Greatness on a baseball diamond in Major League Baseball seems to happen every season with a new plot line or inspiring story. Whether it is a batter who has gotten into a grove and kept up a hitting streak to compete with Joe DiMaggio’s 56 consecutive games with a hit. Maybe a hard hitter like Alex Rodriguez starts hitting homeruns with every swing raises hopes that he might be able to hit enough to pass Barry Bonds 73 homeruns and break his record. Whatever the case may be, every player and team has its share of historic seasons and individual accomplishments and the New York Yankees are no different as almost every few years a player hits a milestone.
When people may think of the biggest, most historic moment in New York Yankees history a lot of different events or records may come to mind that span over almost of hundred years of historic baseball in New York.
One moment may be Babe Ruth calling his shot or hitting 60 homeruns in a single season which stayed a MLB record for an amazing 34 years until another player in pinstripes, Roger Maris hit 61, which is what I believe, is the biggest moment in New York Yankees history.
In 1961, Major League Baseball went through a pretty big change by expanding the amount of teams in the American League from 8 teams to 10 and extending the season from 154 games to 162. This change was all good and well until the change created a challenge to the most sacred of all MLB records, Babe Ruth’s 60 homeruns in one season.
In 1956, the face of the New York Yankees was Mickey Mantle who some believed was the best player in the MLB and quite possibly ever to play the game of baseball. He was known, much like Ruth, for hitting a lot of homeruns and generally being a very exciting player, especially in this year where Ruth’s record was finally tested as Mantle was able to hit 54 homeruns.
The problem with Ruth’s record was that it was so immortal, so amazing to people of that era and baseball in general that no one wanted the record broken, especially by an unknown player or a non-Yankee. Mantle was by no means unknown player, but Roger Maris just that.
Unlike the homerun races of today, where everyone wants the player to break the record like back in 1998 when Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris’ homerun record, in 1961 Maris was though of as an enemy of sorts, an outcast and Yankee fans wanted what they saw as a “true Yankee” like Mickey Mantle to break the record so Maris didn’t even have supported from his home crowd while in the process of breaking the mother of all baseball records.
Maris went through all sorts of adversity in his record breaking season, from the commissioner saying he was going to put an asterisk on the record to death threats to media scrutiny, no one seemed to be on Maris’ side, but he fought through everything and overcame what was the biggest milestone in baseball history by breaking a seemingly unbreakable record when all the chips were down.
There have been a lot of great to put on the pinstripes, but one of the greatest Yankees Jerseys of all-time, is by #9, Roger Maris.
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