WHEN a baseball player approaches the breaking of a major record — Cal Ripken Jr.’s pursuit of Lou Gehrig’s streak of consecutive games played comes to mind — the commissioner of baseball usually is allowed to bask in the glow and enjoy a public relations windfall.
But Commissioner Bud Selig is not in such a fortunate position with Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants’ left fielder, approaching the most hallowed of all baseball records, Hank Aaron’s 755 career home runs.
Bonds’s alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs has put Selig in a lose-lose situation. In a May 18 USA Today/Gallup Poll, only 8 percent of fans surveyed viewed Bonds as the greatest home run hitter ever, an indication that Selig would be angering the majority of fans by attending the game in which Bonds surpasses Aaron. Fay Vincent, the former commissioner, said in a recent radio interview that if Selig weren’t at the record-breaking game, he would be sending a message that he believes Bonds cheated.
Selig is in a bind, one that, to hear fans on radio call-in shows tell it, he can only resolve by the use of an asterisk. (Perhaps the collective will of the average baseball fans is best expressed by the current cover of ESPN the Magazine, which features a photo of Bonds and a giant 756*.) To fans of an earlier generation, of course, the Asterisk means one thing: the caveat that Commissioner Ford Frick raised in 1961 when Roger Maris surpassed Babe Ruth’s single season record of 60 home runs.
“One generation’s way of trying to preserve its youth,” as a New York Times editorial put it, shortly after Maris died on Dec. 14, 1985.
Except that Frick never affixed an asterisk next to Maris’s 61 home runs. At least, not officially.
Frick had been a close friend of Ruth’s and saw himself as the self-appointed custodian of his legend. In the summer of 1961, aided by what seemed to be a livelier ball and an eight-game extension to the 154-game season, Maris, Mickey Mantle and other sluggers appeared to be closing in on Ruth’s mark. At a news conference that July, Frick declared, “if a player does not hit more than 60 until after his club has played 154 games, there would have to be some distinctive mark in the record books to show that Babe Ruth’s record was set under a 154-game schedule.”
Maris ended up hitting 59 home runs through 154 games, one short of Ruth, though he did hit two more before the season ended.
Frick never used the word asterisk; that was contributed by the acerbic New York Daily News sports writer, Dick Young, who suggested out loud at the news conference that an asterisk should be used, since, “Everyone does that when there’s a difference of opinion.”
There certainly was a difference of opinion among baseball’s old-timers. As Maris got closer to the record, it seemed that every day another former ballplayer threw oil on the fire. Rogers Hornsby said, “it would be bad for baseball if a .270 hitter like Maris broke a record like that.” Hank Greenberg, who nearly broke Ruth’s record in 1938 (ending up with 58 home runs) said he thought Frick’s idea of a “distinctive mark” was “just damned stupid.”
On the last day of the 1961 season, Oct. 1, the New York Times columnist James Reston, who got his start as a sports writer, wrote that Frick, by questioning Maris’s achievement, had reduced Maris “to an asterisk or footnote in baseball history.” He went on to say, referring to a political scandal of the time: “It may well go down as the worst judgment since Sherman Adams took that rug from his old friend Bernard Goldfine of Boston.”
To confuse matters, baseball did not even have an official record book in 1961. (Major League Baseball published its first official record book in 1995.) Frick had no authority to tell anyone what they could and couldn’t put in their record books.
In the minds of millions of fan, though, from old-timers who loved Ruth to younger fans who wanted Mantle to break Ruth’s record, Maris was suspect, and so the idea of the asterisk stuck and acquired the veneer of reality. Frick himself eventually tried to dispel it, writing in his 1973 autobiography, “Games, Asterisks and People,” that, “No asterisk has appeared in the official record in connection for that accomplishment.”
The myth persisted nonetheless. Dan Gutman, who wrote about Frick, Maris and the asterisk in his 1992 book, “Baseball Babylon,” says the reason was simple. “The majority of the fans believed that Maris should have had the asterisk, and so he did,” he said.
In 1991, Commissioner Vincent appointed an eight-member committee on statistical accuracy. One of the questions the group examined was whether Maris should be given sole credit for the single-season home run record. The committee’s answer was an emphatic yes, a response that Vincent, who chaired the panel, endorsed when he said he supported “the single record thesis.” As the baseball historian Bill Deane later noted, removing the asterisk from Maris’s name “was an easy job: the asterisk never existed.”
Except, of course, in the public mind.
It’s a safe bet that Bud Selig will steer clear of suggesting that Bonds receive an asterisk next to his name, should he break Aaron’s record. The fans, not Bud Selig or the press, will be the ones who make that decision.
Whether it ends up in the record book or not.