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Young clacked the keys, covering for his co-worker’s unfortunate case of writer’s block by crafting a memorable lede that would win awards under Trimble’s byline: “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game yesterday.” With fresh Maris quotes in his notepad, Trimble fired off a dispatch that was no love letter:
Kansas City, Mo., June 20—“Roger the red-necked Yankee” is almost the term used by other ballplayers to describe Roger Maris. But ballplayers being ballplayers and this being a nice newspaper, we’ve had to paraphrase the expression, anatomy-wise.
Maris doesn’t take surly pills. He only acts that way. The Yankee slugger really is a nice man. It’s just that he is perpetually sore.
“I was born red-necked and I guess I’ll stay that way,” the national game’s angry man said Tuesday.
And that’s the image of Maris that was delivered to the public, even before the chase was in full swing. If there was any question about Maris’s state of mind, the writers could simply check the stool in front of his Yankee Stadium locker. On days when Maris didn’t feel like talking, and those were growing more frequent, he would produce a plaster cast of a hand with an extended middle finger.
“That didn’t endear him to the press,” said Marty Appel, a Yankees author and historian who served as the club’s public relations director during the 1970s. “These were guys who were covering the Yankees in the 1920s and ’30s, so they weren’t about to be disrespected. You had these afternoon papers like the [New York] World-Telegram, decrying Roger Maris as being a bad guy.”
Maris’s dismissal hardly doused excitement over the budding home run chase; Maris hit his 31st homer on July 4, while Mantle trailed close behind with 28. A few writers attempted to stir drama, suggesting that Maris and Mantle disliked each other. Teammates refute that in the strongest terms, painting them as buddies who spent time together away from the stadium and benefited from the competition.
They had more in common than outward appearances indicated; Maris and Mantle were both three-sport high school athletes from blue-collar backgrounds, North Dakota and Oklahoma, respectively, who married their high school sweethearts and now found themselves stars in the big city. As in the 61* movie, Mantle, Maris, and outfielder Bob Cerv really did spend that summer in a modest two-bedroom apartment off the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, not far from Idlewild Airport (renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport following the president’s 1963 assassination).
One too many of Mantle’s alcohol-fueled, late-night Manhattan incidents spurred Maris to host something of an intervention, believing that the team’s star player needed a break from his high life at the Hotel St. Moritz, which today overlooks Central Park as the Ritz-Carlton New York. Mantle was earning $65,000 in 1961, and it was disappearing fast. The St. Moritz alone charged $125 per night, more than $1,200 in 2023 dollars, and Mantle was running up thousand-dollar tabs all around town.
Maris laid the ground rules: there would be no partying, no women. Mantle had nodded, saying that he could use a summer like that. In their unassuming living space, Maris liked to cook breakfast; he’d fry bacon first, then make the eggs in the fat from the bacon, which would blacken the eggs. “Big Julie” Isaacson, one of Maris’s best friends during his time with the Yankees, said: “I used to tell him this wasn’t North Dakota, that no one in New York makes eggs like that. But Roger did, and I ate them. I’ll say this, they weren’t bad.”
Maris, Mantle, and Cerv would spend hours putting golf balls into a small tin hole atop the living room carpet, playing for pennies. They rode to the Bronx in Maris’s convertible, the top down and the wind in their faces. On one occasion, the M&M Boys went grocery shopping together, the sight of Mantle and Maris pushing a cart down a Queens supermarket aisle prompting a teenage stock boy to fall from his ladder. Cans scattered everywhere; Mantle and Maris had just laughed.
“I liked it in Queens,” Mantle said. “The press couldn’t find us. We had an icebox full of sandwiches and pizza. Roger liked his privacy. When we went out to eat, Roger didn’t like to be bothered for autographs during the meal. He’d ask the person to come back when he was finished eating. Usually, I just signed it to get it over with. When I was with Roger, I followed his lead. Outside the park, Roger would stand there and sign as long as anybody, but he had a thing about being bugged in restaurants. That’s why the apartment was perfect for him, and it was good for him. He wanted to get away from everything, and I needed to get away from it all, too.”
It was the afternoon of July 18 when Commissioner Ford C. Frick—pressed by the surging interest in the race—made his ruling, suggesting that any record not broken within a player’s first 154 games would be recognized as a new and separate record.
Frick suggested there would be a “distinctive mark” to show that a record like Ruth’s was set in a 154-game schedule; it was Dick Young, the influential columnist at the New York Daily News, who suggested that there would be an asterisk applied. Young wrote that a record achieved in a 162-game schedule was akin to “permitting a man to run 95 yards to break a record in the 100-yard dash.”
“Over the years, [Frick] came to be ridiculed and defiled over this decision,” Appel said. “But if you put yourself in his position, baseball clung to tradition so strongly, and now he’s faced with this possibility that every record could fall and we could have an entirely new record book. The home run record was getting everybody’s attention, and he was thinking—not incorrectly—that the whole record book was in danger, and with it, baseball’s heritage and legacy.”
Coincidentally, Maris entered an 0-for-19 skid as Mantle briefly inched ahead in the race, but Maris homered four times in a July 25 doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox. The Yanks won twenty of twenty-nine games in July, and Maris finished the month leading Mantle, 40 to 39.
There was an interesting subplot to the Maris and Mantle chase concerning the baseball itself, which was manufactured at the time by Spalding. It was called the “rabbit ball,” believed to be livelier than anything Ruth had swatted. Edwin L. Parker, the company’s president, insisted that “the built-in characteristics of the ball haven’t changed in 35 years.”
The New York Times commissioned an investigation, hiring chemists and engineers to run tests on seven balls manufactured between 1927 and 1961. It appeared on the Times’s front page on August 14, below larger and much more important headlines concerning the East Germans and Soviet allies having encircled Berlin with a barbed-wire barrier, the predecessor of the Berlin Wall.
Three pages of charts and data, detailing “surgical dissection and batterings by an explosive-driven Remington Arms ram” and headings like “Impact vs. Travel,” “Rotational Stability,” and “Rebound Coefficient” yielded this finding: Was the 1961 ball livelier than Ruth’s? “Maybe yes and maybe no.”
In the clubhouse, the ’61 Yankees had chuckled, considering the story ridiculous. It was the grandfather of the conversation that would arise in December 2022, when an Insider investigation claimed that three types of Rawlings baseballs had circulated during the previous year, with astrophysicist Dr. Meredith Wills conducting tests of 204 balls obtained from twenty-two different ballparks during the season.
Major League Baseball had previously acknowledged two different baseballs, one less lively than the other, citing a manufacturing issue at a Costa Rican plant during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report suggested that there was a third type of ball, which it called “Goldilocks”—not too heavy and not too light—that was largely found in the postseason, at the All-Star Game and the Home Run Derby. According to Insider, the only “Goldilocks” balls not bearing commemorative stamps were found in Yankees games.
MLB forcefully denied the story, stating that “the conclusions of this research are wholly inaccurate and just plain wrong.” Meanwhile, people close to the Yankees said that pitchers did complain about some of the baseballs, but a sample size of 204 balls was too small to prove the distribution of the balls had not been random throughout the league.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1961, it was Mantle who had said: “Maybe it’s the players now who are livelier.”
8
WALK-OFFS AND MAGIC WANDS
Since the August 2016 beginning of the Yankees’ Aaron Judge era, no place had brought them more heartbreak than Houston’s Minute Maid Park.
The retractable-roof ballpark at the corner of Crawford Street and Texas Avenue opened its existence as Enron Field, that name lasting but two years before the energy and financial trading company became synonymous with embarrassment and scandal.
It was where CC Sabathia had wept in the visiting clubhouse after the 2017 American League Championship Series, and where Brett Gardner’s voice had cracked during a heartfelt speech to his vanquished teammates at the end of their 2019 run.
Where Joe Girardi had marched through a service corridor in ’17, jaw clenched, to deliver his final words as the team’s manager. Where there had been awkward silence again in ’19, punctuated only by the slaps of palms against shirtless backs as players absorbed defeat and wished each other well for the winter.
Oh, the Yankees hated that place.
The opening of the second half of the season offered little reason to change that stance. Once again, the Yankees returned disappointed from their sojourn to Space City, swept in a day-night doubleheader between the league’s top teams. Houston rookie J. J. Matijevic decided the opening contest with a walk-off single off Michael King, and things looked bleak in the nightcap, too.
Yordan Alvarez and Alex Bregman slugged first-inning homers off Domingo Germán, then added run-scoring hits off the righty in the second inning.
“They’re definitely our kryptonite,” King said. “Even when we played them during the regular season, it wasn’t pretty.”
Chas McCormick’s two-run homer off JP Sears gave Houston a commanding 7–2 lead, but the Yanks had one last gasp in them.
HOMER #34: July 21 vs. Houston Astros’ Brandon Bielak (9th inning, three-run)
Exit velocity: 111 mph. Distance: 410 feet. Launch angle: 33 degrees. HR in 30 of 30 MLB parks.
Brandon Bielak, a twenty-six-year-old righty from Metuchen, New Jersey, was born on the same day that Derek Jeter made his first Opening Day start. A generation of Yankees fans would speak fondly of the frigid afternoon that Jeter announced his presence on the big-league stage with a stellar performance in Cleveland, contributing a terrific over-the-shoulder catch behind pitcher David Cone and slugging his first career homer off veteran Dennis Martinez.
Bielak’s assignment here in Houston had been to ice the Yankees, and he was doing well, spinning three scoreless innings in relief as the game plodded toward the end. Fatigue, and perhaps some nerves, were setting in as manager Dusty Baker sent Bielak back to the mound in the ninth. Isiah Kiner-Falefa and DJ LeMahieu opened the inning with singles, and after Anthony Rizzo flew out, Bielak saw Judge come to the plate. Bielak pumped a low sinker for a called strike, then missed out of the strike zone. The next pitch, a slider, squirted through catcher Martín Maldonado’s legs for a wild pitch that advanced the runners. Now Bielak went back to the sinker, and this one hovered around belt-high.
Judge crushed it deep to left field, where it landed on the train tracks overlooking the ballpark, an homage to the ballpark’s previous life as Houston’s heavily trafficked Union Station. Standing in the dugout, Giancarlo Stanton smacked his palms on the padded dugout railing; the Yanks were back in the ball-game. But Rafael Montero entered to record the final two outs, inducing Matt Carpenter to hit into a game-ending double play, and the Yanks chewed on a 7–5 defeat.
Judge showered and paced toward the back left corner of Minute Maid Park’s visiting clubhouse, the same stall he’d occupied back in October of 2019, when José Altuve’s homer off a smirking Aroldis Chapman had dealt a death blow to the Bombers’ postseason. The room was once again pin-drop quiet as Judge buttoned a dress shirt, face toward his belongings, then scrolled through text messages before nodding to a waiting media contingent.
Yogi Berra might have called it “déjà vu all over again,” but Judge wasn’t going there. This was 2022, and it had nothing to do with 2019.
“We’ve got the best record in baseball,” Judge said. “They’re a great team, and I’m not going to sit here and dwell on things that happened in the past, no matter what, good or bad. So we’ll see what happens down the stretch, but I’m focused on this year and this team. We’ve got a great ballclub here. We’ve got to stay within ourselves, focus on ourselves, and I think good things will happen.”
In the manager’s office, Boone sounded exhausted—from traveling to Houston and the day-night twin bill, and also about questions concerning his team’s seeming inability to answer the Astros. Judge noted that the Yankees still owned the majors’ best mark (64-30), but Houston was hot on their tail at 61-32. Those losses mattered in the present, but Judge said he considered October a different animal altogether.
“So,” he said, “this is just kind of a practice test. Every team we play is a little practice test to see how we stack up. Take your notes and then get ready for the real thing.”
The narrative, Boone understood, would not change unless the Yankees toppled the Astros in October—when the games counted most.
“Ultimately, we may have to slay the dragon, right?” Boone said.
HOMER #35: July 22 vs. Baltimore Orioles’ Tyler Wells (3rd inning, three-run)
Exit velocity: 108.6 mph. Distance: 436 feet. Launch angle: 26 degrees. HR in 30 of 30 MLB parks.
HOMER #36: July 22 vs. Baltimore Orioles’ Tyler Wells (5th inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 113.5 mph. Distance: 465 feet. Launch angle: 25 degrees. HR in 30 of 30 MLB parks.
There were no wakeup calls scheduled as the Yankees’ plane touched down outside Baltimore in the wee hours of a Friday morning. Players and coaches shuffled wordlessly into their hotel, closing the blackout shades tight to avoid the approach of sunrise, just precious minutes away. When Judge finally awoke, he had a text message from his father, Wayne: “Hey, make sure you go to right field. They’ve got that big wall in left field.”
Judge chuckled, rolling his eyes and leaning back into the pillow. How could he forget; that modified, deeper wall at Camden Yards had spoiled one of his favorite hitting backdrops.
“I might try to get one over that,” Judge had replied.
Judge did better than that, enjoying his eighth multi-homer game in leading his club to a 7–6 win. In the third inning, Orioles righty Tyler Wells fell behind Judge with a 2-1 count. Judge pounced on a fastball up in the zone, clearing the Baltimore bullpen and reaching the distant visiting warm-up area, where the ball dented earth and rattled against a digital scoreboard touting an upcoming bobblehead night for retired slugger Boog Powell.
“It’s actually really impressive to see how much his approach has changed and how much his swing has changed,” Wells said. “For me, a lot of the time it is, ‘Okay, how can we execute this pitch to where we can eliminate his power?’ Last year, I felt like that was an up-and-in pitch to Judge and that’s where I was able to get him most of the time, or a down-and-away slider. But this year, it seems like he’s made those his strengths. He can get to the inside pitch. He can get to the low-and-outside slider.”
A loud contingent of Yankees fans chanted “M-V-P!” for Judge, which was becoming a familiar and welcome occurrence. “When you give our team an early lead,” he’d say later, “it usually comes out to a good outcome.” New York was up, 3–0, and Judge had another big swing in the fifth, with Wells still in the game. Once again, Wells fell behind in the count two balls to a strike. This time, he tried a changeup, and Judge hit it even farther. This one cleared both bullpens, smacking off a fan before bouncing back among the Bombers’ relievers; the third-longest homer ever clocked at Camden Yards. On YES, Ryan Ruocco exclaimed: “Aaron Judge is going to get on NASA’s radar!”
Coincidentally, the six-foot-eight Wells was the only player that Judge (six-foot-seven) had homered off in the big leagues who was taller than him. “It doesn’t help whenever you throw it down the middle to him,” Wells said. “The first home run that I gave up to him, I was trying to go up there; just didn’t get it in enough. The second one, he just took a pitch right down the middle and hit it a long ways. I think it just shows with Judge or that Yankees lineup, you miss in the middle, you’re going to pay for it.” The performance put Judge back on pace to equal Maris’s 61 homers, with 6 in the Yanks’ last seven games, and the mark seemed quite within reach, at least to his teammates. “At the rate he’s going, he could definitely accomplish anything,” Jameson Taillon said.
“The first time I really thought about it was in the second half,” said Pete Caldera of the Bergen Record. “At that point, the Yankees had a ridiculous lead in the division and you’re looking for other things to circle the calendar for. You take a real good look at Judge’s home run total and you say, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s got a shot to hit 60.’ I remember predicting 59, only because 60 is so mythic in Yankees lore and MLB history.”
Though Judge’s two blasts had sparked revelry in the clubhouse, the fun would be punctured by bad news. That afternoon, while shagging batting-practice fly balls, Michael King had confided in Clay Holmes. King told Holmes that his pitching elbow had been aching for weeks, to the point where he no longer suspected tendinitis. King had been gobbling anti-inflammatories in the trainers’ room, and Holmes told King that he needed to go straight to the team’s training staff when batting practice ended. King listened, nodded, then completely ignored his teammate. “After the conversation, I said, ‘My velo has still been there. I’m still producing decent numbers. I don’t want to shut it down,’ ” King said. “Our bullpen was struggling at the time, so we really needed the help. I would have felt really soft if I said, ‘Hey, I’m actually hurt and I need to get shut down here.’ ”
