Wealth & Money Quote by Roger Maris

Maris strips the romance out of sports with one blunt comparison: baseball isn’t a temple, it’s a paycheck. The line works because it refuses the story fans prefer to tell themselves - that athletes are driven primarily by love of the game, loyalty to a city, or some mythic competitive purity. “It’s a business” is the curtain drop; the zinc mines are the punchline that makes the point impossible to misread. He’s not claiming baseball is joyless. He’s reminding you that joy isn’t the economic engine.

The subtext is defensive and a little weary. Maris spent his career under a microscope, most famously during the 1961 home-run chase when he was cast as the spoiler to Mantle and treated like a hired hand chasing numbers rather than glory. In that atmosphere, moralizing about motives becomes another way to police an athlete’s behavior: take less money, play through pain, smile more, be grateful. Maris answers with a worker’s logic: I sell the skill I have where it pays. If the market rewarded zinc-mining hands the way it rewards a right fielder’s swing, he’d clock in underground.

The intent isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s boundary-setting. He’s insisting on being seen as labor, not folklore - an employee in a high-gloss industry where sentiment is often used to discount bargaining power. That’s why the quote still lands today, in an era of free agency debates and “legacy” talk: it punctures the convenient fantasy that only the owners are allowed to be practical.