Cheer on Aaron Judge but Don’t Forget Roger Maris

This is on July 5, 1983. The 50th anniversary Major League Baseball All-Star Game will be played in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, which will be demolished within a decade. First, though, a special Old Timers Game has been scheduled. A television sportscaster says loudly into his microphone that seldom if ever have more members of baseball’s Hall of Fame been gathered in one place.

I’m standing with Maris, who shows no reaction, even though he hears the broadcaster’s words and no doubt feels their sting. There are plenty of Hall of Famers here, all right. And he’s not one of them.

He never became one, either before or after his death in 1985. He willed his way to as vaunted an all-time record as there is in sports—most home runs in a season—yet the voters who determine inductees to the Hall of Fame would never allow him in, apparently feeling that, other than his 61-homer year, his career did not meet the hall’s standards.

And now Maris begins to fade in the rearview mirror, because on Tuesday night Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees hit his 62nd home run.

On that summer afternoon at Comiskey, Maris tells me something that has made him melancholy: During warm-ups for the Old Timers Game the bat in his hands felt awkward. It has been so long since his playing days that now the bat seems like a foreign object. Once, he says, it might as well have been an extension of his arms: “Baseball basically meant everything to me.”

It will be a shame if, in the wake of Aaron Judge’s accomplishment, Maris and what he achieved become diminished. That often happens to athletes whose records are broken, and Maris always had to deal with the invisible asterisk that separated his 61 from Babe Ruth’s 60 because Maris’s came during a longer season. Then arrived the muddying, vexatious issue of the steroids-era home run hitters with 70 or more a season.

Maris’s family has comported itself with complete grace each time someone has approached his record, yet somehow the indignities keep coming his way. Baseball has a Golden Days Era Committee to offer a place in the Hall of Fame to deserving players who were overlooked during their years of eligibility. Maris was on the ballot last December. He was passed over again.

Perhaps he’ll never make it to Cooperstown, N.Y. But there is one town that has seen to do right by him. In Fargo, N.D., where he played American Legion ball as a boy and is buried, the Legion youth program in 2006 instituted its own baseball hall of fame. The ceremony didn’t attract national attention, but the first inductee was Roger Maris.

Mr. Greene’s books include “And You Know You Should Be Glad: A True Story of Lifelong Friendship.”