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Roger Eugene Maris (September 10, 1934 – December 14, 1985), American baseball player of Croatian origin is remembered for breaking Babe Ruth's 34-year-old single-season home run record in 1961. His record 61 home runs stood until 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both surpassed it.
Born in Hibbing, Minnesota, Maris grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota and Fargo, North Dakota and made his Major League Baseball debut in 1957 with the Cleveland Indians. The next year, he was traded to the Kansas City Athletics, whom he represented in the All-Star game in 1959 in spite of missing 45 games to an appendix operation.
Kansas City usually traded its best players to the New York Yankees, and Maris was no exception, going to New York in a seven-player trade in December 1959.
Although Maris is generally only remembered for his record-breaking 1961 season, in 1960, his first season with the Yankees, he led the league in slugging percentage, RBIs and extra base hits and finished second in home runs and total bases, won a gold glove, and won the American League MVP award.
In 1961, Maris found himself chasing Ruth's record along with popular teammate Mickey Mantle. Unlike McGwire and Sosa after him, Maris was ostracized. 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 distinguished by an asterisk. Maris hit his 61st on October 1, 1961, the last game of the season. Though there was no asterisk formally entered into the record -- baseball had no official record book, and Frick later acknowledged that there never was official qualification of Maris' accomplishment -- Maris remained bitter. Speaking at the 1980 All-Star game, Maris 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.
In 1962, Maris made his fourth consecutive and final All-Star game appearance. Injuries slowed him for the next four seasons, most notably in 1965, when he played most of the season with a misdiagnosed broken bone in his hand.
In 1963, after missing a ground ball hit in a nationally televised game, he gave the middle finger to a jeering Minneapolis crowd. Now encumbered with an injured image as well as body, he was traded by the Yankees to the St. Louis Cardinals after the 1966 season. The Yankees questioned Maris' courage and Maris left angry.
Maris played two final seasons with the Cardinals, helping them to two pennants in 1967 and 1968 and a World Series victory in 1967 (he hit .385 in the post-season). Gussie Busch, owner of the Cardinals and of Anheuser-Busch, set Maris up with a beer distributorship after he retired.
On the Indians, he wore uniform number 32 in 1957 and 5 in 1958; the Athletics first gave him uniform number 35, but in 1959 he wore number 3. On the Yankees and Cardinals, he wore number 9, which the Yankees have now retired in his honor.
Maris died in December 1985 in Houston, Texas of lymphatic cancer, aged 51. A Roman Catholic, he was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fargo, North Dakota.
See also: MLB players who have hit 30 or more home runs before the All-Star break
External links
- Roger Maris at: