Fans of the Kansas City Athletics endured many disappointments during the team’s thirteen-year stay at Municipal. Where do we start? The many, often lopsided trades to the Yankees? How about the fact that the team never had a winning record during its stay in Kansas City? Then, of course, there’s the move. The move was a tough pill to swallow, even though the city and the fans had their fill of Charlie O. Finley. Finley was a visionary, but he was also a world-class ass. I could write a chapter on the number
of times he insulted the city and the fans.
What made the move really painful was that we could see the team was going to be good. Catfish, Rudi, Fingers, Jackson, Bando, Tenace, Blue, Campy, and Green. One thing Finley had done right was accumulate a deep pool of young talent.
And right on cue, they posted a winning record in their first year in Oakland. Then they won three World Series in a row. I couldn’t have been the only one who thought, “Those titles should have been ours.”
Despite that litany of tears, my first disappointment as a fan came when I was old enough to realize the team had traded away Roger Maris. Roger Maris! The guy who hit 61 home runs in a season! That Roger Maris? I was probably seven. Maybe eight. I remember thinking, who was the idiot who traded away Roger Maris?
That would have been Parke Carroll. Carroll probably wasn’t an idiot, but you can make the case that his loyalties still ran with the Yankees and not Kansas City. Carroll had been employed by the Yankee organization, most recently as the business manager of the Yankees’ Kansas City Blues farm team. The Athletics were owned at the time by Arnold Johnson. Prior to owning the Athletics, Johnson owned not only Yankee Stadium but also Blues Stadium, which he agreed to sell to the city. With that bit of housekeeping taken care of, Johnson moved the Philadelphia Athletics into a newly revamped and renamed Municipal Stadium. Johnson’s director of player personnel was George Selkirk, a former Yankee player who took over right field when Babe Ruth retired. Carroll, Selkirk, and Johnson all had heavy Yankee ties. With leadership like that, the Athletics never had a chance.
The Athletics somehow found some talent. At various times they had guys like Bob Cerv, Ralph Terry, Clete Boyer, Bobby Shantz, and Harry Simpson. All those guys ended up being traded to New York.
The most glaring trade had to be Maris. The Athletics had picked him up, along with Dick Tomanek and Preston Ward, in a June 1958 trade with Cleveland in which they gave up Woodie Held and Vic Power. It was a heavy price to pay, as Held was an adequate center fielder and Power was an excellent hitter. Power had been a two-time All-Star and picked up MVP votes in four seasons in Kansas City, but Maris was different. He had a gift.
Maris had been a football standout at Bishop Shanley High School in Fargo. He set a still-standing national record with four return touchdowns in one game. Maris was such an excellent football player that the University of Oklahoma wanted him. He didn’t even like baseball until he got into high school, whereupon he excelled.
The Indians signed him as a free agent, and he was named Rookie of the Year at his first minor league stop, playing for his hometown Fargo Twins. In four minor league seasons, Maris hit .303 with 78 home runs. The talent was there.
He made his major league debut with Cleveland in April of 1957, going 3 for 5. Two days later, he hit his first major league home run, a grand slam. He was just 22 years old.
Cleveland fans must have also felt our pain. They only had Maris for 167 games over parts of two seasons before they traded him to Kansas City.
Maris battled injuries during his time in Kansas City, including appendix surgery, which hurt his production when he tried to come back too soon.
He made his first All-Star team in 1959 when he hit .273 with 16 home runs and 72 RBI in just 122 games. It looked like the Athletics had their right fielder for the future.
In between injuries, Maris had some fantastic games for the Athletics. On August 3, 1958, in a game at Municipal Stadium against the Washington Senators, Maris went 4 for 5 with two home runs and five RBI. He ended just a single shy of hitting for the cycle and collected 13 total bases during a 12–0 Athletics rout.
On September 24, Maris made his former team pay during a 9–3 Kansas City win in Cleveland. Maris went 3 for 5 with two home runs, three RBI, and nine total bases.
On May 10, 1959, Maris clipped the Tigers for two home runs, scored four times, and drove in five in a 7–6 loss to Detroit.
Once he got healthy toward the end of the 1959 season, it was impossible to miss the talent.
The evil axis of Carroll, Johnson, and Selkirk thought otherwise. On December 11, 1959, the team shocked its fans by sending Maris, Kent Hadley, and shortstop Joe DeMaestri to New York in exchange for Marvelous Marv Throneberry, Norm Siebern, Hank Bauer, and a sore-armed Don Larsen. Maris was quoted in the Reading Eagle as saying, “Believe it or not, I had rather stayed with the Athletics, but I’ll do my best for the Yankees.”
Throneberry was immensely popular with the fans but could never unlock the power he displayed in the minors. Bauer was already 37 and in steep decline. Larsen was 30 and came to the Athletics with a career record of 55–57. His claim to fame was throwing the only perfect game in World Series history. The only thing that saved the trade was Siebern, who over four seasons slashed .289/.381/.463 with 78 home runs and 367 RBI. He made two All-Star teams and picked up some MVP votes. Siebern’s four Kansas City years were basically peak Eric Hosmer.
Maris hit his peak in New York. In 1960, he led the league in several offensive categories, including WAR (7.7), RBI (112), and slugging percentage. His sweet left-handed swing was custom-built for Yankee Stadium. That production earned him the league’s MVP award. Ouch.
Maris was even better in 1961, slashing .269/.372/.620 and leading the league in home runs (61), RBI (141), runs (132), and total bases (366). He won a second MVP award.
Maris broke Babe Ruth’s cherished 60-home run record and received numerous death threats for his trouble. Baseball fans can get nutty. Not “soccer-fan nutty”, but nutty enough.
If you want to know what kind of man Maris was, consider this. His 61st home run ball landed in the hands of 19-year-old Sal Durante. The young man was immediately surrounded by Stadium ushers. He told them he wanted to give the ball to Maris personally. After the game, Durante presented the ball to Maris, saying, “Here’s the ball, Roger.”
Maris then signed and dated the ball and gave it back to Durante, saying, “Keep it, kid. Put it up for auction. Somebody will pay you a lot of money for the ball.” Durante later sold the ball to a California restaurant owner for $5,000. The restaurateur then gave the ball back to Maris. Can you imagine that happening today? How much is that ball worth now?
Maris donated the ball to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where it still resides.
Maris played in New York for seven seasons, during which he hit a total of 203 home runs and won two World Series titles. But he never got over the abuse Yankee fans heaped on him for breaking the Babe’s cherished record. Despite playing in New York, the Maris family maintained their home base in Independence, Missouri. Roger really didn’t want to leave KC.
In December 1966, in a puzzling move, the Yankees traded Maris to St. Louis for utility infielder Charley Smith. The Yankees believed Maris was in decline, but the reality was that he’d had surgery to remove bone chips from his hand in 1965, then played most of the 1966 season with a broken bone in his hand. His batting average slumped, and his once prodigious power all but disappeared. Understandable. I’m not sure how the guy played, except on pure guts.
With his hand healed, Maris enjoyed a late-career revival for the Cardinals. At the ages of 32 and 33, his power had waned, but his defense was as good as ever. He played a pivotal role in the Cardinals’ 1967 World Series win, hitting .385 with a dinger and seven RBI. He nearly picked up another ring in 1968, a classic seven-game series that pitted the excellence of Bob Gibson against the immovable object of Mickey Lolich.
Maris retired after that 1968 season and owned and operated a Budweiser distributorship in Florida, something that Cardinals owner Gussie Busch had set him up with. Maris had a 10-year estrangement from the Yankees, which ended in 1978 when he returned for their Old-Timers’ Day.
In 1983, Maris was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He battled for two years before succumbing to the disease on December 14, 1985, at the very young age of 51.
Maris first came up for Hall of Fame consideration in 1974 but could never garner enough votes for induction. Despite his two MVP awards, the home run record, three World Series titles, and seven All-Star appearances, his overall body of work fell just a little short.
Analytics, invented long after Maris’ passing, show him with a little over 38 WAR, certainly a respectable total, but not enough to warrant Hall of Fame induction.
Despite that, Maris’ legacy lives on. The Yankees retired his No. 9 jersey and gave him a plaque in Monument Park. Can you believe the Yanks have 22 retired numbers? If they continue at this pace, they’ll have to start assigning letters.
The Postal Service issued a Roger Maris commemorative stamp in 1999. Barry Pepper played Maris in the acclaimed movie “61*.” In 2023, a Maris game-worn 1961 jersey sold for $1.59 million. His last game was almost 60 years ago, but people remember.
If you ever happen to be in Fargo, plan to make a stop at the West Acres Shopping Center. The mall is home to the outstanding Roger Maris Museum. Always a modest man, Maris first rejected the idea of a museum in his honor. He eventually relented on the condition that the museum would never charge admission.
Former teammate Moose Skowron said, “People just remember the 61 home runs. They forgot that Roger was an excellent base stealer and a superb right fielder. He was the best defensive right fielder in the majors. He was an all-around ballplayer, a humble guy, and a real team player. History never gave him his due.”
