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756*
2007, letters Illustration
Client: The New York Times
1 of 1
Barry Bonds hits career home run #756 to become the all-time home run king.
In colloquial usage, an asterisk is used to indicate that a record is somehow tainted by circumstances, which are putatively explained in a footnote supposedly referenced by the asterisk. This usage arose after the 1961 baseball season in which Roger Maris of the New York Yankees broke Babe Ruth’s 34-year-old single-season home run record. Because Ruth had amassed 60 home runs in a season with only 154 games, compared to Maris’s 61 over 162 games, baseball commissioner Ford Frick announced that Maris’ accomplishment would be recorded in the record books with an explanation (often referred to as “an asterisk” in the retelling). In fact, Major League Baseball has no official record book, but the stigma remained with Maris for many years, and the concept of a real or figurative asterisk denoting less-than-official records has become widely used in sports and other competitive endeavors. A 2001 TV movie about Maris’s record-breaking season was called 61* (pronounced sixty-one asterisk) in reference to the controversy. Fans critical of Barry Bonds also taunted him with asterisks as he approached Hank Aaron’s career home run record.-from Wikipedia
