04/24/24
October 05, 2022
The sanctimonious baseball purists want to elevate Aaron Judge. Don’t let them.: But it is not surprising that the keepers of the sport have not made this clear [that Bonds holds the record]. They rarely do. Over the years, they’ve selectively disguised dishonesty in baseball under the cloak of folklore and corrected the record only under duress. (WaPo gift article link)
The thing I keep coming back to is that juice or no juice, Bonds, McGwire and Sosa still had to put together quality at bats, be selective with all the unhittable junk they were seeing, and make contact with the ball and put it in play. There's a lot of aspects of that process that performance enhancers don't provide an advantage with. Things like mechanics, hand-eye coordination and mental approach still have to be elite.
It's interesting that all the most mega homer seasons happened in the league that didn't have the designated hitter. Those guys kept blasting homers despite all the lineup and batting order changes that come with changing pitchers and inserting pinch hitters. There were more opportunities for opposing pitchers to work around the big guns to get to much weaker batters hitting behind them in the order.
If Bonds, McGwire and Sosa had not hit significantly more homers during the peak years than declared non-juicer Ken Griffey Jr. over in the American League and had not surged past the single season homer totals of Ruth and Maris, there's a good chance that their juicing would have been overlooked or forgotten and they'd be in the HOF.
posted by beaverboard at 11:32 AM on October 06, 2022
The real shame is that Bonds' whole career was overshadowed by the cloud of suspicion surrounding his chase for the home run record. When he was in Pittsburgh, he was one of the best ballplayers I've ever seen, a legit five-tool player who would likely be in the HoF already, despite his occasional surliness.
posted by The_Black_Hand at 08:00 PM on October 06, 2022
A justgary sighting!!
posted by NoMich at 09:10 PM on October 06, 2022
Aaron Judge's 62nd Home Run And MAGA's Rejection Of Reality