On October 1, 1961, in New York's final game of the regular season, Yankees slugger Roger Maris hit his 61st home run, becoming the first player in MLB to hit more than 60 in a season.#OnThisDay
New York Yankees RF Aaron Judge just tied Roger Maris' single-season home run record of 61 when Judge went deep in the 7th inning off Toronto Blue Jays' pitcher Tim Mayza.
Doris Day and Cary Grant with New York Yankees players, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra, before a Yankees-Dodgers game in 1962. The players had cameos in THAT TOUCH OF MINK.
In the summer of 1961 I was 12 and besotted with baseball, so the Maris-Mantle home-run chase was totally in my wheelhouse. It was pretty much all I thought about.
Roger Maris won. He hit 61 homers, surpassing the 60 hit by Babe Ruth in 1927. In 1961, baseball was still the National Pastime, so the nation was transfixed.
I’m recapturing some of that vibe now as New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge approaches Maris’s’ record. He hit No. 60 on Tuesday and, with 12 games to go, has a good chance of tying, or passing Maris’s single-season record.
So what about Sammy Sosa (66 homers in 1998), Mark McGwire (70 in 1998), and Barry Bonds (73 in 2001) ...?
That’s where things become muddled. Sosa, McGwire and Bonds set their records during the so-called “steroid era,” when some players relied on performance-enhancing drugs to increase their offensive numbers.
Any reasonable baseball fan (me, for example) still believes the record belongs to Maris; and soon, to Aaron Judge.