* Ruth, Maris, and Greenberg?

There are a couple of books out this year that deal with athletes — Roger Maris and Hank Aaron– who were vilified by the press and the public for the audacity in approaching the home run numbers put up by Hall of Famer Babe Ruth, albeit for different reasons.

Maris, who broke the single season mark of 60 with 61 in ’61,was deemed an inferior ballplayer, someone who wasn’t even good enough to carry Ruth’s… glove. Ford Frick, then the commissioner of baseball (not to mention a former Ruth crony), went so far as to decree that the record would not count unless Maris reached 60 in 154 games (rather than the scheduled 162), just as Ruth had done.

Aaron, on the other hand, received a different kind of ugliness, including death threats, when he approached Ruth’s lifetime total of 714.

According to Howard Megdal, author of The Baseball Talmud: The Definitive Position-by-Position Ranking of Baseball’s Chosen Players, one has to look at the ledger to see if Hank Greenberg was cheated out of the chance to beat the single-season figure.

In today’s Times sports section, Megdal published “Religion Aided a Home Run Chase, and May Have Led to Its Failure,” in which he suggests “When Hank Greenberg…made a run at Babe Ruth’s season home run record, falling two short with 58 in 1938, was he pitched around because he was Jewish?”

Jewish paranoia? Perhaps, but Megdal makes a compelling case by comparing the amount of walks Greenberg received in the last few weeks of the season with those of the rest of the year.

“It is impossible to know what was in pitchers’ hearts, but it is also impossible to ignore the statistical record. In short, the American League didn’t seem exactly thrilled with Greenberg’s pursuit,” Megdal writes.

Tagged as: Babe Ruth, Hank Greenberg, home runs, Howard Megdal