Season is a Season.

If you don't like it, find something else to do with your time.

**encinorick** · 09-04-2006, 08:54 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Yeah sure, Gibson hit home runs. But, he pitch? Did he pitch versus Walter Johnson and win 1-0? Did he pitch and hit homeruns in a World Series? Did he hit and pitch drunk? Did he hit and pitch after eating 24 hot dogs? I don't think so.

**33bird** · 09-04-2006, 09:22 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

A season is not a season. Why do I always disagree with Trsent?? Maris had 162 games to break Ruth's record. Ruth had only 154 games. That's 8 extra games. Do the math.

**stkmtimo** · 09-04-2006, 09:37 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Reid,
I'm with you on this one. Babe Ruth is in a class by himself. He defined a generation, made millions of people baseball fans and was by and large a great role model for kids. The stories of him visiting children's hospitals and spending time with the disadvantaged coupled with his legendary status in the game of baseball make him one of the truly "great" athletes...ever. Barry Bonds? Mark McGwire? Sammy Sosa? Ryan Howard? Albert Pujols? I'd take Babe Ruth over any of those, any day. The Babe is truly a legend.

Tim

**trsent** · 09-04-2006, 11:27 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Originally posted by 33bird

A season is not a season. Why do I always disagree with Trsent?? Maris had 162 games to break Ruth's record. Ruth had only 154 games. That's 8 extra games. Do the math.

After embarrassing baseball years and years ago, they took the asterisk away from the Roger Maris record and determined that a player cannot be penalized for breaking a record if more or less games are added to a season.

Therefore, baseball determined that "A Season is a Season" and the record books will continue to use that policy.

You do not have to like it and you can have your own personal record book, but as far as Major League Baseball's Official Records, they will use this theory.

**ironmanfan** · 09-04-2006, 11:51 PM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Actually, thats always been a misconception BUT there NEVER was an asterisk next to Maris' single season Home Run record in the Official Baseball Records. Of course, it doesn't make Billy Crystal's story (or the story we all grew up with) as interesting, but Ford Frick orignally suggested an asterisk be placed as an "designation," but the official record books subsequently showed for awhile a Home Run record for a 162 game schedule (Maris) and one for a 154 game schedule (Ruth).

I agree "A Season is a Season," but's not let that asterisk urban legend persist.

**trsent** · 09-05-2006, 01:38 AM

Re: Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Originally posted by ironmanfan

Actually, thats always been a misconception BUT there NEVER was an asterisk next to Maris' single season Home Run record in the Official Baseball Records. Of course, it doesn't make Billy Crystal's story (or the story we all grew up with) as interesting, but Ford Frick orignally suggested an asterisk be placed as an "designation," but the official record books subsequently showed for awhile a Home Run record for a 162 game schedule (Maris) and one for a 154 game schedule (Ruth).

Originally posted by ironmanfan

I agree "A Season is a Season," but's not let that asterisk urban legend persist.

Ok, I had to do some homework to learn more about that, I never did see Billy Chrystal's movie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Maris

"So as 1961 progressed, the Yanks were now "Mickey Mantle's team" and Maris was ostracized as the "outsider", and "not a true Yankee." (Similar words have been leveled in more recent times at Alex Rodriguez. Rodríguez, however, had become a Yankee by choice. In Maris' day there was no choice involved.) The press seemed to root for Mantle and to belittle Maris. But Mantle was felled by a leg infection late in the season, leaving Maris as the only player with a chance to break the record.

On top of his lack of popular press coverage, Maris' chase for 61 hit another roadblock totally out of his control: along with adding two teams to the league, Major League Baseball had added 8 games to the schedule. In the middle of the season, Baseball commissioner Ford Frick announced that unless Ruth's record was broken in the first 154 games of the season, the new record would be shown in the record books as having been set in 162 games while the previous record set in 154 games would also be shown. It is an urban legend, probably invented by New York sportswriter Dick Young, that an asterisk would be used to distinguish the new record.

Maris failed to reach 61 in 154 games. He hit his 61st on October 1, 1961 in the fourth inning of the last game of the season, a sparsely-attended contest between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox in New York. The Red Sox pitcher was Evan Tracy Stallard. No asterisk was subsequently used in any record books -- Major League baseball itself had no official record book, and Frick later acknowledged that there never was official qualification of Maris' accomplishment. However, Maris remained bitter about the experience. Speaking at the 1980 All-Star game, he said of that season, "They acted as though I was doing something wrong, poisoning the record books or something. Do you know what I have to show for 61 home runs? Nothing. Exactly nothing." Despite all the controversy, Maris was awarded the 1961 Hickok Belt for the top professional athlete of the year, as well as winning the American League's MVP Award for the second straight year. It is said, however, that the stress of pursuing the record was so great for Maris that his hair occasionally fell out in clumps during the season. Later Maris even surmised that it might have been better all along had he not broken the record or even threatened it at all."

Now, my post was based on the article copied below that I have not read in about 20 years, but with this newer invention call the internet, I was able to find a copy as now I can reprint it with the greatest of ease:

The Record Almost Broke Him

With 61* homers in '61, Roger Maris beat the Babe, but got belted for doing it. Now a beer distributor, Maris finds his bitter memories are getting sweeter

by Rick Telander

Sports Illustrated: Issue date: June 20, 1977

"Sunday, Oct. 1, 1961, Yankee Stadium, Bronx, N.Y. Bottom of the fourth, nobody on, one out, no score. Roger Maris of the Yankees steps to bat for the second time in the final game of the season. Tracy Stallard, a 24-year old righthander for the Boston Red Sox, delivers a fastball — "a strike, knee-high on the outside part of the plate," he would say later.

Maris swings and everybody knows the ball is gone. In the melee in the right field stands, Sal Durante, a teenager from Brooklyn, emerges with the home run ball and becomes a footnote to history. Maris slowly circles the bases to a standing ovation from the crowd. Yogi Berra, the next batter, shakes his hand, as does the bat boy and an ecstatic fan who has leaped out of the stands. Maris disappears into the dugout, comes out again, doffs his cap and smiles. On the last possible day he has broken Babe Ruth's "unbreakable" record and hit 61 home runs in a season.

Wednesday, March 23, 1977, Perry Field, Gainesville, Fla. Roger Maris, beer distributor and 42-year old father of six, stands in the Yankee dugout watching his old teammates prepare to play a spring-training game against the University of Florida. George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, approaches. "Hey, Rog," he says, "where's the beer?" Maris laughs and shrugs his shoulders. "You should have asked me earlier," he says.
Steinbrenner chuckles, but then his smile fades a bit. "You know, you're a hard guy to get a hold of, Roger," he says. "You're hard to get to New York for just one day."

There is a pause. Maris' smile continues, but it is artificial now, as though propped up with toothpicks. Steinbrenner is referring to the annual Old Timers' Game, an event Maris has never attended since he left the Yankees in 1966. Maris has refused to visit Yankee Stadium for any reason.

"Why don't you come?" Steinbrenner says in a softer voice.
Maris stares out at the field. "They might shoot me," he says.
Steinbrenner's voice becomes solemn. "I'm telling you, Roger, you won't ever hear an ovation like the one you'd get if you'd come back to Yankee Stadium."

Maris looks at the ground. "Maybe," he says without conviction, and the conversation is over.

After all these years, the man who hit more home runs in a season than anyone still has not recovered from the emotional turbulence of the summer of '61. Hounded ceaselessly by an aggressive sporting press and by fans who lusted for the long ball, Maris proved himself inadequate to the vast demands of public relations. It is uncertain whether anyone could have been adequate.

At times, 50 or more reporters so packed the Yankee clubhouse to interview Maris that some of his teammates could not reach their lockers. Rather than clarifying his image, many of the reporters garbled it, filling their copy with adjectives as diverse as their own natures. At various times in 1961 Maris was described as "shy," "decent," "hot-headed," "low-key," "easily agitated," "devout and home-loving," "surly," "cooperative," "unselfish," "reticent," "talkative," "trite," "choleric," "self-pitying," "sincere," "wonderful," "sensible," "petulant," "honest," "literate," "straight-forward" and "morose."

When it became apparent that Maris had a real shot at Ruth's record, the barrage of home-run questions intensified. A hundred times a day he was asked if he thought he could break the record, how soon, what he had done to his swing, what did he think of all this. "You can believe me or not — I don't care — but I honestly don't know," he would answer, when thinking became unbearable.

Never a patient man, Maris told reporters that if they thought he was surly, it was just too bad, because that was how he was going to stay. In one away game, angered by catcalls, he made obscene gestures to the crowd. In every road park, and frequently at Yankee Stadium, he was booed. He was, after all, chasing the immortal Babe, who hit is 60 home runs in 1927, before TV coverage and routine mass postgame interviews.
Autograph seekers grew vicious. "People would elbow up to Rog and yell, 'Give me your John Hancock!'" recalls teammate Moose Skowron, "so sometimes Rog would sign 'John Hancock.' Sometimes they'd say, 'Gimme yer X!' So he'd sign X. I mean, how many hours can you put up with that garbage?"

Though he admitted to having a short fuse, Maris resented being labeled a redneck by the press. He stopped smiling. His mouth always seemed set in a tight line. His hair began to fall out. His wife, visiting New York from Kansas City after giving birth to their fourth child, told him he looked like a molting bird. A private person, Maris found he could never be alone, and his statements became less and less printable. The needs of the public were not his needs, and the chasm of misunderstanding widened. In 1963 a reporter wrote that the trouble with Maris was not that he had problems with the press but that "he has proved to be such an unsatisfactory hero."

As a final dig at Maris' authenticity, baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, an old friend of Babe Ruth's and a former sportswriter who once ghosted articles under Ruth's byline, decreed that Maris' record must go into the books accompanied by an asterisk. This, explained Frick, was because Maris played a 162-game season, while Ruth played a 154-game schedule; 1961 was the year that baseball expanded its schedule to 162 games, and Maris' feat was the first baseball record thus qualified.

----------------------------

Paunchier, fuller-faced and less hawkeyed than the blond, crew-cut young athlete who, it was said, could have posed for a Marine recruiting poster, Maris seems at ease now, but somehow misplaced in his role as small-town businessman. He fidgets with his tie, pulls at the tight sleeves of his blue blazer. He is a man of action at a sit-down job.

His hair is now dark and long. When he leans forward it falls over his forehead and he pushes it back. "This hair in my eyes, this long stuff, it bothers me," he says with the irritation of someone who grew up believing in barber shops. "I'm about this close to getting a crew cut again. I really am. You know, it's hard these days when athletes and professors and everybody has long hair — it's hard for me to tell my kids to get theirs cut."

Maris looks at the family photos on the back wall of his office, the snapshots of his six blond children, aged 11 to 19, and his infant grandson. Always fiercely protective of his family, Maris never considered moving them to New York during his years with the Yankees. "Never, ever," he says quickly. "I knew it wasn't my permanent home. I don't like big cities. I don't like hustle and bustle." Patricia Maris and the kids lived instead in a suburb of Kansas City where Maris returned as soon as each season ended.

"It can be rough on you having five adolescent kids," Maris adds. "I shudder to think what would happen if they got up in the morning with nothing to do. Fortunately, we belong to a country club, and the boys are pretty interested in golf. Oh, they like baseball, too, but the private school they go to is too small to have a team. The only other thing around here is American Legion ball, and that can be rough when you have all those older boys to compete with.

"I don't push my kids into anything, but I think golf is a good clean sport — no broken bones or anything like that. And if you ever make the pro tour, why, you don't even have to win. You can do just fine finishing near the top."

------------------------------

Mickey Mantle, the affable golden boy contrasting with the brooding Maris, was in the midst of an outstanding year himself in 1961. Together the "M&M Boys" blasted 115 homers — 61 for Maris, 54 for Mantle — a major league record for teammates. It soon became part of the skeptics' argument that were it not for Mantle's batting cleanup, Maris never would have seen the pitches he did, never would have approached even 50 home runs. (In fact, all the Yankees aided one another. Six different players hit 20 or more home runs in 1961, and the team total of 240 is by far the most ever hit by one club in a season.)

In the team's 159th game Maris finally hit his 60th homer, tying Ruth's record. Five days later he hit the 61st, and as the dust cleared, he said that he was immensely — exhaustedly — relieved, that he could never go through the same experience again. But instead of the public nightmare dissipating, as Maris hoped, it reappeared in a different form. Now everyone wanted to know if Maris could repeat his feat. There were many — fans, reporters, players — who felt he had to, to prove his legitimacy. But in 1962 Maris hit only 33 home runs, and after that he never hit more than 26 in a season. In his last four years he averaged slightly less than nine.

The notion that Maris was a fluke, that he was not in Ruth's class in anything — skill, endurance, personality, charisma — gained credence. He was, to many, not worthy of being considered Ruth's equal. He would never make the Hall of Fame, they said. (He hasn't.) Forgotten were Maris' outstanding arm, his fielding skills, his baserunning, his three years of 100 or more RBIs, his two MVP trophies — he got his second, of course, in 1961 — his many debilitating injuries, the fact that he never claimed to be anything more than a man "just doing my job."

After 1961 fans booed him as routinely as they ordered hot dogs. Some sportswriters gloated over his failings, crediting themselves for much of his fame. "If it weren't for sportswriters," said Tommy Devine of the Miami News in 1962, "Roger Maris would probably be an $18-a-week clerk in the A&P back in Missouri." On a "home-run derby" tour in the South after the '61 season, Maris reached one of the low points of his career. Playing before almost deserted stands, he was jeered by children each time he took a pitch or hit a ball that did not clear the fence.

In New York the press continued to pursue him. Though Maris had informed reporters that he led "the most boring existence you can imagine," that he didn't read, didn't drink, didn't go out, that world events held no interest for him, that he tried to get 10 hours of sleep a night, they would not quit.

"Some of the questions they asked me!" says Maris, his eyes narrowing again. "I remember one writer asked what I did on the road. I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Well, do you go out with girls, fool around, anything like that?' I said, 'I think I'm married, if I remember correctly.' He said, 'Well, so am I, but I still go out and fool around.' I said, 'You do whatever you want. I don't do it.' I mean, that's an intelligent question, isn't it? Especially with about a hundred reporters around me. Then another brilliant guy asks, 'What would you rather do, bat .300 or hit 61 home runs?' That's a hell of a question. How many guys hit .300 and how many hit 61 home runs? Doesn't common sense tell you what you answer to something like that?"

Maris shakes his head. "I tried to get along with them, but it just didn't work. I think the problem was that at a certain point the baseball writers got to be gossip columnists. I'm not speaking of some of the old, polished writers — I mean this new breed that came in around 1961. They weren't there to write what happened on the field. And the Yankees, with the experience they'd had, they should have been able to see the whole thing coming. But they did nothing. They just let you stew in your own brew, baby.

"I used to sit at the Stadium for three and four hours after games, until the last reporter was gone. That's wrong. I know there was competition among the writers, and I guess there were times when I got things going, too. Like for years, Willie Mays said that he'd play for nothing. I always maintained that I was playing for my family and my bread and butter, and when the bread or butter's not there, I'm not there. So the headlines come out that I'm playing strictly for money, which wasn't true, because I loved the game, too. The press was making me a — what do you call it? — a whipping boy.
"What's funny is that when I first came to the Yankees everybody was giving Mantle a bad time. Why, I don't know. But when I got there, all of that stuff just sort of slid off him and came onto me. I was the one assaulting baseball, apple pie, Chevrolet, the whole works. That's when Mickey got to be the golden boy." "

Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

Ryan Howard / Roger Maris

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