Alaska Employment Law

Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James Hirsch, is, I understand, the first fully researched biography of Mays that has Mays’s blessing.  Mays agreed to be interviewed by Hirsch, and he put Hirsch in contact with many people important to Mays’s life.  It appears Mays has given the book’s contents his nihil obstat, and he shares in the profits, most of Willie’s share of which will go to the Say Hey Foundation that he established.  I have to say, however, that while Mays was surely one of the finest baseball players ever to have picked up a bat, this book left me flat.  The main thing I took from it is how non-confrontational Mays was, during his career and after.  Jackie Robinson criticized Mays repeatedly for not doing more to enhance equality for black and Latin players.  I think Mays understood that his personality was not like Robinson’s, and that he could not have succeeded in that endeavor in the way that Robinson (at great personal cost) did.  Anyway, even though I am an avid baseball fan, I thought this book was kind of blah.  Readable, but a disappointment.

In contrast, I loved Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero, a new biography by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary.  Maris (born Roger Maras, pronounced “Morris”) originally came from Hibbing, Minnesota, but had such disagreeable family relationships there that he fostered the myth that he was from Fargo, North Dakota, where his immediate family moved.  Signed into the Cleveland Indians organization, he played for Cleveland, Kansas City, the New York Yankees, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

In New York, Maris won two straight Most Valuable Player awards and memorably clubbed 61 home runs in 1961, the last one off Red Sox Tracy Stallard, who pitched as well as he ever did in an undistinguished career (losing 20 games in 1964 for the Mets does not count as distinguished), losing 1-0 in a game that was played, mind you, in one hour and fifty-seven minutes.  But Maris’s time in New York was a horror show for him.  While his teammates, and notably Mickey Mantle, considered him a hard worker and a good friend, the press was relentless in badgering him during his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.  Today, ball clubs may limit press access to players when appropriate (such as by means of a daily press conference by the player).  But the Yankees did nothing to stop reporters from hounding Maris at his locker until they were satiated for the day.  Maris’s hair began to fall out.   Worse, if possible, was the decree from the Commissioner of Baseball, Ford Frick, that Maris had to beat the Babe in 154 games (the number played in 1927), not 162 games (the number played, for  the very first time, in 1961).

Eventually, the Maris “asterisk” was deleted by Major League Baseball.  (Incidentally, Maris hit his first 60 home runs in fewer plate appearances than Ruth.)  Fittingly, an “asterisk” is now quite literally inscribed on a Barry Bonds home run ball in the Baseball Hall of Fame, reminding us of the chemical assistance many believe Mr. Bonds enjoyed.  Maris still holds the American League single-season home run record, and all three of the National Leaguers who surpassed it have been strongly implicated in the steroids scandal or confessed to using steroids.  Long live Roger Maris’s record.

In 1965, Maris broke a bone in his hand that significantly affected his hitting.  The Yankees lied to him about the extent of his injury in an effort to keep him in the line-up; Maris never forgave them.  Traded to St. Louis in 1967, Maris made it back to the World Series two more times (against the Impossible Dream Red Sox in 1967), giving him seven trips to the Series in a 12-year career.  More importantly, he began to enjoy baseball once again.  A clever negotiator, he persuaded Gussie Busch to give him a Budweiser beer distributorship in Gainesville, Florida, a university town, which paid him as much after his baseball career as he earned during it, and made his descendants wealthy.

Maris was a proud and private man, forced to act in a public setting at a time when reporters no longer protected the privacy of sports heroes.  He died at age 51 of lymphoma, leaving his wife and six children.  At Maris’s funeral, Mantle laughed that his old friend, who lived in Florida, had managed to get the Mick to Fargo on a particularly cold and snowy day.

This is a first-class treatment of a complex man.  Highly recommended.