Giants, Barry Bonds fans should enjoy Aaron Judge’s homers


Aaron Judge speaks to the media.

Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images

With his 61st home run Wednesday in Toronto, Aaron Judge finally tied Roger Maris’ American League single-season home run record. The presumptive AL MVP and the rest of the New York Yankees have Thursday off, followed by seven final games with the Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers. Every baseball fan who is able should seek a screen when Judge is up to bat, at least for this weekend in the Bronx, to see if he can claim the AL record outright. When folks measure up Judge’s season against the best in MLB history, it will deserve that billing — and highlight just how extraordinary Barry Bonds was.

For some San Francisco Giants fans and Bonds supporters in particular, the baggage surrounding Judge’s season can be off-putting. For a vocal subset of MLB fans — from Sal on Staten Island to Roger Maris Jr. himself — Judge has just tied the “real” record. The “clean” record. This is, of course, in defiance of MLB, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and, most convincingly, any of the squirming confounding factors that might crawl out of the can of worms that is parsing which decades-old statistics are true and false. (As one FanGraphs writer put it Wednesday night, “There’s a pretty good chance [Mickey] Mantle would’ve had the home run record, but he missed a bunch of time because a quack physician named Dr. Feelgood was injecting so many amphetamines into Mantle’s butt his butt got infected to the point he couldn’t play anymore.” Pretty much.) Where some see a threat or an opportunity to erase unwanted history of the game, Bonds himself sees an exhilarating moment in the sport, himself exhorting Judge to “go for it,” in pursuit of not just the AL record but his own mark of 73. 

Judge is in rarified air already this season, with his 61 homers tying him for seventh-most in a single season ever and the most in 21 years — since Bonds. His OPS+ is a staggering 213 after Wednesday’s game, meaning he is more than twice as good as an average big league hitter and in the midst of the ninth-best offensive season since MLB began to integrate, trailing only Mark McGwire, Juan Soto, Mantle, Ted Williams and, guess what, four seasons by Bonds. He’s currently in position to win the Triple Crown, leading the league in home runs, batting average and runs batted in, something only future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera has achieved in the past 55 years. Per FanGraphs, Judge has just crossed the threshold into 11.0 wins above replacement, a level achieved only nine times since 1947, by Joe Morgan, Stan Musial, Carl Yastrzemski, Mantle (twice) and … Bonds three times.

With many artists or pieces of art, their appreciation must at times be separated from their most fervent fans. Judge may be the “Rick and Morty” of baseball. The fans are unbearable, but the underlying product is actually pretty good. Those who love and appreciate Bonds can watch and relish Judge’s greatness, securely knowing Bonds is the benchmark by which all other seasons are measured. Judge knows it too, calling Bonds “the greatest hitter of all time” and acknowledging 73 as the record in an interview with Tom Verducci for Sports Illustrated.

Yankees fans are proud of their perch as the most annoying in sports; they’ve teamed up with drug scolds to form the Voltron of asshole sports fans. Even Barry Bonds’ staunchest defenders, though, should enjoy the greatest season we’ve seen since Bonds. To let them ruin it would be giving them what they want.





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