If you believe Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are the genuine, honest-to-goodness home run champions, perhaps you’ll recall Ben Johnson as a great Olympic gold medalist, Lance Armstrong as someone to be celebrated and Rosie Ruiz as a rightful Boston Marathon winner.
Of course, Roger Maris remains the real single-season home run record holder. In our hearts and minds, we all know that to be true.
So, if Aaron Judge tops Maris this year, and Judge now has 50 homers, putting him on a record-breaking 63 home run pace, he is not only the Yankees and American League home run champion but the authentic major league champ.
Read both sides: The Aaron Judge home run debate
61 is the real record
Roger Maris remains the real single-season home run record holder. In our hearts and minds, we all know that to be true.
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PEDs or not, 73 is the number to beat
Pick up a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia, click on baseball-reference.com, look at baseball’s official record books, the home run record is 73.
Maris beat the Babe and Mickey with his hair falling out, the misguided commissioner of the time threatening an asterisk and everyone outside of the Maris family (and the rest of his home state of North Dakota) rooting on The Mick, the homegrown Hall of Famer who was everyone’s boyhood idol, including mine. More importantly, Maris did it without chemical assistance.
Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961, which also happens to be 61 years ago. So perhaps it’s fitting another great Yankee right fielder can break Maris’ home run record, which held for 37 years until both McGwire and Sosa combined with their respective drug dealers to captivate a naïve nation and cheat Maris out of his rightful record. Then Bonds, knowing he was better than McGwire and Sosa combined, and also that he had access to Balco and even better chemicals via Victor Conte, stole the record from Thieves One and Two.
That was a long time ago, back in the steroid era, and we’ve learned a lot since then. Bonds, McGwire and Sosa transformed their bodies into home run machines. Their numbers in those years are a mirage. Their game was a scam.
Everyone knows this, including my esteemed colleague Mike Vaccaro, who in Tuesday’s excellent column on Judge separated the “clean” 50-homer hitters from the “dirty” ones. It’s all in the open now, even if baseball’s powers that be don’t want to completely acknowledge it, and correct what’s obvious to all.
The debate about how Bonds turned himself into a better Babe Ruth in his late-30s, about how Sosa went from a skinny, base-stealing prospect traded for an old DH (Harold Baines) to a North Side hero (for a while, anyway) and about how McGwire transformed from aging and injury prone to a monster who made the old Busch Stadium look tiny ended long ago.
The inflated numbers of these three talented scoundrels are about as legit as Bernie Madoff’s accounting records. We’d be fools to continue pretending their dealers don’t deserve half the credit, or more.
Judge, like Maris, is doing it the old-fashioned way. While batting in the two spots historically reserved for table-setters, and shuttling between right field and center, and by playing in the most publicized walk year and with the pressure of knowing he left $213.5 million on the table, Judge is putting together one of the greatest seasons of all time.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, that’s for damn sure,” teammate Gerrit Cole said.
We’d never seen anything like the late-’90s and early-2000s either, before Conte and his ilk, and players who were anxious to hit more home runs, make more money and win more honors turned that era into what one other steroid user call the “loosey goosey” days. We can still recall that it happened, and that we all let it happen. But that doesn’t mean we have to honor the folks most responsible — the cheats themselves.
We know now their home runs came via chemistry, that they spent as much time perfecting their regimens as their swings, that they traveled needles (or pills or creams) as well as their uniforms and bats, and that their numbers are the saddest part of baseball history, certainly not something to be celebrated or honored. It’s somewhat ironic now that then commissioner Ford Frick wanted to place an asterisk on Maris’ record since it was done in a 162-game season, and not 154. If anyone should have had an asterisk, it is Ruth, who hit his 60 homers 20 years before baseball integrated.
Now, it’s about more than eight extra games, and a tiny little asterisk. It’s about a whole different ballgame that was played with PEDs.
History tells us the asterisk wasn’t real justice. Neither are the phony “records” set by three well-known cheats.
