The most infamous asterisk in sports history wasn’t an asterisk. It was a sketchy statistical differentiation. As Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle — as of Sept. 10, 1961, Mantle had 53 homers to Maris’ 56 — chased Babe Ruth’s record, the spoilsport commissioner Ford Frick decreed that, to be deemed the single-season home run champ, a player would have to better Ruth’s 60 in 154 games, which once constituted a season. By ‘61, baseball had adopted a 162-game schedule.
After the Yankees’ 154th game, Maris had 59. (Mantle, who sustained a hip injury, finished with 54.) No. 60 came in Game No. 158. No. 61 was struck off Tracy Stallard on the season’s final day. Big drama, right? Uh, no. Thanks in part to Frick’s party-pooping — FYI, the commish was a friend of Ruth’s family — attendance in Yankee Stadium, was 23,154, nearly 40K short of capacity.
The next year’s record book bore no asterisk. It read this way:
Most home runs, 154-game season: Babe Ruth, 60 in 1927.
Most home runs, 162-game season: Roger Maris, 61 in 1961.
Not until 1991 did another commissioner set this right. (A season is a season, is it not?) Fay Vincent anointed Maris, who died in 1985, MLB’s record-holder for home runs in, ahem, a single season. Herein rests today’s lesson: In sports, asterisks — even imagined ones — are unwelcome things.
We mention this because sports could soon see a slew of perceived-if-not-actual asterisks. The NBA, NHL and MLS seasons have been paused for two months; none have set a restart date. The Braves were scheduled to work their 30th of 162 games Monday; they’ve logged none. We’ve seen seasons shortened by strikes/lockouts. We’ve seen a World Series scrubbed and a NHL season never begin. We’ve never seen anything like what we’ll see if sports resume in 2020. (Which isn’t a given, we stress.)
If you’ve visited an ESPN platform over the past month, you’ve seen Michael Jordan. You’ve also seen Phil Jackson, who coined the phrase “Last Dance” to commemorate his final run with the Bulls. The same Jackson gave the NBA its most notable imaginary asterisk when, after alighting in L.A. to coach Shaq and Kobe, he derided the Spurs’ 1999 NBA title for being won after a regular season that didn’t begin until Feb. 5 — five days after the Broncos beat the Falcons in the Super Bowl.
Teams played 50 games in 1999, almost 40% off the usual regimen of 82. The playoffs wound up half-weird. The Spurs, who finished tied with Utah for the most regular-season wins with 37, won the title. Their finals opponent was the East’s No. 8 seed.
The 27-23 Knicks upset Miami in Round 1 on Allan Houston’s floater that hit rim, backboard and then net. Round 2 brought the fourth-seeded Hawks, an unassuming team handed a clear path to the Eastern finals. Being the Hawks, they got swept. Latrell Sprewell ran wild; the Hawks barely broke a trot. They averaged 71.3 points over the final three games.
In 1999, Jordan was again retired, Scottie Pippen was a Houston Rocket and Jackson was off contemplating his navel. The rising Spurs filled the void. This didn’t stop the Zen Master from playing his mind tricks on the team he knew would be a prime challenger to his Lakers.
The 1981 baseball season was halted for seven weeks by a strike. When it resumed, four teams knew they’d be playing in October. In its infinite wisdom, MLB broke the broken year in half: There was a first-half champ and a second-half champ in each division. Thus did the teams with the best and third-best record — the Reds and the Cardinals, respectively — miss the playoffs. Cincinnati “lost” the first half, in which it played one fewer game than the Dodgers, by a half-game; St. Louis did the same in the second half vis-à-vis Montreal.
Both World Series qualifiers were first-half winners: The Dodgers went 27-26 after the resumption; the Yankees were 25-26. The Dodgers beat the Yankees in six. By then, matters were so muddled that Series MVP honors were split three ways. On opening day in 1982 in Riverfront Stadium, the defiant Reds hoisted a banner: “Baseball’s Best Record 1981.”
How many of those seasons would have played out the same way if they hadn’t been delayed/interrupted? How high is up? To borrow from Dan Jenkins’ irreverent-to-say-the-least “Semi-Tough:” “What could have happened, did.”
———
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.