Removing a player from MLB history - A Hunt and Peck

Who would you choose?

By lil_scooter93 Dec 7, 2020, 2:00pm EST

Milwaukee Brewers v St. Louis Cardinals — the cardinal killer

When scouring the wasteland that is the Internet for post ideas I came across a tweet I thought my start an interesting discussion:

If you could erase one player from the history of MLB, who would it be and why?
— High Heat Stats (@HighHeatStats) November 22, 2020

There are a lot of ways to look at this question. For the sake of the hypothetical I am going to assume the person that gets erased still exists, they just perused a career in accounting or something and never became a professional baseball player. Of course, one thing to do would be to erase the career of some person with a well-known character flaw. Another idea would be to erase someone that seemingly crushed your team (Aramis Ramírez, I am looking at you). Or maybe you might erase a player that has wronged you personally.

I want to go a different route. I want to erase a player that made history. One that set a record that, while has been broken, has still be held as the standard. I want to erase Roger Maris.

In 1961 Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in a single season, a feat that has only been broken by Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds. I am not saying Maris did not deserve the prestige of having the home run record, but if you look at that list of single season home run leaders... what the heck is Maris doing there, ya know? For one season Roger Maris just could not stop hitting dingers, which is actually really cool, but should he be the “True Home Run record holder”, as people like to refer to him, for that one outlier season? Or should it be the King of Clash, the Colossuses of Clout, the Great Bambino himself, Babe Ruth?

Roger Maris’s 1961 season represents some of the weird beauty of baseball. And I want to get rid of it. When I put it that way I just sound wrong, don’t I? Look, I was trying to be creative here, I don’t exactly like this pick, but I will stand by it.

So you tell me... which player would you erase?