When he finally broke the record, it was extraordinary; hitting sixty-one home runs was a remarkable accomplishment under the best of circumstances, and Maris had done it under the worst of them. Ruth had never dealt with the comparable pressure. After the last game, when he had hit number sixty-one off Tracy Stallard, a radio reporter asked him if he had thought of Mickey Mantle while rounding the bases during his home-run trot. That struck him as the weirdest question of the day. That night he went to dinner in the city with a few friends, and when he saw a nearby Catholic church he left the dinner party to go over and pray. The priest noticed him in the back of the church, and announced to the other parishioners that Roger Maris was among them. Even here there was no moment of privacy, and he quickly fled the church.
As the Yankees did nothing to protect him during the assault, they did nothing to reward him after it was all over. “You know what I got from Topping for hitting those sixty-one homers that year?” Maris said to Maury Allen years later. “Nothing. Not a cent. Not a gift. Nothing. I don’t know what the Yankees drew [they had their largest attendance in ten years], but they gave me nothing.” He was bitter about that. He felt that, at the very least, he should have gotten a one-shot bonus of $50,000. When it came to contract time there was the usual squabble. Maris, who had made $37,500 the year before, wanted to double his salary to $75,000. The first contract from the club called for a salary of $50,000. Maris was enraged. The Yankees did not like the idea of doubling a salary, no matter how good a year a player had enjoyed: it was a dangerous precedent, but they were also nervous about being in an ugly negotiating war with a player who had just broken Ruth’s record. That gave Maris rare leverage in his contract talks. After some haggling, management came in at $72,500. But all in all the Yankee management had not behaved well; financially and emotionally it had not been generous and a huge wound had been left at the end of the season. In the following years, when he did not play at that level again, in part because he was often injured, in part because it had been a special season, one not easily recaptured, he was berated for not being Ruth or Mantle.
Maris’s frustration with the Yankee organization continued to grow. He felt they had signaled to him in a variety of ways that he was not a true Yankee, not a member of the inner group, and he resented that. He felt club officials minimized his injuries, and sometimes did not even seem to believe he was hurt. A year after the home-run assault Jake Gibbs, the young catcher, came up to join the team, and was with Maris on a swing through Boston. Gibbs was stunned to hear Maris suddenly utter a prolonged and bigger diatribe against the club, its medical practices, and its lack of trust in its players. Maris had been hurting and it was clear that management did not believe him, and suddenly it all poured out, etched in bitterness: “Jake, the next time I’m hurt, I hope the bone comes right through the skin and shows and there’s lots of blood so they’ll finally believe me. I’m so damn tired of being hurt and them thinking I’m faking it.”
The problem with the media, Maris said years later, was not in 1961 but in 1962. It would have been easier for him, given his nature and his love of privacy, if he had come close and just missed it. Then he would have been cast as an ordinary man who had come close in one magical summer to living the great baseball dream. In that case he would have been seen as a sympathetic figure who had just fallen short of an elusive goal. Instead, he was cast as an ordinary player who had the temerity to break a record of which he was not worthy. There was nowhere to go but down. The sports world was primed for his failure, that is, for him to fall short of that great season, and to prove himself unworthy of his extraordinary accomplishment. The spotlight followed him relentlessly. If, during the off-season, he left a sports dinner a little early to catch the last flight out to the next night’s dinner, that was news. If he did not handle an autograph session with young boys well, that was news. In spring training there was an incident when he was asked to pose with Rogers Hornsby, a great hitter but a notoriously churlish man from another age, who had frequently demeaned Maris during his home-run chase. Each man thought the other should come over to pose, and in the end, the picture was never taken. There were other incidents: a column by Oscar Fraley belittling Maris (because Maris had been unwilling to give his side of the Hornsby story), and then one by the very influential Jimmy Cannon, ripping Maris for having missed an appointment with him. Cannon had been very close to DiMaggio and was wary of Maris anyway, and his column widely influenced other writers in the press corps, not only in New York. Its ripple effect was considerable, and in other cities that the Yankees visited, Maris now found that sportswriters were prepared to judge him unsympathetically. His relations with the media, always fragile, grew bitter.
It was hard to believe in 1964, as the Yankees struggled to stay near the top of the American League, with Mantle, Maris, and Ford all coping with various injuries, that only three years earlier, the Yankees had been the mightiest team in baseball. Maris was still a good line-drive hitter, but his home-run power was in sharp decline.
13
TO THE NEW YORK writers there was something schizophrenic about New York players. They wanted the glory of playing in New York, and they knew playing there made them more famous and affected their income, but they were innately suspicious of dealing with the press. Such stars as Hank Aaron, playing in other cities, often felt they were shortchanged because they did not get the benefit of the New York media machinery. Part of the problem was the nature of the game itself, for even the best player hit only about .333, which meant that he went out two out of three times; in turn, that meant that no matter how enthusiastic a writer was about a player, he was, more often than not, describing the player’s limitations or even his failures. Casey Stengel was very much aware of that, and would point out to the writers that ballplayers were the only professionals who had their every mistake and failure scrutinized the next morning in print. It didn’t happen to Hollywood actors, Stengel said, no one wrote that they had done a bad take on a scene; and it didn’t happen to reporters themselves, no one graded them each day on their stories or published a list of their journalistic mistakes. “You guys wouldn’t like it if you had a box score on yourselves every day,” said Stengel.
Another part of the problem was cultural. The writers were, by and large, urban and college-educated; many of them were Jewish. They were verbal, not physical, men. The players were country boys, high school graduates, and often not even that. The writers sometimes seemed to be making fun of them at their expense. There was on occasion a resentment, albeit an unconscious one on the part of the writers, of being part of the instrument that brought fame and glory to men who did not even read books, and who in fact often did not read the stories written about them each day. If anything, the complaints that the players passed on to the writers seemed more often than not to be triggered not by what the players had read but by what some friend of theirs had said after reading a story. It was an ongoing complaint of the writers that if they wrote a long, essentially praiseworthy story about a player, they never heard about it. But if they wrote one negative sentence, a friend of the player would call him up, and there would be an unpleasant confrontation the next day. It took a rare athlete, such as Whitey Ford, tart and cocky, both ballplayer and New York City kid himself, to know the rhythms and the voices of the city and its newspapers. He, as far as most of the working journalists were concerned, was a model of what an athlete should be like in dealing with the press. Available to reporters on bad days as well as good, he was candid, often funny, and, above all, straight. There was a general feeling among the reporters that the one player on the Yankees who might have pulled off being subjected to the scrutiny that Roger Maris underwent was Whitey Ford.
In years past the press corps had been remarkably reverential, and the most important sportswriters tended to reflect the views of management as well as to sanitize accounts of tensions that existed on teams. Later there was much talk about the good old days, when the writers and the play
ers had gotten on better, but the truth was that even in the good old days, the players often hated the writers. By the sixties those tensions were steadily exacerbated by a new and very different kind of media approach, one decidedly less reverential toward athletes. Some of that had been obvious during the Maris ordeal, but it was becoming clear that that was no mere fluke. The changes taking place were driven by two distinct forces, first by the coming of television, and second by the rise of an increasingly iconoclastic and eventually confrontational press corps.
The impact of television on the sports scene was already immense. Fifteen years earlier baseball had been a radio game; now it was a television game, and teams played not so much in cities as in markets. The Milwaukee Braves, once enormously successful after their move from Boston, were already completing negotiations to go to Atlanta, where they would have a market all to themselves, instead of sharing the greater Chicago market with two Chicago teams. Television was making the sport ever more an instrument of big-time entertainment, and it was also changing the nature of fame for the players. Because of television, not only were the stars recognizable now, but so were the backup players. Greater celebrity led, almost certainly, to greater ancillary money, all of this gradually undermining the traditional hold of management over ballplayers based on salary. Television was making other sports as popular as baseball, and it was creating a different kind of athlete; within the year the New York Jets, an upstart team in an upstart league (but an upstart league with a network television contract) would sign a quarterback out of Alabama named Joe Namath for more than $400,000 a year, based on the belief of the team’s owner, a former agent and promoter named Sonny Werblin, that Namath had precisely what Roger Maris lacked: star quality. At Namath’s signing there was a press conference befitting the size of the contract. Lou Effrat of the Times, one of the more senior sportswriters, asked Namath what would happen if after all this promotion and furor he did not make the grade as a pro quarterback. “I’ll make it,” Namath said quietly and confidently, and there was an immediate sense that Werblin had bet on the right man.
If television was creating the athlete as star, it was also applying pressure on the press corps for a new kind of story. Newspapers were going out of business in the late fifties and the early sixties in New York under the pressure created by the rise of network and local television as a more dramatic and accessible alternative. Not only were a number of tabloids dying, but so was a great paper like the Herald Tribune. That meant that the competition among the surviving papers, particularly the surviving tabloids, had become fierce. The New York Post was the prototype of an afternoon paper trying to survive in those days. Still liberal, and still trying to get by despite an ever weaker advertising base, it relied heavily on liberal columnists in the front of the paper and boasted an exceptional sports page. Though by the early sixties the great Jimmy Cannon had departed, the paper still had Milton Gross, Maury Allen, and, for a time, all the Leonards (Leonard Shecter, Leonard Lewin, and Leonard Koppett), as well as Vic Ziegel. The Post gave its writers a free hand, but it had to, since so few papers in the country paid so poorly. Larry Merchant, summoned from a Philadelphia tabloid to go to work for the Post, had to take a pay cut in order to do so. In the past the beat reporters covering such teams as the Yankees had tended to be men in their fifties and their sixties and had held the beat much as Supreme Court justices held their jobs, until death did them part. Now that was changing, spurred by changes in society, and by the harsher demands of more travel and late games on the West Coast, a new generation of younger reporters was taking over. They were called the Chipmunks, a name given them by one of their own heroes, Jimmy Cannon (who was not at all sure that he wanted to be one of their heroes). Cannon had come into the press box one day and had seen them all gathered and, it seemed to him, chirping together. Because one of them had teeth that protruded, he called them the Chipmunks.
The Chipmunks (who liked being called Chipmunks) gloried in the fact that they were part of the new breed. Not only were they younger than their predecessors, they were generally better educated, definitely more iconoclastic, certainly more egocentric, and probably less grateful to be covering the great New York Yankees. Leonard Koppett, a traditionalist who worked for the Post and then went to the Times, thought that the Chipmunks were different in one additional way: the older writers had written for their readers. The best of them all, Dick Young, was the most irreverent of baseball writers when he was younger, and widely admired by his peers as the best baseball beat writer who ever lived. He was considered brilliant because he had an unerring instinct for exactly what the fans wanted to know each day. By contrast, Koppett thought, the Chipmunks often wrote for each other, admiring each other’s leads and different takes on stories. There were other differences. They did not go to Toots Shor’s and drink with the ballplayers and managers as their predecessors had, which was a major change, one dictated by the endless night games and harder road trips. They often drank wine instead of whiskey. They were more likely to hang out on the road at nightclubs like the hungry I, where Mort Sahl was playing; when they were in New York, they were to be found at the Lion’s Head, a bar in Greenwich Village, where novelists and poets gathered. Nor did they necessarily intend to spend their whole lives covering baseball. The older reporters had regarded their jobs as the best ones on the paper, and they thought of themselves, consciously or unconsciously, as an extension of the team. Once, in a Detroit-Yankee game, Al Kaline of the Tigers made a great running catch to rob Roger Maris of a home run, and the next time up Maris drove the ball much deeper, some four hundred feet into the bullpen, far over Kaline’s head. One of the old guard stood in the press box, shaking his fist at Kaline. “Let’s see you try and catch that, you son of a bitch!” he thundered down at the Detroit right fielder. The Chipmunks looked on with contempt.
The Chipmunks deliberately put distance between themselves and the players. They found Mantle intriguing but difficult, an occasionally brooding, occasionally joyous figure who clearly did not value what they did. Told by the more senior figures how exceptional a man DiMaggio was, they were often puzzled when they found him to be unusually suspicious and uncommunicative. “For a time,” reflected Maury Allen, one of the most talented men of that era, and an early Chipmunk, “I was puzzled because I had heard how wonderful DiMaggio was, and I always found him unpleasant, and for a long time I thought it was my fault, and then gradually I found out that the older writers felt much the same way, but that they were afraid to admit it because it would reflect badly on them.” One of the Chipmunks, Stan Isaacs of Newsday, arrived on the field as a young reporter when DiMaggio, by then a coach in spring training, was instructing for the Yankees, and he went over to interview him. DiMaggio seemed irritated by this impertinence, and later Isaacs was told by Joe Trimble, a more senior figure on the Daily News, “You don’t just go over and talk to Joe—you wait for him to give you a signal that he’s ready to talk.”
Stan Isaacs, knowing of Ralph Houk’s complete fidelity to the Yankees and their cause, once asked him if he wore the Yankee logo on his pajamas. If a young reporter from a small newspaper came to a postgame interview with Houk and Houk did not like his questions, he would look at the traditionalists and roll his eyes to try to diminish the young man, but Stan Isaacs, Maury Allen, and Leonard Shecter would just repeat the questions. Of Isaacs, it was said that he asked the definitive Chipmunk question after the seventh game of the 1962 World Series. Ralph Terry, the winning pitcher, was being interviewed in the locker room by a bunch of reporters when he took a long-distance phone call. He spoke over the phone for a few minutes and then returned to the reporters. Who called? one of them asked. My wife, he said. What was she doing? the reporter asked. Feeding our baby, he answered. “Breast or bottle?” Isaacs asked.
The first Chipmunks were Isaacs and Leonard Shecter. Shecter started covering the Yankees in 1958; it was a hard assignment at first, and he had felt very much the outsider, isolated by the older r
eporters, who would not let him in on the stories they shared—such as the fact that George Weiss had put private detectives on his players, and a gumshoe had followed Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek instead of the carousers. Then, on the train coming back from the game in Kansas City in which they had clinched the pennant, there was a more serious incident: Ryne Duren, the relief pitcher who had been drinking, squashed Ralph Houk’s cigar in his face, and Houk, then a coach and the manager-in-waiting, swatted Duren with the back of his hand, cutting him near the eye with his World Series ring. Shecter had asked the veteran writers what they were going to do with the story, and they said they were not going to do anything with it. By chance he got off the train at the next stop, and in a phone call to his editor, Ike Gellis, he mentioned what happened. Gellis, in turn, mentioned it to Paul Sann, the operative editor of the paper, and the Post not only went with the story but greatly overplayed it. The small incident was described as a vast, ugly brawl. (Years later Shecter asked Gellis what he would have done if he had been the reporter on the train, and Gellis answered candidly that he had pondered the same question and decided he would have given it a pass.) That turned Shecter, already an outsider, into something worse: a leper. For much of the rest of that season when he was on the team train, he carried with him the new novel by Jerome Weidman, The Enemy Camp. The next year Shecter spent an evening with Jerome Holtzman, the distinguished Chicago sportswriter, and poured out his unhappiness about how much the players hated him and how lonely his assignment was. To Holtzman it was a stunning confession, because while there had always been incidents between players and writers in the past, there was a new and frightening dimension to what Shecter was saying. A few years later, when the Yankees clinched yet another pennant, one of the few players on the team who liked Shecter warned him to stay out of the locker room because some of the Yankee players were out to get him. What had made the isolation bearable, he later told his colleagues, was the fact that he had waited for so long to get a beat. He had been a desk man working inside the paper for more than fifteen years, and every time he asked to go out and cover a story he was told he was too valuable to the paper as a desk man. Now, finally unleashed on a beat, he could bear the loneliness.
October 1964 Page 20
