The single-season home run record of Roger Maris has lasted two years longer than Babe Ruth’s did, not that the world still is quite certain that Maris is the man and not the Babe.
So, if Mark McGwire should, for whoever will pay him to do it, break the Maris mark of 61 home runs, or if Ken Griffey Jr. gets off his homer-a-month pace and re-ignites in time to do it, neither is likely to be treated like a thief.
Each is an authentic clubber of the baseball and not a serendipitous trespasser, as Maris was widely considered to be.
Maris’ great defect was that he happened to be just an ordinary guy and not the big deal his teammate Mickey Mantle was or contemporaries like Willie Mays and Henry Aaron.
Breaking Ruth’s record became such an affront that it had to lug along an asterisk for a while, though had Mantle or Mays done it, no adornment would have been added.
That asterisk did not indicate eight more games in a season as much as it did Cipher at Work, but Maris’ record has lasted a very long time, 36 years compared with the Babe’s 34.
Legendary records should belong to legends. Cal Ripken takes over for Lou Gehrig, Pete Rose for Ty Cobb, Nolan Ryan for Walter Johnson, like that.
Aaron did get Ruth’s all-time record, at least, and if Tony Gwynn becomes the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams, it isn’t as if Gwynn came out of ambush to do it.
This is vital to the game’s self-renewal, and baseball is so legend-free at the present time even gloomy Albert Belle would be better than Tino Martinez, the other player with a chance to catch Maris.
Martinez is Maris all over again, and even a left-handed, secondary Yankee.
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All three challengers have home run totals in the 30s and should reach the 50s even if they don’t catch Maris, not an insignificant achievement.
McGwire is just about on the pace with Maris, Martinez is just a little behind and Griffey, after a terrific start, needs to get back to his May production or to get the air conditioning in the Kingdome blowing out.
Actually, Frank Thomas would be a better choice than any of them, but that will have to wait for another year or a different frame of mind.
Baseball does need someone to do it, to do something riveting. And home runs are the great imagination magnets. Baseball needs the honest, unmanufactured reassurance of great performances to reattach with its essential stuff, those generational connections so foolishly tossed aside for greed.
The game has been relying on gimmicks to restore itself, interleague play, wild card playoff teams, Japanese imports, new stadiums, expansion hustles, etc.
The next great idea to phony up baseball is to take it apart completely, eliminate the leagues, force rivalries by geography, put everything into zones of interest. You know, like football does the Jets and Giants in one stadium.
None of this has made new fans and hardly held on to the old. Contrived pennant races may help in pockets, but it makes the game a regional pastime.
Baseball needs something everyone can latch on to, like Ripken did Gehrig, or Rose did Cobb. What baseball really could use is Belle and Thomas doing this instead of McGwire and Griffey.
It needs its heroes to be in a reasonable time zone, near a convenient airport and in a media center.
It is just baseball’s luck that McGwire and Griffey are players in puny markets performing after deadline, and no matter what they do, they are second-day stories to the rest of the nation, which has lost interest by then.
If one of them does get Maris’ record, I imagine we shall hear about it eventually.