Addiction takes many forms
What the fuck came over Roger Maris in 1961? To go from a well-rounded baseball player to SOLELY a home-run hitter just to beat Babe Ruth's record? What pushed him to do it? It RUINED his life!!!
I am taking the advice of the 8 people who have emailed me about Better Days Are A Toenail Away to heart. My posts need to be shorter.
See, as a writer I am a maximalist. My favourite writers are too: Donna Tartt, Stephen King, Steve Erickson, Jeffrey Eugenides, that guy who wrote The Art of Fielding. I just cannot shut the fuck up.
Forgive me for not being able to figure this out on my own, but I grew up the youngest in a household with two older sisters. I did not get to speak much, so if the chance to do so came, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t shut up. I like to talk and talk and talk. It has been a lifelong habit for which I apologize. Seriously, you should have seen my ex-wife's eyes glaze over anytime I tried to speak. So I’m sorry. People who talk too much usually do not know enough, and when I was a kid, I definitely did not know enough. I still don't know enough. But it was worse when I was younger.
See, before the internet, information was currency. Usually my sisters, and people in general, weren’t so generous telling me what was what. I once found a tampon in one of my sister’s drawers & she convinced me it was a Fruit Roll-Up, but only for girls. If I opened it & ate it, I would turn into a girl.
Having read what would now be a deeply problematic children’s book called Marvin Redpost: Is He A Girl? in which a 9-year old, my age, has a gender identity crisis. I took my sister seriously. I did not find out what a tampon really was til Sex Education class years later.
One time at recess in high school somebody told me that the actor French Stewart was the son of Martha Stewart. I did not find out this was bullshit til 2016, when my girlfriend-at-the-time, laughing so hard she was crying, googled it for me. But I mean, it made sense to me at the time because, as far as I was concerned, French Stewart was easily the weakest actor on 3rd Rock From the Sun. If you remember that TV show, he was the guy with the annoying squint. “Incoming message from the Big Giant Head.” I you don’t remember, here he is, squinting irritatingly:
Yeah. Him. It seemed more than possible that nepotism got him the part. He wasn’t a skilled thespian. I mean, did you ever see him again after that show stopped airing?
(Before my maximalist drive takes over, just let me say that Jane Curtain and John Lithgow had the best on-screen chemistry I have ever seen on a network television show. HBO, Showtime…yes they have better pairings cuz they got the $ to make ‘em, but Dick & Mary on that TV show were pure fucking magic.)
Anyway, I’m gonna take to shortening my posts.
I found an old diary of mine from summer to autumn 2019, which was around the time my life was spinning completely out of control. Now, I’m also gonna scan or just photograph the mauled pages so you can see I’m not bullshitting, and I’ve got a fantastic 11-12 page entry in which I have an encounter with a Mrs. Lovejoy-esque (“won’t somebody please think of the children?!”) neighbour after she catching me smoking crack an snorting fent in her backyard. But for today I’m just gonna leave a few funny fragments I have found amongst the hopeless tallies of how much $ I owed to who for which drug and so on.
Some are sad, some are funny, one involves me passing out nude with a smoke between my fingers and severely burning my penis (no permanent damage was done, but I will say, with certain types of penis pain….opiates just can’t touch it)
Oct 25 2019
Roger Maris in 1960
Tunnel vision isn’t particular to drug addicts. Any individual with a single, overriding purpose can be said to be addicted. Michael Jordan was obsessed with being the best. Gretzky too (well, I’m a Leaf fan so fuck Wayne for high-sticking Gilmour and getting away with it in the Western Conference Finals in 93. And yes, the Toronto Maple Leafs were in the West for a while.) I’m not high; I’m not making shit up.
So. Michael Jordan. Wayne Gretzky. Tiger Woods. Roy Halladay (one hell of a great pitcher but a terrible pilot).
Would you add that list Babe Ruth?
Sure. Sure you would.
Would you add that list Mickey Mantle?
Absolutely.
Would you add that list Roger Maris?
I don’t know. I feel sorry for the guy and I don’t even know if I’d equate him with greatness. I’d certainly associate him with obsessiveness.
Roger Maris in the late 1950s during his stints with Cleveland & Kansas City was one of those baseball players that scouts who loath Moneyball-type thinking and sabermetrics essentially shoved into Major League Baseball. Because he had a high upside. That’s one of the problems with judging a player for who he is when he is just 18. You don’t always know how high he can go.
Now, I side with the number guys, meaning I think they are correct. even though it makes talking about sports about as fun as algebra class. Watching sports will always be great but, as we all know, Bill Beane doesn’t even watch the games. Why even get into sports if you are not going to watch the fucking games? That’s was the one part of Moneyball that made me wanna slap Brad Pitt in the fucking face. Telling Pete “I don’t watch the games” with the same tone you’d use to say “I don’t swallow spiders.”
Because what Moneyball scouts do is judge the player based on WHO THEY ARE NOW, not what they could be.
Is potential unmeasurable? Yes it is. That’s why scouts take risks.
All you have to do, if you’re not a baseball guy, is do a quick skim-read of Jose Bautista’s career. And he almost got cut from the majors. Drafted in 2000, no batting coach could figure out how to turn Bautista’s sheer strength into runs until 2008. And even then it took another two years to get him to maximize his potential.
From 2010–2015, Jose Bautista hit more home runs than any other player in the major leagues. (Who could forget his 2015 bat flip? I mean…c’mon?) And they almost cut him from MLB.
MY POINT IS THIS:
In 1959 a quiet, media-shy Midwestern kid named Roger Maris, who was roundly acknowledged as having come into his own, landed a spot on the New York Yankees roster. After which he did something people still view as controversial.
Seen as a well-rounded player who could hit, bat runs in, bunt, walk, steal bases, etc, Maris focused instead on one singular goal: Beating Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record of 60 homers in a season.
Noted1 Northwestern American author David James Duncan (The River Why, The Brothers K) put it, a man not know for acerbic analysis but instead for deeply meditative novels (I’m using italics to denote Duncan’s words, not mine) thusly:
I usually like watching home runs, but there is something about Roger Maris that makes even his homers boring. I don’t hate the Yankees like most people, so it’s not like I just don’t care to watch Roger Maris.
Without knowing why he did it, Maris began to play ball like a different person. An obsessive person. A person who’d accidentally discovered and applied to baseball what the practitioners of countless modern military, industrial, economic and scientific disciplines had already learned: namely, that by jettisoning one’s diverse abilities in order to condense and identify the will like a magnifying glass intensifies sunlight, by forgetting all about being a complete person and throwing one’s whole being into a single obsession, one stands a very good chance of achieving some narrow excellence. Such as an unnatural ability to boink 299-foot fly balls.
This brings us to a surprising definition. Insofar as the word “radical” implies a drastic departure from accepted thinking and practices, it is only accurate to say that this crewcutted All-American Midwest farmboy was in fact the first famous radical of the Sixties. Who but a radical would sacrifice all-around excellence to focus on a single, iconoclastic facet of his existence?
Even before he did it, the media was pissed at Maris for even wanting to. How dare this nobody from nowhere try to dethrone the Great Bambino?
But, then again, in 1961, it wasn’t just Maris trying. Mickey Mantle was trying beat Babe’s record too.
From Wikipedia: Yankee home runs began to come at a record pace. One famous photograph lined up six 1961 Yankees, including Mantle, Maris, and Yogi Berra, under the nickname “Murderer’s 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, a team that included Babe Ruth on its roster.
That’s Maris on the left, Mantle on the right in 1961.
As the 1961 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, as Berra would tell multiple interviewers. Mantle and Maris were friends. But because Maris was so cameras-shy, the infamously fickle Mew York baseball fans began to think of him as a jerk.
More and more, the Yankees became "Mickey Mantle's team" and Maris was ostracized as an "outsider" and "not a true Yankee.”
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, which he did do.
There was also another problem: In Babe Ruth’s day, the MLB season was 154 games. In Roger Maris, it was 162.
Whatever drove Maris to chase that record is the same internal combustion engine that drives addicts to do almost anything. Maris’ hair started falling out, due the sheer stress of the media firestorm.
Maris had 59 home runs after the Yankees' 154th game and therefore failed to beat Ruth's 60 home runs within the original season length. Maris hit his 61st home run on October 1, 1961, the last game of the season. And so his record was slapped with the most famous asterisk of all-time.
Buy any MLB yearbook or all-time stats and you will next to Maris’ 61 home runs in the 1961 season, a big *
This was MLB’s way of saying, “yeah, he did it. But we don’t have to like it.”
Now, from listening to crowd at the game, I’m not hearing a lot of booing. I’m hearing cheering and seeing a standing ovation.
David James Duncan again: “Many people felt, and even behaved (*), as if he were mire the assassin of a legend than a conquering hero.”
I am shocked as any fan that team pride didn’t come into it. Ruth was a Yankee when he set that record. So was Maris. So why set them against each other instead of celebrating the greatness of baseball most famous, most decorated, most accomplished team in baseball?
I’ll hazard a few guesses.
One, he wasn’t just less interesting a person, even Maris’ name was less interesting.
Babe Ruth sounds like a classic American character. Like P.T. Barnum. Even those who loathe America’s pastime associate the name “Babe Ruth” with a certain gum-smacking, irreverence. Remember, this was a man who once pointed to a full stadium of fans exactly where in the crowd he was going to put the ball (essentially guaranteeing a home run, a sports feat unrepeated until Mark Messier’s guarantee of 1994). Babe pointed at a spot in the crowd, and then he hit the ball there.
Babe Ruth. It’s a name as American as America itself, of chewing tobacco and Coca-Cola.
Roger Maris sounds like a forlorn weatherman on a failing television station.
He would later get into brewing him own beer and involved himself in numerous business ventures, but later in life he would admit to a reporter that beating Ruth’s record had done more harm than good, and that he shouldn’t have done it.
“Something came over me that year,” was all he was able to say. “Sure, I got to meet JFK but seemed like everyone else wanted to spit on me.”
He got addicted. He got addicted to a notion, and he neglected every other aspect of his well-rounded game to gain that embarrassing asterisk.
Like another misguided historical figure, he expected applause and got only hostility, suspicion, and eventually hatred.
You have be careful.
Even an addiction that may appear benign, may not be.
The media-shy Maris of 1961 was in a world of his own. He could think only of one thing. And that’s not healthy.
There has been a recent movement of redress, to delete the asterisk, but that won’t happen. One of baseball’s greatest strengths and selling points, is its past. How one might compare a player from The 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers to a player today and come up with a reasonably accurate comparison, perhaps even a conclusion as to who is better.
Me, I’d rather watch the fuckin games. That’s what they’re there for. But one last thought from Ducan, one that applies to heroin addicts who seem just fine, as I'm sure I do in this photograph, or Maris does in his
Technical obsession is like an unlit, ever-narrowing mine-shaft leading straight down though the human mind. The deeper down one plunges, the more fabulous, and the more remunerative, the ore. But the deeper down one plunges, the more confined and conditioned one’s thought’s become, and the greater the danger of losing one’s way back to the surface of the planet. There also seems to be an overpowering malignant magic that reigns deep down in those shafts. And those who journey too far or stay down too long in those shaft becomes its minions without knowing it – becoming not so much human beings as human tools wielded by whatever ideology, industry, force, or idea that happens to rule that particular mine. Another danger; because these mines are primarily mental, not physical, they do not necessarily mar or even mark the face of those who have become utterly lost in them. A man or woman miles down, thrall to the magic, far beyond caring about anything occurring on the planet’s surface, can sit down beside you on a park bench or bleacher seat, greet you in the street, shake your hand, look you in the eye, smile genially, say “How are you?” or “Merry Christmas” or “How about those Yankees?2” And you will never suspect that you are in the presence of not a kindred spirit, but a subterranean force.
Now that, is frightening. You can’t always know…and trust me, you typically don’t know, just how far gone some of these miners of experience are. Or how long they’ll stay at it. Or if they will ever come back up.
I know this sounds Seinfeld-esque, but what must one do to become “noted.” How far a departure from a the average American must one travel to be “noted” in a field, whether the field is a baseball one or an academic one? It’s from the conversation Jerry and George are having about Keith Hernandez and how he’s a Civil War “buff.” “What do you have to fo to become a buff?”
God help us if Hernandez is a “noted’ Civil War “buff.”
LAWL. Of course he sez the Yankees, DJD, given the material, what other team could he have picked? The St Louis Cardinals?