McGwire’s Single Season Mark One for the Ages ─ Not!

Barry Bonds last year broke Hank Aaron’s career home-run record and did it on steroids. Is it any wonder he never received a congratulatory call from Aaron? Outside of San Francisco, the city that hails Bonds as a hero, it seems most fans from around the country were pulling against him.

Yet consider the hoopla that followed Mark McGwire in 1998, when he broke Roger Maris’s single-season home run record by hitting 70 dingers, since eclipsed in 2001, with far less fanfare, by Barry Bonds’ 73. Perhaps it was a circus specifically created to reunite fans with the national pastime in the aftermath of the players’ strike that resulted in cancellation of the 1994 World Series, but I recall, as I watched my own beloved Tigers struggle through another losing season, McGwire updates interrupting my game as the entire baseball world waited for the inevitable. It was clear: America was pulling for McGwire, his body bulked up by steroids (little resembling the muscular yet lean kid who began his career with the Oakland Athletics in 1987) ─ rumor had it his body was so wracked by steroids that he showed up for games dressed in uniform and left the same way, never showering with his team mates.

I was not yet five years old in 1961 when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single season homerun record, then the oldest record in baseball. And it was many years before I realized what he endured in this quest for baseball immortality ─the stress, the hair that fell out in clumps, the negative press, the hate mail and the boos that rained down on him every time he took the field at the House that Ruth Built, his own hometown fans no less! The fans and press alike had wanted the Bambino to hold onto that 34-year-old record. Ruth was Adonis, and no one wanted a kid with a mere .270 batting average to tarnish Ruth’s image as one of baseball’s immortals.

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. Maris failed to reach 61 in 154 games (he had hit 59 after 154 games). He hit his 61^ston 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, which sadly contrasts McGwire’s feat on September 8, 1998, when he hit a pitch served up by Chicago Cubs’ Steve Trachsel over the left field wall for his record-breaking 62^nd  homerun in front of a sellout crowd at Busch Stadium. Thankfully no such asterisk ever existed in any book of records. Despite all the controversy surrounding Maris’s accomplishment, it was sad to see all the hoopla, pomp and ceremony heaped upon McGwire, while Maris, in the aftermath of his record setting season, was merely awarded the 1961 Hickok Belt for the top professional athlete of the year and the American League’s MVP Award for the second straight year.

To say that Maris remained bitter about the experience is an understatement. Speaking at the 1980 All-Star game, he said of his 61 homeruns, “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.” It grieved me to learn that Maris once said that it might have been better all along had he not broken the record or even threatened it at all.

Maris died all too young, at age 51, but perhaps it is best he did not live to see his own single season record for homeruns, which endured longer than Ruth’s, surpassed by McGwire.

McGwire finished the 1998 season with 70 home runs, but since Ruth had hit 60 homeruns in 154 games during 1927, McGwire broke the record in his team’s 145^th game, laying to rest the issue of the extended season.

Unfortunately for me, and for many other baseball purists, it does nothing to allay the fact that he accomplished this feat, as did Bonds, with the help of performance enhancing drugs.

My hat is off to you, Roger Maris, a member of the infamous 1961 Murderers Row composed of Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Elston Howard, Moose Skowren, and Johnny Blanchard, combining to hit 240 homeruns that year. Your record still stands in my record book.