For three decades after he hit the 61st home run of the 1961 season in the last of the New York Yankees’ 162 games, Roger Maris’s record (in)famously carried an asterisk. Since that single-season record has since been blown by — six times in a four-season stretch that spanned the turn of this century — the controversy surrounding one of baseball’s most revered records has been not about the length of the season but the means by which the standard was attained.
The best comp for Aaron Judge’s historic season? Babe Ruth.
Into that morass, by no doing of his own, strides Aaron Judge, who wears the same pinstripes as Maris and Babe Ruth, and is doing things in the summer of 2022 that are as unusual as his predecessors did in the 1920s and ’60s, respectively. Judge had 55 homers through Thursday, and with the Yankees only 24 games from the conclusion of the season, it’s unlikely that he’ll reach Barry Bonds’s (murky) mark of 73. Unlikely. But don’t take your eyes off him.
There’s ink to be spilled about what the rightful home run record should be, because Bonds was on “the cream” and “the clear” and whatever else he took to artificially build himself into the all-time home run champ, both for one season and a career. The only other players to have hit more than Maris did in that summer of ’61 are similarly stained — Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in both 1998 and ’99, and Sosa again in 2001, the year Bonds established the record.
Home run hitting, like anything in baseball, is normally a product of where the sport is at a particular point in time: the dead-ball era, the year of the pitcher, the steroid era, the juiced ball of 2019 and so on. In 2022, Judge is an absolute outlier, spitting on the belief that the ball has traveled less this year by launching shot after shot over the fences.
When Maris surpassed Ruth’s record of 60 — a number the Babe reached in the 154-game season of 1927 — he was pushed by teammate and icon Mickey Mantle, who finished with 54. That fits with history. More often than not, there is a Robin riding alongside Batman. Not up for some severe baseball nerdiness at the moment? You may want to put down this column. The rest of you, come along.
The only seasons in which more than two players smacked 50 homers were 2001, the year Bonds set the existing mark; and 1998, the year McGwire and Sosa created what seemed like magic by tracking down and passing Maris. In each of those seasons, four players reached 50 — Bonds, Sosa, Luis Gonzalez and Alex Rodriguez in ’01; McGwire, Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr. and Greg Vaughn in ’98. Remember the days when chicks dug the long ball?
There have been 13 seasons before this one in which a player hit at least 55 homers. Nine of those years, at least one other player hit 50. That was true during the Bonds-McGwire steroid era, of course. But it was true, too, in 1938 for Hank Greenberg (58) and Jimmie Foxx (50). It was true in 2017, when Giancarlo Stanton, now Judge’s teammate, hit 59 for Miami while Judge smacked 52 as a Yankees rookie. It was true for Maris and Mantle.
Separating yourself from the power pack, as Judge is doing, is something that really hasn’t happened since Ruth’s days, which we’ll get to. Judge will almost certainly stand alone beyond 50 when the season ends in early October. Philadelphia’s Kyle Schwarber would have to hit 14 homers in his team’s final 25 games to reach 50; St. Louis’s Paul Goldschmidt and Atlanta’s Austin Riley have around the same number of games in which to hit 15 to get to that mark.
What it amounts to is that Judge is outpacing the league at a rate not seen since Ruth, who basically played a different sport from his contemporaries. In 1920, Ruth hit 54 homers when his closest pursuer, George Sisler, managed only 19. (That year, Ruth homered more times than all but one other team.) The following season, Ruth clubbed a then-record 59 homers when the next best in the league — Ken Williams and Bob Meusel — each hit 24.
Judge’s 19-home run lead on Schwarber? It would be the most since Ruth hit 54 and the next-best duo of Hack Wilson and Jim Bottomley managed 31 in 1928. In the 93 seasons since, only Jimmie Foxx — who beat Ruth by 17 homers in 1932 and 14 homers in 1933 — has approached such a gap.
The season’s not over, and it will be fascinating to see when and if Judge reaches Ruth at 60, Maris at 61, Sosa’s 63 from 1999 or his 64 from 2001, McGwire’s 65 from ’99 or Sosa’s 66 from ’98. Those are all reachable landmarks.
Through Thursday, Judge had homered in a staggering 9.29 percent of his plate appearances. (Ruth’s best, it’s worth mentioning, was 8.75 percent in 1920.) If he gets the same number of plate appearances he has averaged thus far, and homers at the same rate, for the rest of the season, he’ll hit 10 more and finish with 65 — which would tie him for the fourth-most all-time.
But as notable as that blast toward history will be, what he’s doing in relation to the rest of the league better defines the impressiveness of his season.
There is time, over these final three-plus weeks, to reconsider what the rightful single-season home run record should be. I’ll be honest: I’m torn. I’m not into criminalizing Bonds, McGwire and the rest, because who knows if everyone’s clean — even now, with a rigorous drug-testing program long in place? But it’s hard to deny that the top of the most-homers-in-a-season list reads as dirty. I’ll leave it as a fun barroom discussion, and respect both views.
What’s undeniable, though, is Aaron Judge is distancing himself from his power-hitting peers in a way even Bonds and McGwire didn’t in their most prolific seasons. That gives his season a distinction that is decidedly devoid of controversy.
Source: WP
