Ever since pitcher-turned-slugger Babe Ruth brought an end to the “dead ball” era by clouting 29 home runs for the Boston Red Sox in 1919, fans have clamored for the long ball. And now, no American League slugger has ever hit more than New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge, who hit his 62nd home run Oct. 4, eclipsing the single-season record of fellow Yankees right fielder Roger Maris, who hit 61 in 1961.
In a sport now dominated by such advanced analytics as wins above replacement, hard-hit rate, and win probability added, to name but a few, the home run remains baseball’s easiest to grasp and most enduring statistic. Even novice spectators can understand its significance: The batter swings at the ball, swats it out of the park, and gets four bases for his trouble. A cricket batsman hitting the ball clear over the boundary on the fly, essentially the same sort of powerful blast, is another easy-to-appreciate feat. Even if Los Angeles Angels designated hitter-cum-starting pitcher Shohei Ohtani’s back-to-back seasons of 30-plus home runs and 150-plus pitching strikeouts likely constitute the most statistically improbable feat in MLB history, what Judge has done this season at the plate is arguably more important for what diehards and purists would call the “soul of the game.” In an era of mandated and reliable drug testing, the 6-foot-7-inch, 285-pound Judge, the adopted biracial son of white parents, has redeemed a home run record that was rendered suspect by the proven association of the prior generation’s great home run hitters with anabolic steroids.
The single-season home run record, which originally belonged to Ruth, who established the record at 60 in a 154-game season for the all-time great “Murderers’ Row” Yankees in 1927, appeared to be one of the most impregnable records in a sport that, almost from its outset, has boasted a numerically minded fan base obsessed with such trivia. Thirty-four years later, on another all-time great Yankees squad, Maris hit 61, albeit in a 162-game season, thereby setting a new record but one to which purists would append an asterisk, given that Maris had more games in which to accumulate those home runs.
Years passed and 61 loomed as an unassailable record — until the floodgates burst open around the turn of the century. Supersized St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire and pumped-up Chicago Cubs outfielder Sammy Sosa both broke the record in 1998, with McGwire hitting 70 and Sosa 66 during a season that baseball pundits initially presented as extinguishing the bitter taste of the strike-shortened 1994 season that had diminished interest in the national pastime. McGwire would hit 60-plus home runs one more time, Sosa would do it twice, and a suspiciously enlarged Barry Bonds, no longer the lithe athlete of his youth, would eclipse both of them when he set the all-time mark of 73 in 2001. There was a time when children could not miss ads for inflated bats advertised under McGwire’s name on television, for sale to make you, too, a home run superstar, supposedly without the drugs. These absurdly high “video game” home run totals, along with the statistical tallies of many of their contemporaries, would then become grist for the sports news cycle of the next half-decade: steroid investigations by reporters, congressional hearings on the fate of the sport, fervent denials of steroid use later proven to have occurred, and, eventually, conclusive proof that all the men who surpassed Maris were chemically enhanced.
In the interest of protecting its valuable brand, the MLB battled its own union to implement drug testing — a development that gradually led to the exposure of another round of superstars, such as Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez and longtime Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez. As with Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire before them, their bids for a plaque in Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame were derailed by these disclosures.
The 30-year-old Judge, however, has proven himself the champion slugger of baseball’s current heavily regulated era. Although it is impossible to state with certainty whether any athlete is “unenhanced,” Judge has never failed a drug test. He hit 52 home runs when he won the Rookie of the Year award as a 25-year-old in 2017. He then continued to rake during subsequent seasons. Prior to his memorable 2022 campaign, only current Yankees teammate Giancarlo Stanton, then with the Florida Marlins of the National League, had approached Maris’s mark during the era of drug testing, hitting 59 in 2017. The Yankees outfielder slugged his way to the American League single-season home run record and secured a place for himself among the sport’s immortals.
The significance of Judge’s accomplishment cannot be understated. Maris’s own son Roger Maris Jr. has stated that Judge will be the “actual single-season home run champ … if he hits 62,” thus discrediting the efforts of steroid-era sluggers Sosa, McGwire, and Bonds. Those same baseball writers who have repeatedly voted to keep that unholy trinity out of the Hall will now have their own champion, a towering titan whose loving parents have cheered his every swing as he pursued Maris’s American League record.
The great home run chase of 1998 may have been necessary to redeem the strike and cancellation of the World Series in 1994, but it is only now, 24 years later, that lovers of the game can put the bad memories of 1998 to rest.
Aaron Judge — the absolute hardest hitter in baseball, per advanced analytics measuring the speed of balls coming off the barrel of his bat — has knocked all that past unpleasantness out of the park. That he has done while wearing Yankees pinstripes, the uniform of Ruth, Maris, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and all the rest, is merely the cherry on top for a sport that trades heavily in nostalgia for a bygone age.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
