Roger Eugene Maris (born Maras; September 10, 1934 – December 14, 1985) was an American professional baseball right fielder who played 12 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB). He is best known for setting a new MLB single-season home run record with 61 home runs in 1961.
Maris played in the minor leagues from 1953 to 1956, and made his major league debut for the Cleveland Indians in 1957. He was traded to the Kansas City Athletics during the 1958 season, and to the New York Yankees after the 1959 season. Maris finished his playing career as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1967 and 1968. Maris was an AL All-Star from 1959 through 1962, the AL Most Valuable Player in 1960 and 1961, and an AL Gold Glove Award winner in 1960. Maris appeared in seven World Series; he played for Yankees teams that won the World Series in 1961 and 1962 and for a Cardinals team that won the World Series in 1967.
Maris's home run record was controversial, as the previous single-season home run record (60, set by Babe Ruth in 1927) was set during a period when MLB teams played 154 games per season. Maris broke Ruth's record in the year the AL baseball season was extended to 162 games, hitting his 61st home run in the last game of the season, which led to questions about the legitimacy of his record. However, he hit his first home run in the 11th game of the season, so that he hit all 61 within a 151-game span. Maris's major league record remained unbroken until Mark McGwire surpassed it in 1998; his AL record stood until 2022, when Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs for the New York Yankees.
Roger Eugene Maris was born on September 10, 1934, in Hibbing, Minnesota; in 1955, his father changed the surname from Maras to Maris. Roger's parents, Rudolph S. "Rudy" Maras and Ann Corrine "Connie" (née Perkovich) were born in Minnesota, and were of Croatian heritage.
Maris's brother Rudolph, who was a year older, developed polio at age 18 in 1951. It was Rudolph who began Maris's baseball career. Maris recalls Rudolph forcing him to play the sport, saying that he physically would drag him out by his ear to play the game that he hated desperately. While he loved taking breaks from his schoolwork and spending time outdoors, he could not stand baseball. By the time he was playing baseball in high school, he no longer had to be forced to play and enjoyed the game. Maris's parents had a turbulent marriage and divorced in 1960. The Maris family moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1938, and to Fargo, North Dakota, in 1946. Maris entered Fargo Central High School in 1948. In 1950, Maris, a Catholic, transferred to Bishop Shanley High School in Fargo, and graduated from there in June 1952. Maris played both baseball and football for the Shanley Deacons. In football, Maris set a national high school record, which still stands, for most return touchdowns in a game, with four (two kickoff returns, one punt return, and one interception return). In that 1951 game, he also scored a fifth touchdown on a 32-yard run from scrimmage. He met his future wife, Patricia, in the tenth grade at a high school basketball game.
Maris began play for the Indians' minor league organization at Fargo (the Fargo-Moorhead Twins) in 1953. He was named rookie of the year in the Northern League, then moved on to Keokuk, Iowa, the next season. In four minor league seasons from 1953 to 1956, Maris hit .303 with 78 home runs and 353 runs batted in (RBI). In Game 2 of the 1956 Junior World Series, Maris, playing for the Indianapolis Indians of the American Association (Triple-A league), set a record by driving in seven runs. With all five teams for which Maris played in the minors, the clubs' win-loss records improved from the prior season.
Maris made his major league debut on April 16, 1957, with the Cleveland Indians. He finished the game 3-for-5 with a run scored in a 3–2 loss against the Chicago White Sox. Two days later, he hit the first home run of his career, a grand slam off Detroit Tigers pitcher Jack Crimian at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. He finished his rookie season with a .235 average, 14 home runs and 51 RBI in 116 games. On June 15, 1958, after playing in 51 games and hitting .225 with nine home runs and 27 RBI for the Indians, he was traded to the Kansas City Athletics with Dick Tomanek and Preston Ward for Vic Power and Woodie Held.
Kansas City Athletics (1958–1959)
After the trade, Maris played in 99 games and hit .247 with 19 home runs and 53 RBI for Kansas City in 1958. In 1959, he played in 122 games and batted .273 with 16 home runs and 72 RBI; he missed 45 games during the second half of the season as a result of an appendix operation. He was selected to play in the second of two All-Star Games held that year. In the late 1950s, Kansas City frequently traded their best young players to the New York Yankees—a practice which led them to be referred to as the Yankees' "major league farm team"—and Maris was no exception. In a seven-player deal completed on December 11, 1959, he was sent to the Yankees with Kent Hadley and Joe DeMaestri in exchange for Marv Throneberry, Norm Siebern, Hank Bauer, and Don Larsen.
In his Yankees debut on April 19, 1960, Maris hit a single, double, and two home runs in an 8–4 win over the Boston Red Sox. He was named to the AL All-Star roster again and played in both games. He finished the season leading the AL in slugging percentage (.581), runs batted in (112), and extra base hits (64). He also hit 39 home runs and had a .283 batting average in 136 games. He won the American League's Most Valuable Player award and was recognized as an outstanding defensive outfielder with a Gold Glove Award. The Yankees won the American League pennant, the first of five consecutive pennants, but lost a seven-game World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates culminating in Bill Mazeroski's dramatic walk-off home run. Maris hit .267 with two solo home runs, six runs scored and a double in the series loss.
In 1961, the AL expanded from eight to ten teams. In the expansion draft, the newly created Los Angeles Angels and Washington Senators were restricted to drafting players from AL rosters. The perceived result was that American League team rosters had become watered down, as players who would otherwise have been playing at AAA, if not lower, were now in the AL. In order to maintain a balanced schedule, AL owners extended the season from 154 games to 162 games in 1961. (The National League expanded from eight to ten teams and its season to 162 games in 1962.) On January 23, 1961, an Associated Press reporter asked Maris whether the schedule changes might threaten Babe Ruth's single-season home run record; Maris replied, "Nobody will touch it ... Look up the records and you'll see that it's a rare year when anybody hits 50 homers, let alone 60."
Yankee home runs began to come at a record pace. One famous photograph lined up six 1961 Yankees, including Mantle, Maris, Yogi Berra and Bill Skowron, under the nickname "Murderers Row", because they hit a combined 165 home runs the previous season (the title "Murderers Row", originally coined in 1918, had most famously been used to refer to the 1927 Yankees). As mid-season approached, it seemed quite possible that either Maris or Mantle, or perhaps both, would break Ruth's 34-year-old home run record. Sportswriters began to play the "M&M Boys" against each other, inventing a rivalry where none existed; in fact, the two men were friends and roommates. Mantle, however, was felled by a hip infection causing hospitalization late in the season, leaving Maris as the single remaining player with the opportunity to break Ruth's home run record. In the middle of the season, baseball commissioner Ford Frick (a friend of Ruth) announced at a press conference that unless Ruth's record was broken in the first 154 games of the season, the new record should be shown separately in the "record books," with some "distinctive mark" next to it indicating it had been done in a 162-game season. The asterisk as such a mark was immediately suggested by New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young. In spite of its formality, Frick's so-called ruling was merely a suggestion: Major League Baseball had no direct control over any record books until many years later. As he closed in on Ruth's record, Maris received death threats and NYPD detective Kieran Burke was assigned to watch over him.