The two players laughed at stories that their contest had turned them into personal enemies. Mantle recalled that when Maris once brought the morning newspapers and coffee back to their apartment, he said, “Wake up, Mick, we’re fighting again!” Another time, when Mantle spotted a sportswriter next to Maris, he deliberately called out, “Maris, I hate your guts!” and the next day, the two men searched the papers to see if the reporter had succumbed to the ruse.

One reason that 1961 appeared to be the year when Ruth’s record could be broken was that, in order to accommodate new expansion teams, the American League had lengthened its schedule from 154 to 162 games. But in mid-July, just as the two Yankees seemed on track to catch the Babe, the Major League Baseball commissioner, Ford Frick, dropped a bombshell. He ruled that if a player “does not hit more than 60 until after his club has played more than 154, 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.”

Some explained Frick’s move as a blatant attempt to safeguard the legacy of an old friend, the Babe, at whose deathbed he had been present. Allen thought “what Frick did was take the joy out of the race” and “made it ugly.” Allen observed: “Mickey went along with it much easier than Roger, who took it very, very hard and personally. He felt: ‘They are making a ruling to hurt me. Babe Ruth is the Yankees and Mickey Mantle is the Yankees, and I’m an outsider.’”

Smoldering at Frick, Maris insisted, “I don’t want to be Babe Ruth.” He felt further wounded when a survey found that New York sports reporters endorsed Frick’s decree by a ratio of 2 to 1. After inflicting this blow, as Clavin and Peary wrote in their book, “these same sportswriters couldn’t understand why Maris wasn’t eager to open up to them the rest of the season.” An unsigned New York Times profile referred to “Roger’s perpetual anger.”

Feeling beleaguered by a hostile press, Maris later recalled: “It was as if I were in a trap and couldn’t find an escape. It was really beginning to get to me now.” One New York Times headline reported that “Maris Sulks in Trainer’s Room.” Mantle remembered that Maris told him, “I can’t take it anymore, Mick,” and that he had replied, “You’ll just have to.”

That September, with Mantle removed from contention by an infection, Maris failed to break Ruth’s record within Frick’s mandated 154 games. In The Milwaukee Journal, Oliver Kuechle snarkily wrote that when the Babe’s record was someday broken, “it should be by somebody of greater baseball stature and greater color and public appeal.” Kuechle insisted that “there just isn’t anything deeply heroic” about Maris.

But by the end of the American League season, the Yankees had won the pennant and Maris had achieved 61 home runs. “I tried,” a grinning Maris told reporters in the clubhouse. “I’m lucky I hit as many as I did. And now I’m completely relieved.”