Life & Mortality Quote by Roger Maris

There’s a sting of locker-room truth in Roger Maris comparing good reviews to obituaries: praise, like grief, often arrives only when it’s safe. Alive, you can contradict the story people want to tell about you. Dead, you’re conveniently edited into a neat myth, all rough edges sanded down, all arguments settled.

Maris didn’t just hit home runs; he became a national referendum. When he chased Babe Ruth’s record in 1961, the spotlight wasn’t celebratory so much as prosecutorial. Fans and writers treated him like an intruder in baseball’s shrine. The pressure wasn’t only athletic but cultural: he was a quiet, workmanlike Midwesterner in an era that wanted its heroes charismatic, narrative-friendly, larger-than-life. If you weren’t the right kind of star, you didn’t get the right kind of grace.

The line works because it flips the supposed purpose of criticism. Reviews are meant to assess performance in real time, to meet art (or sport) where it lives. Maris implies they’re really about managing status and protecting institutions. While you’re still playing, criticism can discipline you, keep you in your place, remind you the public owns the story. Once you’re gone, the story can be sentimental without risk.

Underneath the dark humor is a complaint about delayed humanity: recognition withheld until it can’t change the outcome. For an athlete measured by numbers, Maris points to something stats can’t capture - how fame can feel less like applause than a trial, and how vindication often arrives as a eulogy.