Home runs are the coolest part of baseball.
The run scored is important. But the emotional thrill is witnessing the launching of something out of the boundaries of the game and into the real world, breaking down the barrier that separates athlete and observer, performance and life.
So think for a moment about Aaron Judge.
You may not have been paying much attention, but the big Yankees slugger — 6-7, 282 pounds — has 54 homers this season, and he’s mashing them at a pace that puts what a lot of us consider to be the authentic, un-steroided major-league record of 61 in jeopardy.
Those 61 were hit by Yankee Roger Maris in 1961, breaking Yankee Babe Ruth’s record of 60 set in 1927. Along came the juiced-up era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and we got the home run gong show featuring Sammy Sosa (63 and 66 HRs), Mark McGwire (65, 70), and Barry Bonds (73, the current record). It was devious. It was ridiculous.
Noted steroid-taker Alex Rodriguez kept the show going with his 57 homers in 2002, and then the muscle parade began to atrophy. Let’s just say the Mitchell Report, drug testing, congressional hearings and suspensions for performance-enhancing drug-taking slowed the home run display substantially.
League-leading home run numbers dropped quickly into the 40s after 2002, with only random jumps into the 50s. Judge’s huge Yankees teammate, Giancarlo Stanton — 6-6, 245 — hit 59 while with the Marlins in 2017, the most since Bonds’ 73 from 21 years ago.
And now Judge stands alone, way out in front of everyone in both leagues. The closest in the American League is the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez with 31. In the National League, it’s the Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber with 36.
Is Judge juiced? There has never been a speck of evidence, even suspicion about the big man. But sadly, everybody is tainted by the cynicism created during the Steroid Era. Former MLB commissioner Bud Selig disregarded the doping mess for so long that the festering muscle madness meant only a fool would believe anything any player said about steroids, human growth hormone and the like.
The drug plague seems to be under control, but who knows? Passing a drug test these days means almost nothing. We look at players and get a sense, a feel, and that’s usually what we go on.
And Judge just feels like a non-doper. He has always been huge. Asked why there aren’t other giant men in baseball, he replied, “Because they’re either playing basketball or football.”
We’ll call him squeaky-clean for now. Hopefully forever.
If Sosa, McGwire and Bonds hadn’t come along and given the stats an asterisk, Judge’s home run journey assuredly would have our sports-loving nation fascinated, kids tracking each of his homers like detectives, newscasts leading off with his numbers.
Right now, he’s on pace to hit 65 home runs. He’s red hot, with five in his last seven games, well ahead of both Maris’ and Ruth’s paces, with 27 games to go.
A right-hander, Judge hits his bombs in all kinds of ways, to all fields. He got his first one April 13 off the Blue Jays’ Jose Berrios. On April 26, he homered on his 30th birthday. He has had monster launches, and he has had tidy little ones, like No. 25, which traveled only 364 feet and wouldn’t have cleared any other park wall in that spot except Yankee Stadium’s.
He has hit them off journeymen and pitching stars. He jacked No. 47 against Mets ace Max Scherzer two weeks ago.
“I thought if I kept the ball down on Judge, I could keep him in the ballpark,” Scherzer said.
Sorry.
Judge got to the White Sox on back-to-back days in May (Nos. 11 and 12), leading manager Tony La Russa to say, “We got torched.”
I remember spending time with Maris, after he’d retired as home run king and was running a beer distributorship in Gainesville, Florida. The race for him, he said, against an idol like Ruth, had been traumatic and pressure-packed, filled with taunts that he wasn’t worthy. It bothered him still that critics said he hadn’t been consistent with home run numbers through the years — that he wasn’t worthy of the crown.
“How many times you supposed to do a thing?” he asked me.
Judge is worthy of Maris’ record. If he breaks 61, let’s call him the king. And hope he enjoys it.
