Baseball fans, many of them, believe in frontier justice. So in their minds, the 2017 Houston Astros exist in an orbit of sporting purgatory, their World Series victory removed from the record book, stripped of the Commissioner’s Trophy, vacating their championship like a renegade college basketball program.
In their minds, Barry Bonds is the proud owner of two asterisks: one for the all-time home run record (762), one for the single-season home run record (73, set in 2001).
And here’s the thing: Baseball fans are perfectly within their rights to feel that way. They are well within their personal purview to refuse to acknowledge the ’17 Astros, or any of Bonds’ career achievements after, say, 1998 or so, which is when it is generally believed he began to dabble in the dark arts of PEDs.
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.
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But that doesn’t mean those things didn’t happen.
Because, like it or not, they did. If you pick up a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia, if you click on baseball-reference.com, if you look at baseball’s official record books, the Astros did, indeed, defeat the Dodgers in seven games in the 2017 World Series. They remain the champions for that year. As Casey said, you could look it up.
And Bonds’ single-season record of 73 is also in those same places. For baseball ethicists, what’s especially galling is that Roger Maris’ 61 home runs — the “clean” record — isn’t just absent from the official statistics; Maris actually sits seventh. And Babe Ruth is EIGHTH. It is a list dripping with infamy:
- Barry Bonds, 2001, 73*
- Mark McGwire, 1998, 70*
- Sammy Sosa, 1998, 66*
- Mark McGwire, 1999, 65*
- Sammy Sosa, 2001, 64*
- Sammy Sosa, 1999, 63*
- Roger Maris, 1961, 61
- Babe Ruth, 1927, 60
When Ruth hit No. 60 off Tom Zachary of the Washington Senators on Sept. 30, 1927, he famously crowed in the Yankees clubhouse: “Sixty! Count ’em! Let’s see some other son of a bitch match that!”
Well, five other SOBs not only matched it, but surpassed it. And four of them did so with needles and syringes taking the place of Ruth’s preferred PEDs of hot dogs and soda pop. It was a terrible time in baseball. It was a time of deceit and skirting laws. But, notably, there was no steroid policy on the books then.
Maybe that would’ve made a difference. Probably, it wouldn’t. The fact is the record is 73. It belongs to Bonds. It’s gross, sure. It’s wrong. And maybe someday a commissioner will assume office who feels it is his mission and his duty to cleanse the record books. It will not be the present commissioner, who had the power to take the Astros’ title away and didn’t.
So Bonds it is. For better or for worse.
And yes: For Yankees fans, the home run record is a personal thing. Ruth set the record his first year as a Yankee, hitting 54 in 1920. He bumped it up to 59 the next season before setting what for decades seemed the impossible standard of 60. He held the record for 34 years, and when it was time to fall it was two more Yankees — Maris and Mickey Mantle — who chased the magic number all across that summer of ’61 until Maris took Tracy Stallard deep and into the right-field stands and into the hands of a fan named Sal Durante on the last day of the season.
(In a bitter irony, Maris was forced to see his name attached to an actual asterisk for 30 years because he hit 61 in a 162-game season before Fay Vincent and an eight-man panel finally removed it in 1991.)
So yes: It would almost be poetic if Judge could be declared the record-holder if and when he swats No. 62. And there are a lot of people — not just Yankees fans — who will happily make such a pronouncement.
It just won’t be official.
It won’t erase Bonds’ name from the record book.
Only a 74th home run — or a future commissioner with Vincent’s sensitivities for righting past wrongs — will do that. Which is just as well for angry Yankee fans, who tend to grow quieter when asked if the presence of Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Jose Canseco on their dynasty-boy teams from 1996-2000 ought to be handled with similarly draconian scrutiny.
No. For now, for the foreseeable future, 73 is the record. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to recognize it. But that’s the way it is.