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Ruth was even more than that: he was the chief strategist of modern baseball. He gave it the home run, and the game went on to ever greater glories. In the hands of such free-swinging strongmen as Maris and Teammate Mickey (54 homers) Mantle, the home run has become baseball's basic weapon. It scores runs in clusters, breaks up tight games with devastating swiftness, reduces fielders to the status of paid spectators. And baseball's steadily growing fascination with the home run was never more apparent than during the 1961 season—the Year of the Home Run.
In Kansas City and Chicago, massive scoreboards lit up like Christmas trees when the home team homered; cannons roared and rockets seared the summer sky. In Boston. American League Batting Champion Pete Runnels, a singles hitter, rode the bench while Manager Mike Higgins struggled to get more power into the Red Sox lineup. With one week still to go, an unprecedented 2,596 homers had already been hit. The Yankees set a team record. San Francisco's Willie Mays hit four in one game. New York's John Blanchard managed four in four trips to the plate. Baltimore's Jim Gentile hit two grand-slam homers in two innings. "The old days of the squeeze play, the stolen base, the hit and run are gone," said Oriole Manager Paul Richards. "They'll never come back. Everybody knows that the singles hitter drives a Chevy—the home run hitter, a Cadillac."
No Waste. Nobody swings for the fence with more abandon than husky (6 ft., 200 Ibs.) Roger Maris: more than one-third of his hits are homers. Slow rounding into shape last spring, Maris did not hit his first home run until the Yankees' tenth game. But then he began hitting them in bunches: nine in 13 games in May, 15 in June. When he reached 50 on Aug. 22—with 38 games still to play—Maris became the biggest news in baseball. New York tabloids offered cash prizes for predictions of which days Maris would hit a homer, how many he would hit. Nightly newscasts in Israel included Maris' personal box score for the day, and papers in baseball-happy Japan begged U.S. wire services for interviews with the Yankee slugger. Even when the Yankees made their 26th pennant mathematically certain last week, the news ran second to Maris' 59th homer.
At 27, Roger Maris is a cocky pro with the classic attributes of the power hitter: keen eyesight, quick wrists, magnificent coordination. His controlled, compact swing is one of baseball's prettiest sights. "There's no waste motion at all," marvels Yankee Batting Coach Wally Moses. Raised in North Dakota, the son of a mechanical supervisor for the Great Northern Railway, Maris was a phenomenal high school football player. No student ("Sports took up all my time; I couldn't keep my mind on books"), Maris turned down some half-dozen col lege scholarship offers to try out with the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs. Impressed by his fluid swing and his pull-hitting power, the Indians offered Roger a $15,000 bonus. The Cubs, for some unfathomable reason, were totally unimpressed. "Son, my advice to you," said one Cub official, "is to give up the idea of playing ball. You'll never make it. You're too small."