It is a moment, etched forever in baseball lore.
Roger Maris, who had been in a season-long duel with teammate Mickey Mantle for the American League home run title, broke Babe Ruth's team & major league record with his 61st of the 1961 season. Red Barber provided the call on WPIX (there's another video with Phil Rizzuto's radio call dubbed over the same video).
61 years later, long after an allegedly roided-up Barry Bonds had raised the bar to 73, Aaron Judge, who had hit 52 as a rookie five years ago, only to see that number eclipsed by the Mets' Pete Alonso two years later, went on a season long tear of his own. The deeper into the season it went, the more people began to realize that Judge, like Maris before him, didn't need any artifical enhancements or preservatives. On Tuesday night in Arlington, against the Texas Rangers, Judge hit one for the record books. ESPN's YouTube channel has Michael Kay's call on Yes.
Unfortunately, leave it to America's Idiot, Stephen A. Smith, to throw water on it on this morning's First Take. Christopher "Mad Dog" Russo crosses over from his MLB Network show, High Heat, to take Smith to school.
Russo gets it. Whether or not "Screamin' A. Cosell" does is another story.
The bottom line is that Bonds and his enhanced 73 homers are the National League record. As Russo points out, after Mark McGwire, then with St. Louis, hit 70, and realized he took a shortcut, he apologized to Roger Maris' widow over the phone. Bonds? Nope.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred might want to reconsider the path taken nearly 25 years ago by McGwire, Bonds, and Sammy Sosa. It'd be the right thing to do, after all.
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