A lot today is made of new media, of bloggers and social networks, and the death of traditional journalism.
After reading Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary, I am left wondering if, perhaps, that notion isn’t perhaps a little misguided.
Perhaps what has changed in recent years has more to do with platform and access–more writers, more outlets, more coverage–than content itself. Sure, if a player makes a rash comment, it’s more likely that someone will have caught the incident on camera and make a parody on Youtube, but the celebrity culture which some will say defines the western world has been apparent long before the invention of Blogspot or Wordpress.
Think about all the coverage that Princess Diana received, from her marriage in 1981 to her divorce in the early 90s and her death in 1997, the tabloid nature of the coverage, and the fact that all of this happened before some kids at Harvard came up with Facebook or someone decided to create an account on LiveJournal.
Sure, Diana wasn’t a professional athlete, but that same idea of celebrity is one that we often find surrounds athletes as well. Think of the coverage that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa received in 1998, for example, while they strove to break Roger Maris’s (more on him in a sec) home run record.
After reading Roger Maris , I am left thinking that the real revolution in journalism (or at least in sports journalism), when journalists went from deifying athletes to trying to tear them down, happened around the same time Kennedy was elected and Roger Maris–the one person who may have been most ill-prepared to deal with the NY media spotlight–happened to find himself at the center of it.
Maris, Clavin and Peary state, was a country boy from North Dakota, who, due to a troubled family background, both shied away from acknowledging he spent his earliest years in Hibbing, Minnesota, and changed his last name from Maras to Maris. He valued his privacy and his family, and was, perhaps, never really comfortable with himself until he retired from baseball (Maris so valued privacy that he revealed more about himself in an autobiographical novel, Slugger in Right than he did in his own autobiographical effort after the 1961 season).
If ever there was a misplaced candidate to break Babe Ruth’s single season home run record, the quiet Maris, who was still perceived as an outsider in 1961, having been a Yankee only since 1960, was it.
His relationship with the press and the public in 1961 may not have been all that much different than that of Barry Bonds in 2001. While Bonds’ legacy may be tarnished by rumors of performance enhancing drug use, Maris’s own record bore an asterisk until the early 1990s because he hit 61 home runs in 163 games, and not the 154 in which Babe Ruth had done it. (Here it may be prudent to note that Clavin and Peary point out that Maris actually broke the record in seven fewer plate appearances. Don’t believe me? Check it out on B-Ref).
That said, Ruth’s record was considered so sacred that it was anathema to break it, and if anyone was going to break it, it would have been better to be Mantle–the lifetime Yankee–than Maris. As is often the case, things seldom have a storybook ending.
Clavin and Peary spend the heart of the book chronicling Maris’s 1961 season, the relentless press and the almost amusing tidbit that, far from being bitter rivals, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were actually close friends. In fact, the authors assert, at Maris’s funeral, Mantle was the most distraught of all the mourners.
Roger Maris is a fantastic read because the authors spend enough time on the background (not just of Maris, but of society writ large) that one is able to come to an understanding as to while a small town country boy could be portrayed by the big city media as a surly, dour character when it simply wasn’t true.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess I’m not usually one for the biography circuit unless we’re talking Borgias or Tudors, but I found it hard to put down Roger Maris–even while the Yankees were playing and the Devils were getting knocked out of the postseason. If you value your Yankee history and your Yankee heroes, you’ll pick up this book.
Original Story:
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