Due to historical revisionism, it was said in some publications that Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees shattered Major League Baseball's single-season home run record on Tuesday with his 62nd home run. He refused. On October 7, 2001, would-be Hall of Fame outfielder Barry Bonds set the record, which is 73. A large portion of the sports journalism industry ought to rue the mistake.
However, it is hardly shocking that the sport's stewards have not made this obvious. Rarely do they. Over time, they have selectively covered up baseball dishonesty with legend and only forcedly amended the record.
While ignoring his contribution to drawing the game's color line, Cap Anson's Hall of Fame plaque honors him as the best batter and player-manager of the 19th century. Despite his success during the 60 years when Black athletes were banned from the game due to a racist policy sponsored by Anson that the league's historians neutered in description as a mere "gentlemen's agreement," many in the game still revere Babe Ruth as the best player and slugger.
Bobby Thomson's walk-off, pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants in 1951 was hailed as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" for more than 50 years, but Joshua Prager revealed in the Wall Street Journal in 2001 that a Giants coach using a handheld telescope had secretly intercepted signals and electronically relayed them to the batter, who would then be thrown the pitch.
Aaron Judge surpasses Roger Maris' single-season record with home run number 62.
Given that he hit 61 home runs in 1961, one more than Babe Ruth did in 1927 against all-White opposition, many baseball insiders today claim that Roger Maris has held the title of home run king. However, if Maris had achieved his achievement in a different age, it might have raised a variety of red flags. Maris had an unusual season, hitting one and a half times as many home runs as he had or will have in any other season of his career. It also occurred during a season when Yankees star Mickey Mantle was sidelined for a portion of the pennant race due to an infection he contracted after receiving an injection from Max Jacobson, a physician who was at the time referred to as a quack who distributed amphetamines. The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood," a biography of Mantle by Jane Leavy, stated that the injection was referred to as a "vitamin" shot. Leavy stated she did not think the shot contained either steroid or amphetamine, despite speculation to the contrary over the years.
With the exception of Bonds and a few of his colleagues, all others who have thrived between and around them—including Maris, Mantle, Thomson, and Ruth—still pass baseball's purity test. According to the baseball elite and its created sense of holiness about a game for which so many records are based on a reality as robust as a pile of sawdust, they accomplished what they accomplished, but Bonds somehow did not.
I'm not aware of any sport that is more sanctimonious than baseball. More religion has been discovered by the game keepers than by the greatest evolutionary anthropologists.
Many of their targets were accused of committing crimes against the game, as opposed to crimes against humanity, which were perpetrated by criminals and violent offenders like Klansmen, who are honoured in baseball.
The all-time hits leader Pete Rose is still not in the Hall of Fame because he bet on baseball, but Ty Cobb, another jerk by all accounts, was honored in the first class in 1936 despite being connected to a game-fixing conspiracy years earlier.
Gaylord Perry was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1991 despite acknowledging that he had improperly doctored the ball with spit, Vaseline, or K-Y jelly in his 1974 autobiography, "Me and the Spitter."
Plaster saints are not what we have in the Hall of Fame, as John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, stated in a previous interview with the New York Times. Many were hardly moral role models.
Aaron Judge is pursuing true history, not Barry Bonds's fake version, according to John Feinstein.
When Bonds' ex-wife accused him of physical abuse, it wasn't the first time that Bonds was made to feel like an unworthy recipient of the home run championship — both seasonally and all-time. It didn't start when he was jailed for deceiving a grand jury looking into steroid use allegations. It started when he was chosen as the clubhouse's leader during the steroid era, which didn't last as long as baseball's Jim Crow era but was nonetheless unknown in length. Most unsettlingly, Jim Reeves, a renowned sports columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who is now retired, stated after Bonds's ascension to fame: "It is now officially a national day of sorrow. Every ballpark in America should have black bunting hanging from it. Tonight, every warning track should be escorted by a riderless black horse with an empty saddle and two Hank Aaron cleats turned backward. A liar and a cheat lost the greatest sporting record.
Bonds, though, achieved nothing more than what those who came before him had done: he was the best of his generation, regardless of the theoretical problems that characterized that era. Bonds cannot be disqualified from the game by the game keepers unless and until those who came before him are specifically cited. It would be extremely dishonest to do so.
Judge made a point of pointing out as he got close to Maris's mark.
Judge stated to the San Francisco Chronicle last month that "Bonds's 73 is the record." "I observed him doing it. I watched him do it all night long. The record is that. That is inviolable to him.
However, some of the people Judge met with will want to minimize Bonds. They will disregard Judge's assessment, regardless of how accurate it may be, in order to perpetuate what is arguably baseball's greatest tradition: the mythology of its most important milestones.
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