What better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle’s historic home run race than to celebrate the 10th anniversary of 61*, Billy Crystal’s hackneyed but eminently enjoyable film celebrating the 40th anniversary of Maris and Mantle’s historic home run race? Answer: none. There is no better way.
Crystal is a devoted baseball fan, and an unabashed Yankees fan, and a Godawful director, and all three of those qualities are on display here, though all are eclipsed by the Immense Handsomeness of Thomas Jane and the disturbing degree to which Barry Pepper resembles Roger Maris.
Jane mugs and shrugs and smarms his way through a probably-pretty-accurate portrayal of Mantle (who I will argue would have been the greatest ballplayer of all time had alcoholism and injury not derailed his career) and Pepper plays Maris as an anxiety-ridden Everyman at odds with the fact that, while he loves being a Yankee, he hates the glare of the New York Limelight. The whole thing is pretty damn melodramatic (Forget Paris, anyone?), but for Yankees fans - hell, for baseball fans - it serves as both a sentimental homage to The Way Things Were and, unfortunately, a dated and mildly embarrassing reminder that, for a few months in 1998, we convinced ourselves that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire weren’t full of more growth hormones than a dairy farm cow.
But to paraphrase McGwire himself, I’m not here to talk about the past. Not the relatively recent past, anyway. I’m here to talk about 1961, or more accurately, 61*, which, as noted above, aired in 2001. So, mostly, I’m not here to talk about 1998. I should probably just end this here.
