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Bleak Outlook. That Maris now wears the pin-striped playsuit of the New York Yankees is due partly to good Yankee organization, partly to good Yankee luck. As early as 1955, General Manager George Weiss alerted his well-disciplined scouting and minor league network. "The big need," says Weiss, "was for a lefthanded pull hitter who could take advantage of the stadium's short rightfield fence" (296 ft. at the foul pole). The Yanks quickly spotted Maris—then playing at Reading, Pa., in the Eastern League—and bided their time.
Everything worked in the Yankees' favor. As a highly touted Cleveland rookie in 1957, Maris broke two ribs in a collision at second base, hit a sorry .235. Traded the next season to the Kansas City Athletics, he doubled his home run output (to 28), batted in 80 runs—but still fell far short of promise. Halfway through the 1959 season, despite an appendectomy, Roger led the American League in batting (.344); then he slumped to a disappointing .273 and was traded during the winter to the Yankees.
Like Ruth, Maris came to a Yankee team that was wallowing in despair. The weary Yankees had lost the 1959 pennant to Chicago, and the outlook for
1960 was equally bleak: Mickey Mantle was disabled, Yogi Berra was tiring, Bob Turley—a 21-game winner in 1958—was nursing a sore arm. Like Ruth, Maris shook the team from its lethargy and fired the imagination of New York fans. In the outfield, Maris made leaping, diving catches, dared base runners to test the accuracy of his flat-trajectory throwing arm. At bat, for the first half of the season, he was a one-man Murderers' Row: he hit over .325, and his line drives rattled so often among the rightfield seats that by late July he was ten games ahead of Ruth's 1927 homer pace. Injury finally slowed Maris down in the summer of 1960, but he still finished the season with 39 home runs and 112 RBIs. When the Yanks won the pennant by eight games, Maris was easily the American League's Most Valuable Player—an award he may well win again this year.
No Monkeyshines. As phlegmatic ("I don't give a damn about being a hero") as Ruth was ebullient, Maris has built an inviolable wall around his private life. Married in 1956 to his childhood sweetheart, Patricia Carvell, he leaves his family (four children) in Kansas City during the baseball season shares a secluded apartment in outlying Queens with Teammates Mantle and Bob Cerv. He cooks his own breakfast, rarely reads anything but the sports page ("I'm interested only in current events—I mean what goes on in the clubhouse"). Something of a rarity among Yankee stars, Maris manages to keep out of the gossip columns, scorns the bright lights of Manhattan: "I can't afford a hangover, and anyhow I don't like that kind of life." On the road, he sticks close to his hotel, never sightsees. "I was to a museum once in Chicago," he recalls, "because my wife and Cerv's were there from Kansas City and we didn't want to hang around the room all day. They had a lot of old pictures there."