I've seen Roger Maris's 61st dong a thousand times. But I recently came across--for the first time--a picture of the crowd fighting for the ball, taken from above. How did I miss this? I did a search for the shot after I'd seen it, and I still couldn't make that version come up. So maybe I'm not the only one who hadn't seen this. After studying the picture for a while, I realized that the ball wasn't at the bottom of the scrum, but that a guy was standing up, holding the ball in the air. I've highlighted the guy and the ball for you (along with two gloves I spotted in the crowd, just for fun).

So I'll leave you with just the interesting photo (credit on photo itself), but I also had fun* watching the video from two different angles and trying to figure out how it all went down, and I also read about the controversy of how the fan (Sal Durante) initialed the ball, but the one in the Hall of Fame doesn't have the initials--supposedly Maris lost the original but I guess nobody knows the truth.

So instead of spending a week trying to put all that into a post only to end up with 20 browser windows open and no post to show for it, I'll just...do it this way I guess.


*not that much fun, as we are talking about a Yankee setting a record off a Red Sock