Word: homers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rhodes scholar, at Oxford's Christ Church College-where he developed a taste, which he still indulges, for Savile Row suits and old port. After a brief turn as a Kansas City lawyer, he went into Government service in 1938, as a special assistant to Attorney General Homer Cummings. During World War II, he helped select German economic targets for air raids and sabotage, as chief of the Economic Warfare Division of the U.S. embassy in London...
...last week, as he has all season, Yankee Outfielder Maris knew just where to direct his sullen anger: at a baseball. Leaning into a low fastball thrown by Baltimore's Milt Pappas, Maris sent a whistling drive soaring high into the rightfield seats. It was his 59th homer in 154 games; he had come within one heart-stopping wallop of tying baseball's most dramatic and cherished record: the 60 home runs hit by George Herman Ruth in 1927 (seven years before Maris was born...
...varied emotion-as Maris' determined, season-long assault on Ruth's enduring achievement. Most fans cheered him on; ballparks were jammed wherever the Yankees went, and encouraging messages flowed into Yankee Stadium at the rate of 3,000 a week. But a few sentimentalists saw every Maris homer as a personal attack on Ruth. They argued that today's ball is livelier, today's fences shorter, today's pitching easier to hit. Groused Oldtimer Rogers Hornsby: "Maris has no right to break Ruth's record...
...Waste. Nobody swings for the fence with more abandon than husky (6 ft., 200 Ibs.) Roger Maris: more than one-third of his hits are homers. Slow rounding into shape last spring, Maris did not hit his first home run until the Yankees' tenth game. But then he began hitting them in bunches: nine in 13 games in May, 15 in June. When he reached 50 on Aug. 22-with 38 games still to play-Maris became the biggest news in baseball. New York tabloids offered cash prizes for predictions of which days Maris would hit a homer...
With all that money, Maris could easily afford to pay the $2,500 "ransom" demanded last week by the Baltimore fan who caught the ball the Yankees' new hero hit for his 59th homer. But like a true big league ballplayer, Maris was not about to shake loose a single nickel. "I'll give him no more than another ball, autographed, in exchange," said Maris firmly. "That ball means nothing to him-only to me and the Hall of Fame...