Top 30 most memorable baseball moments: #18-16
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Moment 18: Roger Maris of the Yankees hits 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961.
During a 12-year baseball career, Maris played from 1957-1968 for four different teams, appearing in seven World Series and winning three of them.
In 1961, Yankee home runs began to come at a record pace. One famous photograph lined up six 1961 Yankee players, including Mickey Mantle, Maris, Yogi Berra, and Bill Skowron, under the nickname “Murderers Row,” because they hit a combined 165 home runs that year. As mid-season approached, it seemed quite possible that either Maris or Mantle, or perhaps both, would break Ruth’s 34-year-old home run record.
As 1961 progressed, the Yanks were now “Mickey Mantle’s team” and Maris was ostracized as the “outsider,” and “not a true Yankee.” The press seemed to root for Mantle and to belittle Maris. Mantle was felled by a hip infection late in the season, leaving Maris as the only player with a chance to break the record.
On top of his lack of popular press coverage, Maris’ chase for 61 hit another roadblock totally out of his control. Along with adding two teams to the league, Major League Baseball had added eight games to the schedule. In the middle of the season, baseball commissioner Ford Frick announced that unless Ruth’s record was broken in the first 154 games of the season, the new record would be shown in the record books as having been set in 162 games while the previous record set in 154 games would also be shown. It is an urban legend that an asterisk would be used to distinguish the new record.
Moment 17: Satchel Paige became the first Negro League player inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971.
Paige was a right-handed pitcher and was the oldest rookie to play Major League Baseball at the age of 42. He played with the St. Louis Browns until age 47, and represented them in the Major League All-Star Game in 1952 and 1953.
In the wake of Ted Williams‘ 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech urging induction of Negro Leaguers, and on the recommendation of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Bowie Kuhn empowered a ten-man committee to sift through hundreds of names and nominate the first group of four Negro League players to go to the Hall of Fame. Because Paige pitched in Greensboro in 1966, he would not have been eligible for enshrinement until 1971, as players have to be out of professional baseball for at least five years before they can be elected. All of the men on the committee agreed that Paige had to be the first Negro League player to get elected, so this gave Kuhn plenty of time to create some sort of Negro League branch in the Hall of Fame. On February 9, 1971, Kuhn announced that Paige would be the first member of the Negro wing of the Hall of Fame.
Moment 16: Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates doubles off the Mets’ Jon Matlack in the final game of the season (Sept. 30, 1972) for his 3,000th career hit.
Clemente played his entire 18-year baseball career with the Pirates (1955-72). He was awarded the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award in 1966. During the course of his career, Clemente was selected to participate in the league’s All Star Game on twelve occasions. He won twelve Gold Glove Awards and led the league in batting average in four different seasons.
Struggling with injuries, Clemente only managed to appear in 102 games in 1972, but he still hit .312 for his final .300 season. On September 30, in a game at Three Rivers Stadium, he hit a double off Matlack of the New York Mets for his 3,000th hit. It was the last at-bat of his career during a regular season, though he did play in the 1972 NLCS playoffs against the Cincinnati Reds. In the playoffs, he batted .235 as he went 4 for 17. His last game ever was at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium in the fifth game of the playoff series.
On 1972 Clemente decided to go to Nicaragua and help the victims of the December 23 earthquake. The airplane he chartered for a New Year’s Eve flight crashed into the ocean off the coast of Isla Verde, Puerto Rico immediately after takeoff on December 31, 1972. A few days after the crash, the body of the pilot and part of the fuselage of the plane were found. An empty flight case apparently belonging to Clemente was the only personal item recovered from the plane. Clemente’s teammate and close friend Manny Sanguillen was the only member of the Pirates not to attend Clemente’s memorial service. The catcher chose instead to dive into the waters where Clemente’s plane had crashed in an effort to find his teammate. Clemente’s body was never recovered.
