Say Anything Blog

Nearly a half-century ago, they tried to devalue Roger Maris' record.

They put an asterisk by it.

They said it was tainted.

Richard Maris, Roger's youngest son, laughs now at the timeless parallelism.

"They tried to cheapen Dad's record then and now it's been cheapened even more," Richard says from his home in Gainesville, Fla.

Notice how the son still calls it "Dad's record."

Maybe we should all start doing the same.

I've never been one to side with pandering politicians, but the words of Byron Dorgan - a Democratic senator from Maris' home state of North Dakota_ are starting to sound better. "Some of us," Dorgan said during last year's congressional hearings on steroids, "believe that Roger Maris' home run record still stands."

If anybody has been robbed of his place in history by the hulked-up, bulked-up, steroid-ridden sluggers in modern-day baseball, it is Maris. Never has his record 61 home runs in the summer of `61 seemed so honorable, so legitimate, so untainted. Never has he deserved more credit than he does today - 45 years after he surpassed the Bambino's mythic milestone.

"And the only enhancement Dad used," Richard says, "was cigarettes. He smoked [unfiltered] Camels, and I doubt they helped him hit any more home runs."

With an incriminating book documenting Barry Bonds' steroid use set to hit the stores in the coming days, we now have strong circumstantial evidence that everyone who ever broke Maris' record cheated to do it. Reality has stuck a syringe into the over-inflated balloon bodies of Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.