The Quest -- Roger Maris

When Tony Kubek thinks of former Yankee teammate Roger Maris, and his epochal 1961 season, he remembers the geese at Tiger Stadium.

It was Sept. 17, and the pressure of Maris' pursuit of Babe Ruth's home-run record had reached mammoth proportions. The press corps was swelling daily, and the onslaught became so great that Maris' hair had begun to fall out.

Maris' home-run total was 57 that day as he came to the plate to face Detroit pitcher Terry Fox. Kubek, on second base, vividly remembers Maris stepping out of the batter's box and staring at the sky for an inordinately long time.

"You just didn't do that then, and certainly Roger never did," said Kubek, now retired in Milwaukee. "I looked up and saw about 250 Canadian geese flying south, right over the right-field roof. Nestor Chylak, the umpire, was getting a little nervous, but he just let Roger watch the geese. Finally, he stepped back in, and hit the next pitch for a two-run home run, No. 58, just under where the geese had flown.

"Years later, I had one final conversation with Roger. He knew he was dying of cancer and was saying goodbye to his friends. We started talking about that year, and I asked him about the geese. He said he remembered that, how peaceful and quiet it was, watching the geese flying over Tiger Stadium.

"He always said, the only peace he ever got that year was when he was at the plate."

Baseball's most coveted record

This baseball season, Maris' name has been invoked on virtually a daily basis as Ken Griffey Jr., Mark McGwire and Tino Martinez mount the latest challenge to the home-run record that has stood for 35 years - a year longer than Ruth held his mark of 60.

The 61 home runs remain baseball's most coveted mark, one that over time has taken on an almost mythical quality. And yet it came at a huge cost for Maris, a quiet Midwesterner who shunned the attention that flooded his way as he and Mickey Mantle, his far more beloved teammate, pursued the mark in lockstep most of the summer.

Mantle succumbed to a hip injury in early September, developing an abscess after receiving a shot for a cold. Mantle finished with 54 homers. It was left to Maris, a 27-year-old right fielder who had been named the American League's most valuable player in 1960, to stare down history in an increasingly hostile environment.

"It was a nightmare," said Julius "Big Julie" Isaacson, a boxing promoter and union leader who became Maris' best friend when he was traded from Kansas City to New York after the 1959 season. "It was worse than what the papers printed. It's true he did lose clumps of hair, from pressure and nerves. A lot of times, he wouldn't eat.

"You've got to remember: The Yankees always had a Babe Ruth, a Lou Gehrig, a Joe DiMaggio, a Mickey Mantle, someone who was an idol. People wanted to know, what was this snot-nosed kid from Fargo, N.D., doing hitting 61 instead of Mickey? The fans booed him, and the newspapermen got on him."

Maris came to suspect - correctly - that even the Yankee management and players were behind Mantle, who had 53 home runs with 18 games remaining, three behind Maris, before the injury limited him to two starts the rest of the season.

"All of us were pulling for Mickey to break the record," acknowledged Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson, now retired in South Carolina. "He was one of our own. He came up with us through the farm system and had always been a Yankee. Roger came over from Kansas City. But when Mickey got hurt and had no chance, we were pulling for Roger 100 percent."

Said Kubek: "He had to go against things no one else ever had to in baseball. He was in the media center of the world. Playing for the Yankees, because of their reputation and image of always having to win, gave him even more focus. He was trying to beat a legend in Babe Ruth. And he had to battle his teammate, Mickey Mantle, who a lot of people - even some teammates - thought should be the one to break it.

"Then there was the media pressure, which was overwhelming. Roger had that Midwestern work ethic. The more people said he couldn't do it, the more people said they didn't want him to do it, the more entrenched he got. He was that type of person. He was stubborn, and he had a purpose."

`He was just a simple guy'

Isaacson will never forget the first time he met Maris and began a friendship that gave him an intimate vantage point on baseball history. An old friend of his, Yankee outfielder Bob Cerv, asked him to pick up Maris at the airport after the trade from Kansas City and show him around New York.

The plane emptied and the crowd thinned, and finally Isaacson noticed a young man with a crew cut, jeans, a polo shirt and what he termed "white Pat Boone shoes."

"I said, `Are you Maris?' He said, `Are you Julie?' I said, `Kid, you can't dress like that. This is the Yankees.' He said, `If they don't like it, they can send me back.' That's the way Roger was. He was just a simple guy. If you knew him, you loved him, but you had to know what made him tick."

There were media insinuations of a rift between Maris and Mantle that season, or at the very least a rivalry, but that couldn't have been further from the truth, according to those who were there.

Not only did Mantle and Maris become close friends in '61, they roomed together that season, along with Cerv, in a three-bedroom apartment in Queens.

"Roger actually saved Mickey," said Isaacson, whose name was on the lease. "Mickey was living at the St. Moritz Hotel in Manhattan, and one day he got so drunk, a friend of mine who owned the bar called me. I went and got Mickey, and we convinced him to live with Roger. Otherwise, Mickey went strictly from one bar to another. Roger and Mickey were tremendous friends. After he retired, Roger sent him a ball that said, `To the greatest player I ever saw.' He admired him greatly."

Cerv recalled that Mantle and Maris would make sport of their reported feud, starting mock arguments about who was better.

"We laughed like heck about that," said Cerv, now retired in Lincoln, Neb. "Every day, one of them would say, `I'm going to hit one today,' and the other would say, `Well, I'm going to hit two.' "

The irony is that Maris' emergence as a threat to Ruth helped popularize Mantle, who until then was a target of derision by some Yankee fans. Instead, Maris was demonized by fans and media who deemed him unworthy of Ruth's record.

"Mickey had to follow DiMaggio, and he bore the brunt of criticism because of that," Kubek said. "Then Roger became the villain, and all of a sudden Mickey became the hero. He understood it was a passion play of sorts, where you have to be a villain before you can become a hero."

In his 1985 autobiography, "The Mick," Mantle scoffs at the notion that their home-run battle created a rift. "Through it all we remained close," he wrote. "There was never any jealousy. I rooted for him and definitely rooted for myself. Besides, with Roger hitting good it made me try harder. So, if there was a rivalry, it was a friendly one."

It was in August that Maris' wife, Pat, visited Roger from their home in Kansas City and noted he looked like "a molting bird." His hair loss has become another key part of Maris lore. Jack Lang, a Hall of Fame writer who covered the Yankees for the Long Island Press, believes it has been as overplayed as the supposed Mantle feud.

"It was a small patch, no bigger than the size of a quarter, in the back of his head," he said. "It was no great loss of hair. But we all wrote about it. We all made a big deal about it."

The media, in fact, made a big deal of everything Maris did that summer. As more reporters joined the Maris-watch, the absurdity of the scene grew.

One reporter asked him if he fooled around on the road. Everyone wanted to know how he felt about the record - day after day after day.

"Remember, this was a team going for the championship, and every day our stories were about Maris," Lang said. "It's the only time I remember in 50 years where I spent an entire month writing about one player."

That disparity grated on Maris, who was keenly aware that worthy teammates like Elston Howard, who hit .348 that year, and Whitey Ford, who won 25 games, were being slighted.

"He was kind of a country boy, and he went through a lot," said Ralph Houk, the rookie Yankee manager who also was laboring that year to follow a legend, Casey Stengel. "He really could have cared less about breaking records. If we'd win a game and someone on the club was real instrumental in winning and Roger didn't do anything, the writers would come in, and instead of going to that player, they'd go to Roger. He didn't like that."

Recalled Richardson: "He was a quiet guy, and he didn't know how to respond. Finally, he got upset, and they tagged him arrogant. He was not that way at all."

What Cerv remembers is the mind-numbing repetition of the questions. "When he'd get to the park, people would be there waiting to bug him. After the game, if we were done at 4, he'd be there at 6, still answering questions. I know because I had to wait for him. It would be the same thing, over and over: `Are you going to hit one tomorrow?' How the hell did he know?"

In Houk's memory, the media hordes following the home-run chase were staggering. "I'm not exaggerating - there would be as many as 40, 50, 60 people in the clubhouse," said Houk, retired in Winter Haven, Fla. "It was almost ridiculous."

But the newspapermen of the day have a slightly different recollection. Eleven newspapers covered the Yankees on a regular basis in '61 - eight in New York City, plus Newsday, the Long Island Press and Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger. However, there were far fewer electronic media than exist today.

"The media crush was minimal compared to what it was with (Hank) Aaron and Pete Rose when they went after their records," Lang said. "At most, there were a dozen extra writers. And we didn't have what I call the barking dogs - the camera people and radio guys with their microphones, trying to get a sound bite they can sell for 50 bucks. Now you've got a hundred of those guys. You can't even get near the manager."

"I doubt that it was as high as 60, but the main thing is, it was, at the time, an unprecedented crush," said Leonard Koppett, another Hall of Fame baseball writer who covered the Yankees in '61 for the New York Post. "Whatever the actual numbers, that's what made it difficult to handle. No one had any experience with such a thing. Now, of course, it's routine even after ordinary games.

"I remember Maris handling it better than has been portrayed. He did not arouse press antagonism then. All the antagonism came over the winter and in spring training the following year."

Several incidents have been theorized as responsible for Maris' feud with reporters. Isaacson links it to the time in spring training of '62 that Maris jokingly signed an "X" on a ball belonging to the son of the mayor of Fort Lauderdale. The next day, Isaacson recalls, he stiffed powerful columnist Jimmy Cannon, who then ripped him in print.

Koppett pinpoints Maris' problems with the press to a feud that developed over the winter between Maris and Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, who disparaged Maris' record at a banquet. Maris fired back at another banquet. At spring training, Maris was inundated with reporters wanting a comment on Hornsby, and he stalked into the clubhouse and said he wasn't talking to the press.

"One of the problems was Roger couldn't see himself as a star and celebrity," Koppett said. "He had no self-doubts about his quality as a player. But he thought about himself as a regular person who should be treated as a regular person. All this piled on him. He was very much a private person by nature."

The consensus is that Maris, though tense and snappish toward the end of the home-run chase, handled himself decently in '61.

"Before things changed in '62, he was excellent with the press, much better and easier to get along with than Mantle," Koppett said.

Isaacson had the same perception.

"Mickey was a bad boy until Roger got there," he said. "He used to curse the writers and spit at them."

Years later, before his death in 1985, Maris talked frankly of the toll the record chase took on him and his career.

"It would have been a hell of a lot more fun if I had never hit those 61 home runs," he said. "Some guys love the life of a celebrity. Some of them would have walked down Fifth Avenue in their Yankee uniforms if they could. But all it brought me was headaches."

In September of '61, Maris wasn't just chasing Ruth's record. He was facing the additional burden of trying to surpass it in 154 games so he would be recognized on par with Ruth.

One final myth of that year is the supposed "asterisk" that commissioner Ford Frick said would adhere to Maris' record if it took more than the 154 games Ruth had played in '27.

Frick, who had been a close friend of Ruth's, never used the phrase "asterisk," saying instead in July that "a distinctive mark" would attach to the record if it was beyond 154 games. The record book never had an asterisk either, merely a parenthetical notation that Maris' record was achieved in a 162-game season.

Heading into his 154th game at Baltimore, Maris had 58 homers. In the third inning, he hit No. 59 off Milt Pappas, leaving him three more chances to tie the Babe.

He just missed on a ball that hooked foul before striking out. He flied out deep to right in the seventh, then grounded out in the ninth.

"The wind was blowing out when he hit his homer," Cerv recalled. "Later in the same game, he hit another long drive, but the wind had changed. I always said, Babe Ruth was pushing that bugger back."

Maris was becoming a basket case as the pressure reached a crescendo. Before the 154th game, he approached Houk nearly in tears and stunned the manager by asking for the day off.

"I said to him, `Roger, look at the crowd out here. You've got to play,' " Houk recalled. "He was half sick. He said, `OK, Skip, if you want me to, but I don't really want to.' I said, `How about you go to right field for the first inning, and I'll say you got sick and take you out after that.' He came in after the first and didn't say anything, so I left him in. He hit his 59th that day."

Maris hit No. 60 off Baltimore's Jack Fisher with four games to play, and again asked Houk for a day off. This time, the manager gave him one, although he was puzzled why Maris was forgoing one of his few remaining chances to break the record.

Finally, on Friday, Oct. 1, in the fourth inning of the Yankees' 163rd game - one had been a suspended game that ended in a tie - Maris hit No. 61 off Boston pitcher Tracy Stallard. A mere 23,154 fans were at Yankee Stadium.

"One thing Roger had that players lack these days - more than some - was respect for the game and his teammates and the opposition," Kubek said. "Some of those challenging the record today don't have that.

"Roger showed the ultimate respect when he hit No. 61. Three of our bench players had to push him back on the field to acknowledge the cheers. He doffed his cap and ran back in - not because he was shy or unaware of what he had done. He didn't want to show up the opposition pitcher, who had thrown him a strike when he didn't have to. One thing he did was show an abiding respect for the game of baseball."

Now, 36 years later, the game is showing an increasing respect for Maris, and especially for his remarkable achievement that still stands as a beacon, luring players toward its brilliance. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Breaking down the chase The history of Major League Baseball is strewn with the remains of great sluggers on pace to claim the single-season home-run record, only to fall short. Most home runs by the end of the month:

April Ken Griffey Jr., Seattle, 13 in 1997 Six players shared the record o 11 home runs in April before Griffey broke it this season. Of those six. only Baltimore's Brady Anderson (1996) finished with 50 home runs.

May Ken Griffey Jr., Seattle, 24 in 1997 Griffey this year broke his major-league record of 22 home runs by the end of May. He set his previous mark in 1994, breaking Mickey Mantle's record of 20 home runs (through the end of May 1956) en route to his first American League home-run title. He finished with 40 on Aug. 11, because the players' strike that wiped out the rest of the season began the next day.

June. Ken Griffey jr., Seattle, 32 in 1994 Griffey, also set this mark during the strike year. Third baseman Matt Williams, then with the San Francisco Giants, set the National League record with 29 home runs through the end of June 1994, but his pace also was wiped out by the strike.

July Jimme Foxx, Philadelphia (1932) and Babe Ruth, New York Yankees (1928), 41 Foxx, ninth on the all-time list with 534 career home runs, was on pace to break Ruth's 5-year-old record of 60 homers in as season for the Athletics and finished with league-leading totals of 58 home runs, 169 RBIs and a .749 slugging percentage at age 25. Ruth missed 21 games and finished his 1928 season with 41 home runs.

August Roger Maris, New York Yankees, 51 in 1961 Maris went on the hit 10 more homers to break Ruth's record, finishing with 61 in his 163-game season (one tie on April 22, a game in which Maris did not homer). Maris played 161 games that season. Chicago's Hack Wilson holds the Nationhal League record with 46 through the end of August 1930, and finished with 56, still the National League record for home runs in a season. ----------------------------------------------------------------- DALLAS MORNING NEWS, KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE.