The “Real Record"
I am reluctant to write anything about Aaron Judge’s 2022 season, for fear of jinxing what has, so far, been a magical run. But now that Judge has 45 home runs in mid-August, it is hard to ignore. People around the country, including at national media outlets, are starting to wonder if he will pass Roger Maris’ mark of 61 home runs in a single season, the most for anyone ever on the New York Yankees or in the American League.
This number means a lot to people, far more than you’d expect a league or team record to mean. And that’s because of steroids. The only players to ever hit more than 61 in a season–Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds–have all been linked to performance-enhancing drugs; for many, this makes all their accomplishments tainted, and leaves 61 as baseball’s “real” record. Back in 2017, when Judge’s now-teammate Giancarlo Stanton was in Miami and making his own run at the 61 mark, he admitted that he still considered 61 home runs to be “the real record.”
Personally, I’m very wary of this attitude. Earlier this year, I wrote about the gross hypocrisy that is inherent to all this steroid panic.
But my concern about “real record” talk is about something deeper. Regardless of how anyone feels about steroids, it should alarm you when people start to talk about some noble past that is better and more pure than the present. When people say that Roger Maris’ record is the “real” home run record, they are suggesting that home runs hit in 1961 are more legitimate than home runs hit in 1998 or 2001. This is not all that different from the way many people yearn for an America of the 1950s or 1960s, as a simpler, or more morally upstanding time.
I want to be careful here, because I’m definitely not trying to say that anyone who is excited about Judge’s pursuit of the 61 mark is some Trump supporter who secretly yearns for segregation. If anything, the home run chase helps clarify the appeal of a type of nostalgia that is, in other contexts, obviously reactionary and bigoted. But the longing for a simpler era is understandable; the desire to imagine a world where bad things simply never happened is natural. In fact, it is SO natural it has occurred in EVERY ERA.
When Roger Maris was setting his record, back in 1961, his record was ALSO viewed as illegitimate: Baseball’s then-commissioner Ford Frick announced that Maris’ record should come with an asterisk (or, as he actually put it, “some distinctive mark”) since it was occurring during a 162-game season, as opposed to the 154-game season that had been traditional until that season. Even at the time, this was understood as part of a project to protect Babe Ruth’s status as holder of the “real record.” Ruth, who had been friends with Frick, was a far better player than Maris, and much more central to the history of baseball, and some people did not want to see him displaced from his perch as baseball’s home run king.
Even uglier was the reaction, over a decade later, to Hank Aaron’s pursuit of Ruth’s career home run record. Aaron famously received death threats and other nasty messages from fans who wanted to protect the “real record.” Much of this was explicitly racist–many of the letters Aaron got straight up said they didn’t want a Black man to break the record. But the backlash wasn’t always that transparent. Some people merely said that Aaron wasn’t worthy of the record for other reasons. Because he was never the prolific, revolutionary home run hitter that Ruth had been (he’d never hit more than 47 in a season); because he had never led a dynasty like the 1920s Yankees (Aaron’s Braves never made the World Series after 1958); because he’d never even been considered the best player in the league (he spent most of his career overshadowed by Willie Mays).
Of course, in retrospect, it’s easy to see the racial bias in those statements. Racism does not always take the form of explicit prejudice—sometimes it is just selective standards applied to disfavored groups. And it’s not just racial prejudice that can work this way, but also sexism, homophobia, class prejudice, etc. Which is why we should be wary of calls to apply some new standard to an accomplishment, like declaring a longstanding record is not the “real record.”
It doesn’t seem like an accident that the current holder of the REAL real record, for both career home runs and single-season home runs, is Barry Bonds, a Black man who was known to have a rocky relationship with both the press and his teammates. He’s not the kind of person we WANT to have the record, so we invent reasons to delegitimize it. Not that the evidence that Bonds used steroids is invented, but that if the same evidence surfaced against a more likable personality (such as, say, David Ortiz), then fans and the media would find reasons to ignore it.
The danger of “real records”—of the nostalgic impulse to remember around the bad parts of history—is that we end up creating an impossible standard of purity that nobody can ever meet. And then we apply that standard unevenly—you couldn’t apply it fairly if you tried, since it’s based on some fantasy version of the past. The result is that all the natural human biases about who seems clean or good or trustworthy seep in, and inevitably those judgments reinforce the status quo.
Aaron Judge checks all the right boxes of who we expect a home run champion to be. He’s on the Yankees. He’s humble and soft-spoken. And his massive size obviates most doubts about him being on PEDs. So it is easy to root for him; I am certainly rooting for him. It’s even nice that, if Judge gets to 62, he will be setting a team and league record, allowing people to commemorate the accomplishment without necessarily denigrating Bonds/McGwire/Sosa. But there should be no talk of the “real record.” The real record is the real record. The real record is 73.