Barry Bonds retains the record, but Aaron Judge gets the respect

National Post, 13 October 2022

A great debate has raged about the 'real' MLB home run record holder — the 'clean' Judge, or the 'dirty' Bonds?

It’s October. Play ball! It can appear that baseball is played so that it can be recorded, the game a means to a statistical end. No sport is as ruthlessly detailed in numbers.

Those numbers can be harsh. Witness the epic collapse of the Blue Jays on Saturday. That dome-rattling embarrassment is now etched in the record books, an indelible stain to which the statistics stand witness.

Yet there is sometimes magic in those numbers. There was certainly magic this season. Roger Maris’s record of 61 home runs in a season, set in 1961, would be broken 61 years later. The New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge hit his 62nd home run last Tuesday.

In 1961, Maris hit 61 homers for the Yankees, beating the record set by a previous Yankee, Babe Ruth, who hit 60 in 1927. In 1998 two players hit more than 61; Mark McGwire hit 70 for the new record, while Sammy Sosa hit 66. Three years later Barry Bonds hit 73, which remains the record.

It was discovered later that Bonds, McGwire and Sosa were juiced up on performance-enhancing drugs. They were not the only ones — so many were that those years constitute a “steroid era” — and Major League Baseball turned a blind eye to the whole business in the name of, well, business.

The record-setters were not tested at the time, and their cheating was more of a moral than strictly legal matter. Correcting the matter after the fact was impossible given how widespread cheating was at the time. So the official records will tell you that Bonds, McGwire and Sosa all hit more home runs than Aaron Judge did this year.

But they cheated and he didn’t. MLB now tests the players for drugs. Since they started the testing, no one has hit 60 home runs — until Judge. Even more remarkable, he did so in a season with a “dead” ball; home runs are way down throughout the league.

Thus a great debate has raged about the “real” home run record holder — the “clean” Judge, or the “dirty” Bonds?

The debate illustrates a frequent confusion between quantitative and qualitative measures. A culture beguiled by technological materialism prefers that which can be measured, which is why box office receipts are reported for movies, even though they are a poor judge of a film’s quality. Baseball is particularly prone to the tyranny of quantity, as everything is fanatically measured to an excruciatingly precise degree. But there are measures beyond the measurements, standards beyond the statistics. There is no calculation for character.

Numbers are simple and straightforward. Who holds the home run record? Bonds clearly does. That is a quantitative fact. He hit 73 fair and square at a time when baseball was neither fair nor square. Judge hit 62, fewer than 73. Quantitative case over.

The baseball fan — having not only a head for numbers but a heart for the game — wants a qualitative judgment, too. He wants, somehow, to recognize that Judge’s 62 homers are athletically, historically, ethically superior. He is right about that. Qualitative judgments — which are often more important than quantitative ones — cannot be reduced to numbers, but that does not mean that they are less true.

Continue reading at the National Post.