New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge hits his 60th home run of the season, in New York, Sept. 20.
Photo:
Jessie Alcheh/Associated Press
The baseball world has entered an era of good feelings. All the usual moaning about spoiled, tattooed punks who can’t bunt and don’t respect the game is on hold for the next few weeks. This happens periodically when a respected player is on the verge of making history.
Aaron Judge, the genial New York Yankees slugger, blasted his 60th home run of the season on Monday. In the American League, only fellow Yankees Babe Ruth and
Roger Maris
have hit that many round-trippers in one year. Ruth did it in 1927, when the baseball season was only 154 games. Maris did it in 1961, in the 159th game of a 162-game season.
Mr. Judge topped them both, doing it in the 2022 season’s 147th game. He now has a handful of games with which to break Ruth’s original mark and a solid two weeks to pass Maris’s league record—the one with the famous asterisk. All eyes will be on him every time he steps to the plate.
Some fans call 61 homers the “clean” Major League record.
Sammy Sosa
(66),
Mark McGwire
(70) and Barry Bonds (73) all hit more while playing in the National League during the late 1990s and early 2000s, but many purists don’t consider those records valid. The widely held assumption is that performance-enhancing drugs gave that era’s players an unfair advantage. All three men have been denied entry into the Hall of Fame by the baseball writers who vote on it. Everyone knows why.
Mr. McGwire has admitted using steroids but says he didn’t need them to hit home runs. Mr. Bonds’s lawyer claimed during his 2011 perjury trial that his steroid use was inadvertent—he thought he was taking flaxseed oil and arthritis cream. Mr. Sosa denies ever having used performance-enhancing drugs.
Nobody thinks Mr. Judge is cheating. At 6 foot 7 and 280 pounds…
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