4 baseball legends you forgot played for the Cleveland Guardians
By Chad Porto
Roger Maris
Many may know Roger Maris as the man who broke Babe Ruth’s record in 1961 and became a major league sensation. What you may not have known is before he was a Yankee and before he was a Kansas City Athletic, he was a member of the Cleveland Guardians organization, back when they were the Indians.
He would play a full season’s worth of games in Cleveland over two years, appearing in 167 games, hitting 23 home runs, 78 RBIs, and just a .231 average. He would end up in Kansas City though at the age of 24, where he would go to the first of seven All-Star Games over a total of four years.
This was in an era where the All-Star game took place multiple times in a given year.
He’d go from the A’s to the Yankees, where he’d go on to break Babe Ruth’s single-season record for home runs. His quest for immortality would receive a really well-done movie called 61*, and would only help further the narrative that he was some flash-in-the-pan nobody who broke The Babe’s record.
Except, that wasn’t true at all, as the year he broke the home run record was not only his second in New York, but it was the second season that he won the league MVP. He ended up parlaying that to two World Series wins in New York, and then a third when he arrived in St. Louis with the Cardinals.
Had injuries not derailed his career, it’s very likely he’d have more impressive stats. It’s likely that reason why Maris is still, to this day, not in the Hall of Fame.