NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
The Catholic farm boy from Fargo, North Dakota, had always been a promising athlete. In high school—-Shanley Catholic—-he stood out in baseball, football, basketball, and track. Later, when he moved on to the minor leagues, he excelled there as well.
Nevertheless, when Roger Maris made his major league debut with the Cleveland Indians on April 16, 1957, nobody expected the kid from Fargo to do the unthinkable: break Babe Ruth’s home–run record.
Yet within four years, that’s exactly what he did.
Maris was 26 years old and a New York Yankee when the 1961 season began. Kansas City had traded him to the Yankees after 1959, and although Maris won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award for the 1960 season, New York fans hadn’t taken to him. Quiet and shy, Maris was a faithful family man, more interested in spending time with his wife and (eventually) six kids than schmoozing with the press.
Then, when it became clear that Maris and his teammate Mickey Mantle were in a race to break the Babe’s record of 60 home runs in a single season (albeit, a slightly longer season than Ruth’s), things got ugly.
Every time Maris took to the field in 1961, boos, not cheers greeted him. Threats and hate mail poured into the Yankee’s office, and the press routinely savaged him. People didn’t want to see Ruth’s record broken by an outsider. Maris, however, handled it with grace, keeping his cool and finally hitting his 61st home run in the last game of the regular season.
Maris went on to play five more seasons with the Yankees before finishing up his career in 1968 as a St. Louis Cardinal. Seventeen years later, Hodgkin’s lymphoma took the 51–year–old father’s life. In his funeral Mass at the Fargo cathedral, con-celebrated by the bishop and four priests, nearly 1,000 people turned out to honor Maris, not simply for the way he played baseball but, more fundamentally, for the way he lived life.
