The summer of 1961 was supposed to be a coronation for the New York Yankees, but it became a siege on the most sacred number in sports. Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a single season had stood for thirty-four years an untouchable monolith in the center of the American consciousness. Then two teammates nicknamed the M&M Boys began a dual assault on the ghost of the Bambino that would tear the city of New York and the sport of baseball in two.

In this episode of BenchMarks Tom Albano revisits the grueling and often lonely journey of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. We explore the sharp contrast between the two men: Mantle the beloved homegrown hero and heir to the Yankee throne and Maris the taciturn outsider from North Dakota who never asked for the spotlight. As both players crested the fifty-homer mark the pressure began to manifest in physical ways with Maris famously losing his hair in clumps due to the stress of a hostile press corps and a fanbase that wanted anyone but him to break the record.

Albano deconstructs the infamous intervention of Commissioner Ford Frick a close friend of Babe Ruth who issued a mid-season ruling that the record must be broken within 154 games to be considered valid. This decree birthed the legendary asterisk—a punctuation mark that would haunt Maris for decades.

We relive the final day of the 162-game season at Yankee Stadium where Maris finally connected for number 61 against Tracy Stallard only to find a strangely empty ballpark and a muted celebration. This is the story of how a historic achievement became a burden and how Roger Maris’s greatest triumph was for a long time treated like a crime against history.

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