Tag Archives: Aaron Judge

RBA: Judge’s a .764 batter this year.

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Aaron Judge

Aaron Judge—Real Batting Average says there was a lot more to his 2022 than yanking Roger Maris to one side.

So Aaron Judge didn’t win the Triple Crown after all? Big deal. He pulled up short of passing Minnesota’s Luis Arraez for the “batting title.” When it comes to the batting number that should matter the absolute most—what I call a Real Batting Average (RBA)—the Leaning Tower of 161st Street did more than just bomb his way to the all-time American League single-season home run championship.

How does Judge being a .764 batter this year sound to you?

Judge bombed, slashed, swatted, and walked his way to an RBA 286 points higher than the Twins’ infielder did. It isn’t even close. He did likewise to the tune of 256 points higher than Jeff McNeil, the Mets’ infielder/outfielder who finished as the National League’s “batting champion.”

“Purists” seeing that and jumping up and down kicking, screaming, and throwing things, sit down and listen up.

I’ve argued this before, and I’ll die upon this hill: The so-called “batting average” is a fraud. It treats all of a player’s hits as equal, and the so-called “batting champion” needs a) a minimum number of plate appearances to qualify for the title despite b) the so-called “batting average” being calculated strictly by hits divided by official at-bats. From this point forward, any reference to it will be called hitting average.

Getting lots of hits is wonderful. Freddie Freeman led this year’s offense-challenged Show with 199. (The Show’s earned run average and fielding-independent pitching were each under four.) He also finished one point below National League hitting average-leading Jeff McNeil (Mets). You’re also going to see Real Batting Average saying Freeman was light years better than McNeil at the plate this year.

Why on earth should you give shrift to a statistic that thinks every hit you got was equal value? There’s only one reason: you think a single is as good as a double, a double’s as good as a triple, a triple’s as good as a home run. You don’t even have to pass third-grade math to see that and know it’s about as credible as a 70-dollar bill.

A few years ago, I reminded myself that total bases treats your hits the way they deserve to be treated—unequally. Let’s use Judge to explain. He had 177 hits this season and they were good for 391 total bases. He had 87 singles, 28 doubles, no triples, and 62 home runs. (Notice that almost exactly half his hits were singles, you who still dismiss him as just another all-or-nothing slugger.)

That’s 87 bases on singles, 56 on doubles, and 248 on his record-smashing home runs. Add them up. It’s 391. It’s a shame that his walks don’t count toward total bases, the way they do toward his on-base percentage (for 2022, it’s .425) because that would make his 2022 total bases 402.

The RBA formula I developed, seeking a way to explain a batter’s value simpler than weighted runs created (wRC), simple enough for a child of five or an old fart of 95 to comprehend, is as follows: Total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances. If you’d like to see it again in a non-intimidating mathematic formula, here it is:

TB + BB + IBB + SF + HBP
PA

The old/ancient school looked upon walks as either accidents or detriments, not stopping to ponder that a batter working out a walk if he couldn’t find something reasonable on which to swing was actually exercising a skill profound enough. Time was when observers kvetched about even the greatest hitters taking “too many” walks on too many “hittable” pitches, without asking themselves how hittable those pitches really could have been.

But why single intentional walks out, too, when calculating an RBA? Aren’t they part of the walk total for the season? Well, yes, to the latter. To the former, the answer is simple: If you’re at the plate, and the other guys would rather you take your base than their pitcher’s head off, why should you not get credit for it? There’s something they don’t want to deal with when they can deal with a lesser bat behind you to try doing the clutch hitting. To that, RBA says, basically, yay, you.

Yes, sacrifice flies are outs. But unlike sacrifice bunts, they’re not premeditated outs. You didn’t check in at the plate to make a deliberate out, which is the very definition of a sacrifice bunt. (Do I have to say it again? In four out of six “bunt situations” you have less chance of scoring the player you “sacrificed” ahead a base after the bunt than before it; in one, you have an even chance; in only one more—first and second, nobody out—do you have a slightly better chance.)

You checked in at the plate looking for a base hit. You didn’t think to yourself, “Boy, am I gonna put a thrill into those people in the stands by flying out deep.” (Well, you might, if the fly ball carries all the way to the fence.) But your fly out was deep enough to send that man on third home. You get credit for a run batted in but otherwise it’s as though you didn’t exist at the plate, because a sacrifice fly is counted no further as an at-bat than a walk. RBA says to a walk and a sacrifice fly: We know you were at the plate, that wasn’t a figment of our imagination. You’re going to get the credit you deserve for it.

Shohei Othani

Top ten in RBA; sub-3.00 ERA and FIP plus 11.9 K/9 on the mound. At $30 million for next year, Shohei Ohtani might still be underpaid . . .

We also know that, unless you’re Ron Hunt or Hall of Famer Craig Biggio, you weren’t up there looking to get hit by a pitch. But if the other guys’ pitcher is careless enough, control-less enough, or headhunting enough to plunk you, RBA’s going to give you credit for it—because you reached base. That’s another prospective run on the scoreboard. You might have preferred drilling a hole in the infield, putting a dent in the fence, or dialing the Delta Quadrant, but you became a baserunner on their dollar. Let it be to your credit and on their heads.

On the assumption that I haven’t lost you, or prompted you to send the Cuckoo’s Nest Coach to my driveway yet, what follows are this year’s top forty “batting title” qualifiers across the Show board according to Real Batting Average. Those with .300 or better hitting averages are marked with (*). (If you must throw things, please throw them through an open window facing your backyard, not with your spouse, your significant other, your children, or other family or friends in the line of fire.)

Player PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Aaron Judge (Yankees) * 696 391 111 19 5 6 .764
Starling Marte (Mets) 505 218 97 26 0 13 .701
Yordan Alvarez (Astros) * 561 288 78 9 7 6 .692
Rafael Devers (Red Sox) 555 289 50 11 3 6 .647
Paul Goldschmidt (Cardinals) * 651 324 79 1 4 5 .641
Jose Ramirez (Guardians) 685 309 69 20 9 6 .603
Pete Alonso (Mets) 685 309 67 16 9 12 .603
Shohei Ohtani (Angels) 666 304 72 14 3 5 .598
Jose Altuve (Astros) * 604 281 66 2 1 10 .596
Freddie Freeman (Dodgers) * 708 313 84 12 7 5 .595
Manny Machado (Padres) 644 307 63 10 2 1 .595
Nolan Arenado (Cardinals) 620 297 52 3 4 7 .585
Austin Riley (Braves) 693 325 57 1 4 17 .583
Julio Rodriguez (Mariners) 560 260 40 4 1 8 .559
Vladimir Gurrero, Jr. (Blue Jays) 706 306 58 6 4 6 .538
Taylor Ward (Angels) 564 234 60 0 5 4 .537
Nathaniel Lowe (Rangers) * 645 292 48 2 0 4 .536
J.T. Realmuto (Phillies) 562 241 41 1 5 12 .534
Carlos Correa (Twins) 590 244 61 2 4 3 .532
Andres Gimenez (Guardians) 557 229 34 4 3 25 .530
Xander Bogaerts (Red Sox) * 631 254 57 2 7 10 .523
Yandy Díaz (Rays) 558 200 78 2 1 6 .514
José Abreu (White Sox) * 679 268 62 2 4 12 .513
Jeff McNeil (Mets) * 589 242 40 1 5 11 .508
Justin Turner (Dodgers) 532 205 50 1 8 6 .508
Trea Turner (Dodgers) 708 304 45 1 6 3 .507
Brandon Nimmo (Mets) 673 251 71 0 3 16 .507
J.D. Martinez (Red Sox) 596 239 52 1 5 5 .507
Bo Bichette (Blue Jays) 697 306 41 0 2 2 .504
Ty France (Mariners) 613 241 35 3 5 21 .498
Alejandro Kirk (Blue Jays) 541 195 63 2 4 4 .495
Dansby Swanson (Braves) 696 286 49 0 4 3 .491
Luis Arraez (Twins) * 603 230 50 2 3 3 .478
Steven Kwan (Guardians) 638 225 62 2 4 7 .470
Andrew Benintendi (KC/Yanks) * 521 184 52 0 5 2 .466
Nico Hoerner (Cubs) 517 197 28 4 2 6 .458
Alex Verdugo (Red Sox) 644 240 42 2 6 3 .455
Alec Bohm (Phillies) 631 233 31 1 10 4 .442
Amed Rosario (Guardians) 670 257 25 0 4 4 .433
MLB RBA .456

What probably doesn’t surprise you: the top ten guys for RBA this season. What might come a little more clear to you: just how much the Mets really missed Starling Marte—the National League’s RBA champion this year—in the lineup for most of September and most of this month so far with that finger injury, especially when the Mets couldn’t muster offense enough to overthrow the Braves last weekend.

What might surprise you a little bit: Matt Olson didn’t get anywhere near the top forty for hitting average, but his .548 RBA shakes out as 47 points lower than the guy the Braves let walk as a free agent right before dealing for him. I’m not convinced yet that the Braves got the better end of letting longtime franchise face Freddie Freeman walk into the Dodgers’ arms. (The Braves also won ten fewer than the 111 game-winning Dodgers did.)

What might jolt you a little bit more: The Guardians and the Mets (four each) have more men in that RBA top forty than anyone else this season.

What might jolt you a little bit more than that: A certain unicorn finished in the top ten for RBA in the same season during which he posted an 11.9 strikeout-per-nine rate, a 4.98 strikeout-to-walk ratio, a 2.33 earned run average, and a 2.40 fielding-independent pitching rate. That helped him earn an American League-leading 9.0 total wins above a replacement-level (WAR) player for the year. Across the board, that was second only to Judge’s 10.6.

Shohei Ohtani finished eighth for RBA among the top forty hitting titles and had a pitching season that might be a Cy Young Award season in a different year. He ducked offseason arbitration by signing a one-year 2023 deal for $30 million. He might still be getting underpaid.

And, what of his future Hall of Famer teammate Mike Trout? Well, now. Trout missed a third of the season on the injured list. And he still finished the year with 6.3 WAR (an All-Star-worthy season level), 40 home runs, an OPS one point shy of 1.000 . . . and a .691 RBA. (If he’d qualified in the “batting title” race, Trout would have finished one tick behind Alvarez.)

This ought to tell you why the best news for Angel fans this year—other than Shohtime; other than Trout returning down the stretch of a race out of which the team fell eons earlier—was the news that owner Arte Moreno (who learned and showed all others the hard way that marketing genius doesn’t equal team-building savvy) intends to sell the franchise.

Depending on the eventual buyer, Angel fans may feel the way Met fans did upon the end of the Wilpon Era. It would only begin with those fans singing “Happy Days are Here Again.”

Meanwhile, the Leaning Tower of 161st Street towers over all in this year’s RBA. Judge was so much more than just Roger Maris’s conqueror, but there isn’t a jury on earth who’d rule his 62 home runs anything less than the individual story of the season. With future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols—revived by the advent of the designated hitter in the National League, managed prudently by Oliver Marmol in St. Louis, and finishing the season with 703 home runs lifetime—tied with his former Angel teammate Ohtani for an extremely close second.

If you find a panel that would rule that way, you ought to demand an investigation into jury tampering.

Summary Judgement: 62 in ’22

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Aaron Judge

“I think it won’t sink in until the offseason.—Aaron Judge became the AL’s new single-season home run king at last Tuesday night in Texas.

Maybe Aaron Judge should be playing things like the stock market. Without making as grand a show of things as observers paid to be so grand (and perhaps foolish), he gambled early that he could turn his first walk year into something big when he achieves his first free agency.

He probably didn’t think he’d smash a longstanding American League home run record along the way. Certainly not in a season in which hitting across the major league board was at one of its lowest levels in the professional game’s history, and he could never be certain he’d get a miniature medicine ball or a turbocharged orb to launch.

But smash it Judge did Tuesday night. In the second game of a doubleheader in Texas. If you’re going to slam the season’s biggest exclamation point down but you can’t do it in front of the home audience, there are few places bigger than there to do it.

Batting leadoff for the 106th time at all this year, and batting first in the lineup for the 34th time, Judge squared up Rangers righthander Jesus Tinoco’s slightly hanging slider on 1-1 and drove it parabolically several rows up the lower left field seats. Even the Globe Life Field audience couldn’t contain their pleasure in seeing the Leaning Tower of 161st Street make American League history.

Almost a full week after he met Roger Maris, with the Yankees having banked the AL East title in the same week, the tall swinger from California passed the comparatively compact swatter from the Dakotas. And unlike Maris’s abusively unfair experience in 1961, Judge got there with almost universal approval from the moment it looked as though he had a serious shot at getting there.

There was nothing unfair about Judge’s achievement, unless you count that this is a young man to whom you can throw a ball of Play-Doh and he can still hit it across the county line. Tinoco had never faced Judge before and had only surrendered one home run in 19.2 innings work on the season before Judge rang his and history’s bells.

“We knew it was going to happen and nobody wants to give it up,” said Tinoco—a reliever but pitching as the Rangers’ second-game opener Tuesday night, “but it’s part of the game. I challenged him and he hit it. That’s my job. All I can say is ‘congratulations’ to him.”

“I know he has a nasty sinker and a nasty slider,” said Judge postgame. “We were kind of waiting to hear who the starter of Game Two was gonna be. When I heard it was him, I saw what he did the night before and I said, ‘This isn’t a good matchup to start the game off with a guy with high velocity like that and a good off-speed pitch.’ So going into it, I think that helped me relax: ‘Hey, this is a good pitcher. Let me go up there and let’s see what happens’.”

Maybe he pressed a little too much between home runs 61 and 62. Maybe the opposition pressed a little hard trying to pitch around him until Tinoco’s slider didn’t slide enough. Maybe, too, Judge clung just hard enough to his insistence that, sure, it’d be great to do it, but he had more important things such as postseason prep to think about.

But maybe even this still-boyish looking galoot, who softens the most when interacting with the children who like and admire him while maintaining his privacy otherwise without an ostentatious harrumph, wanted the record so badly he could taste it even up with whatever he’d had for a meal before and after his long day’s work of play Tuesday.

The Yankees won the first of the twin bill without Judge going long. They ended up losing 3-2 in the nightcap Judge opened so historically, before he was given the rest of the night off by manager Aaron Boone, following a second-inning strikeout, and a double switch of second baseman Oswaldo Cabrera to Judge’s position in right field, shortstop Oswald Peraza to second, and Isiah Kiner-Falefa out to play short.

A few hours after the second game ended, and he’d run the gamut of reporters and well-wishers, Judge reportedly found some quiet in the clubhouse until a small voice reached his ears. Asking who was there, Judge then found himself spending a little time with Yankee catcher Jose Trevino’s little son, Josiah.

The gentle giant who helped make a Toronto kid’s week, after seeing the kid in tears of joy when an adult Blue Jays fan handed him a ball Judge sent into the Rogers Centre upper deck in May, spends as much time entertaining his teammates’ kids as he does entertaining fans in the stands with blasts past the ionosphere.

It may not yet have hit him completely that he’d claimed one of the most sacred pages in the AL record book for his own. And it may take the length of the postseason, however long the Yankees prove to stay there, before it does.

“In my book,” the Leaning Tower of 161st Street said after the second doubleheader game, “it’s just another day. I wish we would have gotten the win, that would have made it a little sweeter I think. But I’m going to try to soak it in, soak in the moment with my family, and get ready for the game tomorrow. I think it won’t sink in until the offseason.”

That’s his story and he’s sticking to it. Even through his very visible effort to suppress his patented big snaggle-tooth grin as he rounded first heading for second. Even with his teammates swarming from the dugout starting about two seconds after he dropped his bat to run the bomb out. Even with his wife, Samantha Bracksieck, and his parents, Wayne and Patty Judge, leading the loud ovation.

“We just wanted it to happen so bad,” said Yankee pitcher Gerrit Cole postgame. “I don’t know if that’s pressing, or just hoping hard. We were all just hoping really hard, I think.”

Maris’s 1961 teammates pressed just as hard for him to make it once Mickey Mantle fell out of that unwarrantedly-controversial chase with a hip abscess. But they were almost alone there. Thanks to a capricious conflicted-of-interest commissioner, and a particularly nasty contingency in the baseball press of the time, Maris was denied his due for driving a baseball idol (some think sacred cow) to one side.

Judge has tried to sustain his sense of proportion throughout the entire run. Maybe come the postseason he and his wife will kick their shoes off and romp and play in wild celebration. First, he has his sixth postseason in as many seasons of being a Yankee to play.

Maris, a refugee from the then-Indians and the Kansas City Athletics, and the AL’s defending Most Valuable Player while he was at it, was en route his second consecutive World Series in a Yankee uniform. They lost a seven-game heartbreaker to the Pirates in 1960 but won a five-game laugher against the upstart Reds in 1961.

For daring to challenge and pass the Sacred Babe, Maris was battered unconscionably in ways that would be called child abuse if done by a parent to a child.

“At the plate, he heard obscene abuse from the creeps who think that a ticket to the game entitles them to horsewhip the entertainers,” wrote sportswriting legend Red Smith, then still with the New York Herald-Tribune.

Off the field he was badgered ceaselessly by fans, the press, radio-TV, press agents, promoters. Only on rare occasions did this quiet, candid young man let his temper slip, and then it was due to some especially outrageous question or repeated references to “pressure,” with the implication that he was choking up.

Some social media idiots thought and said the same about Judge as he laboured almost that full week to get from 61 to 62. For those who care about incompetent irrelevancy, let it be recorded that it took Judge two fewer plate appearances to hit 62 than it took Maris to hit 61.

Milton Gross of the New York Post, perhaps the only other writer in New York unwilling to even think about trying to beat Maris into submission or worse, had dinner with Maris and his wife plus their closest New York friends, Julie and Selma Isaacson, the evening that followed Maris’s money blast. When Isaacson toasted Maris, Gross wrote, Maris thanked him but added: “This was the greatest experience of my life. It has to be, but I wouldn’t want to go through it again for anything.”

Soon afterward, a teenage girl approached Maris politely for an autograph and asked him likewise to include the date. “What is today’s date?” Maris asked. Isaacson chimed in at once: “The date is the one you did what nobody else ever did.”

On 4 October 2022—65 years to the day after Sputnik launched the space race—the Leaning Tower of 161st Street did what nobody else in the American League ever did. You could hear Ruth and Maris together in the Elysian Fields, clinking glasses and quaffing a cold one in praise.

“I’d trade my past for his future,” the Babe must have said, knowing that Judge blasted himself toward a payday that might come close to equaling the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual budget.

“I’d trade your past for his future, too,” Maris must have cracked. “His future, and two stock splits to be named later.”

Just . . . no*

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Aaron Judge

Aaron Judge has an embrace with his mother, Patty, after the game during which he hit his 61st home run of the season. (Mom now has the ball her son launched.) And there’s nothing wrong with calling him tied as just the American League’s single-season home run record holder now, either.

I had better things to ponder approaching this weekend. Things such as the showdown between the National League East-leading Mets and the second-place, defending World Series champion Braves entering the weekend a game behind the Mets.

Things such as the Triple-A championship game being played in Las Vegas Ballpark Sunday starting at 4 P.M. Pacific time, which I plan to watch in person from a choice field-level seat several rows up behind home plate.

But no. I had to bump into yet another analysis of Aaron Judge meeting Roger Maris as the American League’s single-season home run champion. That wouldn’t be a terrible collision by itself, if not for the fact of the Associated Press writer offering it, David Brandt, joined Roger Maris, Jr. wading into waters that never really existed in the first place.

Maris, Jr., intends to be there when Judge passes his father before the regular season expires. He inserted the ginger into the tails in the first place, when he opined that Judge should be branded, hallowed, and hosannaed as the actual, no-questions-asked, all-time, across-the-board single-season home run champion when he hits 62 or more.

A few sentences after citing that, Brandt saw and raised, sort of, after nodding toward the debate over whether National League bombardiers Mark McGwire (who broke Maris’s Show record in that memorable 1998 chase), Sammy Sosa (who settled for three 60+ home run seasons including ’98 yet didn’t win home run championships in those years), and Barry Bonds (whose 73 in ’01 yanked McGwire to one side) remain tainted because of their actual/alleged ties to actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances.

“For its part, MLB doesn’t appear eager to embrace the use of asterisks,” Brandt writes. “Neither does the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.” Uh-oh.

MLB has been down that road before. Maris’ record had an asterisk attached to it for 30 years because he played a 162-game schedule instead of 154 like Babe Ruth did when he hit 60. It remained until Sept. 4, 1991, when a committee on statistical accuracy chaired by former commissioner Fay Vincent voted unanimously to recognize Maris as the record-holder.

Maris’s record had nothing of the sort. Once and for all. It had controversy. It had a country arguing passionately over whether the plainspoken, media-shy Dakotan “deserved” to even think about chasing ruthsrecord (once again, that’s the way they said it then) when his matinee-idol Hall of Fame teammate Mickey Mantle was the “rightful” aspirant if anybody was.

But it had an asterisk only in the public imagination, stoked by a baseball commissioner laden with a fat conflict of interest, and a sportswriter about whom “instigator” is one of the more polite epithets attached to his name and memory.

Ford Frick, remember, was once a Ruth ghostwriter. He also loved to engage dinner crowds with stories about how he’d been at Ruth’s bedside the day before Ruth finally lost his battle with throat cancer. Frick would sooner have been caught selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Empire than abiding anyone, no matter whom, pushing the Sacred Babe to one side in the records.

New York Daily News writer Dick Young was only too willing to abet Frick when he called a press conference midway through that 1961 season to expose himself as feeling just that. Together the compromised commissioner and the irascible columnist made poisoned applesauce of a singular achievement.

With the American League’s first expansion and a schedule change from 154 to 162 games, Frick cringed at the thought that somebody, Yankee or otherwise, would knock Ruth’s hallowed 60-bomb season in 1927 out of the record books at once. As recounted by Allen Barra in his 2002 book Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Century, Frick proclaimed:

Any player who has hit more than 60 home runs during his club’s first 154 games would be recognized as having established a new record. However, if the player does not hit more than 60 until after this club has played 154 games, there would have to be some distinctive mark on the record books to show that Babe Ruth’s record was set under a 154-game schedule.

At which point Young piped up and all but hollered, “Maybe you should use an asterisk on the new record. Everybody does that when there’s a difference of opinion.”

Revisiting the controversy in the Village Voice in 2011, after another Daily News writer (Phil Pepe) published a book reviewing the 1961 home run chase, Barra told it as it actually was: Frick did nothing more than put on a show on behalf of his old benefactor. “Frick had no power whatsoever to make a ruling on the subject,” Barra began.

To put it simply, he was grandstanding. What escaped most baseball writers present at Frick’s press conference, and what continues to escape the sports media today, is that major league baseball had no “official” record book and didn’t have one until Total Baseball got the job in the late 1990s. So, in essence, Frick was trying to pressure publishers over whom he had no authority to print his version of the Maris/Ruth home run chase.

Over a decade later, Frick published his memoir, Games, Asterisks, and People. (The front jacket featured a photograph of Frick side by side with Ruth.) The title to one side, Frick himself declared the asterisk on Maris’s record didn’t really exist, Dick Young notwithstanding: “No asterisk has appeared in the official record in connection for that accomplishment . . . ,” Frick wrote in that book. “[Maris’s] record was set in a 162-game season. The Ruth record of 60 home runs was set in 1927 in a 154-game season.” 

Around the time Total Baseball finally got the official record book designation, another commissioner, Fay Vincent, appointed a Committee on Statistical Accuracy. They voted to purge any asterisk from Maris’s record, never mind that no asterisk existed lawfully in the first place. Not for the first time and hardly for the last, baseball’s government sold the nation a bill of goods about as valid as a 27-cent piece.

“Thus,” Barra observed, “a commissioner of baseball voiced his support for removing an asterisk that a previous commissioner denied every having put there in the first place. Probably nothing did more to enhance the myth of the existence of the asterisk as Vincent’s ‘removal’ of it.”

Along came Maris’s son, after his father was met by Judge Wednesday night, to plead for something about as close to a bona-fide asterisk as possible:

[Judge]’s clean, he’s a Yankee, he plays the game the right way and I think it gives people a chance to look at somebody who should be revered for hitting 62 home runs and not just a guy who did it in the American League. He should be revered for being the actual single-season home-run champ. That’s really who he is if he hits 62. I think that’s what needs to happen. I think (the MLB) needs to look at the records and I think baseball should do something.

Well, Judge is “clean”; major league players face mandatory drug testing and Judge hasn’t flunked once. But does it really matter that Judge is a Yankee? Since when was the single-season home run record ruled to be exclusive Yankee property? Would Judge be any less legitimate tying Maris if he’d been a Met? A Brave? A Cardinal? A Guardian? A Dodger? An Astro?

Then a Cardinal, McGwire embraced the Maris family publicly when it looked as though he had a shot at meeting and passing Maris in 1998. (Maris, Sr. finished his major league career with two seasons as a Cardinal.) They returned the embrace just as publicly. It was one of the signature embraces in the year once thought to have been the year that saved baseball, after the lingering clouds of the 1994 owners-provoked players’ strike.

If you saw Billy Crystal’s film 61*, you couldn’t forget the voice of Bob Sheppard, the longtime Yankee Stadium announcer, over a fading image of Barry Pepper as Maris hitting the money shot at film’s end, by referencing the Vincent committee and finishing with, “Roger Maris died six years earlier . . . never knowing . . . that the record . . . belonged . . . to him.”

Crystal and his staffers must not have read Edward Kiersh’s Where Have You Gone, Vince DiMaggio, a 1983 catch-up with a host of former players—including Maris. “I know I have the record,” Maris told Kiersh, “and that’s what counts.” Unconscionably, he just wasn’t allowed to enjoy having achieved it in the first place. From the best of intentions Crystal perpetuated Frick’s and Young’s asterisk fraud.

But only one man could have pushed Ruth to one side in the single-season record book. (It took that man five fewer plate appearances and 34 more pitchers faced on the year to do it.) Only one man going from there could push Maris to one side. Tainted or no, McGwire was the one. Only one man going from there could push McGwire to one side. Tainted or no, Bonds was the one.

You might wish to remind yourself, too—aside from baseball taking no formal action against actual/alleged PEDs until after the Mitchell Report and that parade before what George F. Will called the House Committee for the Dissemination of Great Messages to Kids—that, if the only thing you needed to hit baseballs over fences was a chemical cocktail, any behemoth in the NFL, the WWF, the alphabet boxing councils, or on the bodybuilding circuit could have broken Maris’s record.

When McGwire eventually faced that House committee (don’t kid yourself that they cared more for the health of the game than for making suspect players do a perp walk to public humiliation), he was blocked by his legal team from owning up. (“I’m not here to discuss the past,” he said to the panel infamously.)

When he returned to baseball as a Cardinals batting coach in 2010, McGwire owned up in full.  He said publicly he dipped into the PED waters in a bid to continue playing through frequent injuries, not to enhance what he could do already. However late, his confession was true enough. He could hit a ball of weeds 450 feet whether as a 1987 Rookie of the Year or an injury-wrecked hulk (he doesn’t dismiss that PEDs also instigated a few final injuries) in what proved his 2001 farewell season.

McGwire even apologised to Maris’s widow, Patricia, after his public admission. “My mom was very touched by his call,” said another Maris son, Richard. “She felt sorry for Mark—that he’s going through this. She conveyed that we all make mistakes and move on from there.” Richard’s brother says, retroactively, “Not so fast, Mom.”

Maris, Jr. wants baseball to do something about that post haste. Preferably the split second it appears Judge’s 62nd home run will reach the seats, if not the Sea of Tranquility. You understand his position, too, but good luck with that.

Despise the Sosas and Bondses all you wish. (McGwire accepts that he’ll never reach the Hall of Fame, but his public admission whenever it came bought a lot of good will, regardless of who denies it.) But you can’t just erase the statistics arbitrarily. Any more than Elmer Fudd Frick and Dick Young could impose an asterisk the commissioner himself had no real power to impose.

Pace Brandt, calling Judge the American League’s single-season home run co-champion with Roger Maris isn’t just a euphemism for calling them the “real” single-season home run champions. Judge won’t get beyond the AL record unless he can find a way to send thirteen more baseballs out of the ballparks’ ZIP codes over his next and final eight regular-season games. Settling for being the AL’s single-season bomb king is far from the worst fate he can face.

Well-understood Judge meets misunderstood Maris

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Aaron Judge

Aaron Judge hitting his 61st home run of the season, tying Roger Maris’s league record and keeping it in the Yankee family.

Reaching a milestone is both tough enough and impressive enough in its own right. When your reaching it busts a tie and puts your team ahead to stay, as it turns out, the satisfaction multiplies exponentially.

Roger Maris blasted his 61st home run of 1961 on the season’s final day, cracking a scoreless tie and proving to be the game’s only run. Aaron Judge met his tortured Yankee forebear Wednesday night, cracking a three-all tie and pushing his American League East champion Yankees past the Blue Jays to stay.

Maris drove a one-out Tracy Stallard fastball into the right field seats and Babe Ruth to one side before a Yankee Stadium audience a little over a third of the old ballpark’s capacity. Judge checked in with Aaron Hicks aboard on a leadoff single, caught hold of Blue Jays reliever Tim Mayza’s hanging full count sinker, and drove it off the edge of the stands and into the Rogers Centre left field bullpen.

Thanks in large part to a capricious, conflict-of-interest commissioner’s foolish edicts, a hostile press, and his own unadorned personality, Maris endured a season in hell at home and on the road from fans hell bent on seeing anyone but the plain Dakotan take the Sacred Babe’s place in the hallowed single-season homer record book.

Judge has known the opposite all season long. At home, he’s been a Yankee matinee idol since he set the since-broken record for home runs in a season by a rookie. On the road, he’s a respected and even well-liked opponent. Even fans jaded by the bazillionaires playing the game don’t quake when pondering not whether but how much of a payday Judge will receive during his first free agency in the off-season to come.

In Toronto, Judge may be more than all that. He may be the one Yankee above all that even Blue Jays fans actually root for. For thanks he has only to remember an early May game and its day-after aftermath.

That was the day Blue Jays fan Mike Lanzillotta got hold of a home run Judge drove into the Rogers Centre upper deck . . . and handed the ball to nine-year-old Derek Rodriguez, wearing a T-shirt done into a Yankee jersey with Judge’s name and number 99 on the back, whom Lanzillotta knew prayed to get a ball hit by Judge.

The moment was caught on video and went viral at once, and it got to Judge’s attention after the game. The Leaning Tower of 161st Street saw it and arranged to meet the boy, his family, and the beneficient fan before the next day’s game.

When Judge hit the line running after hitting Number 61, it ended a streak of 34 plate appearances without hitting one out since he matched Ruth’s 60 of 1927. Rogers Centre bathed him in a loud ovation. Rising from their seats behind the Yankee dugout, Judge’s mother shared an embrace with Roger Maris, Jr. The Yankees swarmed him in hugs. The Blue Jays’ bullpen coach, Matt Buschmann, retrieved the landmark ball and made sure the Yankees got hold of it.

Judge even got a present from home plate umpire Brian O’Nora after the game. O’Nora congratulated Judge outside the Yankee dugout and handed him the game’s official lineup card.

“It’s an incredible honor, getting a chance to be associated with one of the Yankee greats, one of baseball’s greats, words can’t describe it,” Judge said postgame. So, perhaps naturally, he tried to make words do just that.

“That’s one thing so special about the Yankees organization,” he continued, “is all the guys that came before us and kind of paved the way and played the game the right way, did things the right way, did a lot of great things in this game and getting a chance to be mentioned with those guys now is, I can’t even describe it, it’s an incredible honor, that’s for sure.”

Roger Maris

Roger Maris, hitting the home run it often seemed nobody wanted him to hit, 1 October 1961.

He also made bloody well certain to give props directly to Maris, who died of lymphoma at 51 in 1985. “Getting a chance to tie Roger Maris, you dream about that kind of stuff,” he said. “It’s unreal.” So is the point that Judge still has eight games left to break the tie with Maris, never mind put a little more distance between them.

Maris, Jr. intends to be there when Judge passes his father. “I don’t think it’s going to take very long,” he told reporters. “I think he’s loose. I think the party last night, the celebration, loosened him up . . . You can tell that he’s back, and he’s ready to go now.” If only things were that simple for his father.

This is now: Nobody has thundered against Judge even thinking about equaling, never mind passing, either Ruth or Maris, Sr. That was then: The elder Maris was never allowed to enjoy even the simple fact of his feat, never mind its magnitude. “Do you know what I have to show for 61 home runs? Nothing,” he said at the All-Star Game in 1980. “Exactly nothing.”

“Heaven protect us from achieving a greatness that the world decides we do not deserve,” wrote Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post upon Maris’s too-early death. “Mortal men can be crushed by immortal deeds. Wasn’t that the moral of Roger Maris’s career?”

A compact, wiry six feet tall, Maris was unprepared and unwilling to make himself a star as the true media age began. Judge, a 6’7” galoot with a still-boyish, snaggle-tooth grin, who looks at times as if he could get from first to second in two strides on a home run circuit, accommodates the public and the media without letting either control or demean him.

What Judge has in common with Maris, aside from a place in the record book he still might claim as his own, is an easy manner with children. Father of four Maris came to quit reading his fan mail unless he was sure it came from kids. As Derek Rodriguez got to prove, Judge savours encounters with kids when they come.

“Maris,” Boswell continued, “was in all ways pronounced deficient. With his flattop haircut, he looked more Hessian than handsome. At twenty-six, the introverted, proud young man from Fargo, North Dakota, did not have a fraction of the charm, sophistication, or patience to deal with becoming one of the most famous and controversial figures in America.

“It might help our sleep to believe Maris was a reclusive oddball figure, uniquely ill-suited to fame. For years he was portrayed as an antisocial grouch. With time, a contrary profile emerged. Now, as eulogies roll in, he’s painted as a family man, a loyal friend, a modest down-to-earth guy proud of his unselfishness as an all-around ballplayer.”

That family man, loyal friend, and modest down-to-earth guy must have savoured and applauded Wednesday night’s doing from his repose in the Elysian Fields. Even if he also expressed just a flickering wish that he could have known even a fragment of the respect, if not adulation, that Judge receives. You can’t blame Maris for either.

The kids are alright, the postseason isn’t

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Steven Kwan

Steven Kwan’s grand salami slammed an exclamation point on the young Guardians’ AL Central division clinch last weekend. But the postseason to come has exposed, yet again, a flaw too many in baseball government’s current (lack of) thinking about the current (lack of) true pennant race and championship meaning . . .

Considering what most seemed to think going into this season, you could be forgiven if you thought the Guardians might dig deep enough into music history to declare their team song the Who’s rock and roll chestnut, “The Kids Are Alright.” They might also reach further for Nat King Cole crooning “They tried to tell us we’re too young . . . ”

They may keep trying to tell them, now that the young Guards are the American League Central champions. Maybe the division wasn’t exactly the strongest in the league. The Guards still had to prove that their actual foray into the past—going as old-school on the field and at the plate as they could get away with—would still work.

It may (underline that, ladies and gentlemen) be the only thing old school about the postseason to come.

Less than three decades ago baseball’s postseason was the nation’s most meaningful because it remained the most exclusive in professional team sports. Even with divisional play then, you finished your season with your cans parked in first place or you waited until next year. Well, let’s look at three decades ago precisely.

There were a mere four divisions. East and West, each league. Their champions were the Blue Jays, the Athletics, the Pirates, and the Braves. The Blue Jays and the Braves went to the World Series; the Braves, of course, got there on Sid Bream’s impossibly dead legged dash home. The Blue Jays won the Series in six; Pat Borders (1.250 OPS in all six games) was the Series MVP.

Come 1995, the World Series restored after its cancellation due to the owner-provoked players’ strike, baseball accepted three divisions and a wild card team in each league. This didn’t dilute the season’s competition so much as people feared, even if there was something disconcerting in watching a couple of teams fighting to the last breath to finish in second place.

That was also the year the classic Braves teams of 1991 through the mid-Aughts won their only World Series, against a club of the Guardians’ Indians ancestors. (Hall of Famer Tom Glavine through eight plus Mark Wohlers in the ninth shut the Indians out, 1-0.) Both the Braves and the Indians finished the season as division leaders. All remained reasonable.

Next month, baseball will see what the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL have known for a few decades—forty percent of its teams going to the postseason. This month, we’ve seen the result of the Manfred Administration’s propaganda that a more deeply expanded postseason entry field would surely guarantee more exciting pennant races.

It’s been exposed as a factual and shameless lie. A lie even more egregious than the lie that the pitch clock will shorten the times of games while the continuing proliferation of broadcast commercials between each half inning and during pitching changes actually does elongate them.

Deadspin‘s Sam Fels has observed just how much more “exciting” it’s been, if you define “exciting” as putting fannies in the seats. He couldn’t help noticing that, last week:

* The Phillies, hanging by a thread in the National League race, hosted the Jays, hanging in for a home-field wild card advantage. Citizens Bank Park holds 42,792 people. Both those Phillies-Jays games, postseason-critical games, barely drew half for each.

* The Milwaukee ballpark formerly known as Miller Field can hold 41,900, but held barely half when the wild card-contending Brewers hosted the National League East-leading Mets for three games. The Brewers drew slightly more than half the park’s capacity and still about a grand less than their 2022 average thus far.

“Those aren’t bad crowds,” Fels writes, “but at the end of September against a well-known and good team . . . wasn’t the point of all this that September attendances would be juiced?”

 . . . That doesn’t mean there aren’t teams drawing well. They’re the names you’d expect–the Dodgers, Yankees, Padres, Braves, Cardinals, Astros. And the overall economy has many factors that don’t Uleave a whole throng of people with the disposable income to attend a ton of games. Except, again, we were told that more teams vying for more playoff spots were supposed to punch through these kinds of factors. It’s what they’ve been telling us for nearly 30 years.

It may just be that fans actually recognize when the regular season is devalued, and the dangling carrot of just two or three wildcard games doesn’t really get the loins tingling. Or that teams that have playoff spots locked up for months can’t really generate excitement until those playoffs actually arrive, unless you’re the Dodgers. Playoff expansion was supposed to bring anticipation and excitement to places it doesn’t normally live. Look at the numbers and tell us.

I looked at the same numbers as Fels. Then I caught hold of the Mets hosting the Marlins in Citi Field Tuesday night, a game that’ll be remembered if at all for a) the Mets losing 6-4, to fall into a tie with the Braves atop the NL East; but, b) Marlins pitcher Richard Bleier  becoming the first pitcher since the birth of the American League to balk three times against . . . the same batter, enabling the Mets’ Jeff McNeil to score without stealing a base or a ball in play after he reached himself on an infield hit.

Citi Field can hold 41,922 in the seats. Tuesday’s game drew 69 percent of that. The game was meaningless (other than the spoiler role) to the eliminated Marlins but critical to the Mets, especially since the NL East is the only remaining division race yet to be resolved, and the formidable, defending World Series champion Braves refuse to go gently into that not-so-good gray night. (Hurricane Ian may have more than a little something to say about the two combatants’ coming weekend set in Atlanta.)

Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani

Trout and Ohtani, plus the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, are almost all that’s left to root for thanks to baseball’s postseason race competition dilution.

All of that tells us playoff expansion does no favours to the game or its fans, but it does plenty of favours for that which is nearest and dearest to Commissioner Nero’s and his employers’ hearts. Well. They may remain the gang that believes the common good of the game equals making money for it, but they can’t (or won’t) answer what good 40-60 percent full houses do for those cherished coffers.

The expanded pelf for the playoffs goes to all teams regardless of whether they become postseason teams. “This only softens that lack of additional fans attending games that they’ve come to realize doesn’t really mean anything,” Fels writes. “MLB can shrug off the lack of heightened ratings or attendance with the bigger checks from TBS, FOX, and ESPN.”

Almost the only things left for which to root are Yankee outfielder Aaron Judge, Angels outfielder Mike Trout, and Angels unicorn (pitcher/designated hitter) Shohei Ohtani. Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols reached his lifetime 700 home run milestone in his homecoming finale with the NL Central-champion Cardinals, but Judge, Trout, and Ohtani still have long distance achievements to achieve.

The Yankees are the official AL East champions, and on Wednesday Judge met Roger Maris at last as the AL’s single-season home run champion. Pressing perhaps understandably since he matched Babe Ruth’s 1927 output, Judge has eight games left to pass Maris. Few are willing to bet against him still.

The Angels go nowhere (again) through no fault of Trout’s or Ohtani’s own. But with eight games left to play on the season future Hall of Famer Trout still has a shot at a 40th home run or more despite missing 31 percent of the season on the injured list. (He had 37 after Tuesday.) It’s to wonder what he might have hit if he hadn’t missed that time. Would 60+ have been out of the question? We’ll never know now.

Ohtani has a shot at a 40th home run, too. (He has 34 at this writing.) He can also become the only man in Show history to have a 40 home run season at the plate and finish on the mound with an ERA and a fielding-independent pitching rate below 3.00. At this writing, Ohtani sits with 34 home runs, a 2.47 ERA, and a 2.52 FIP. Not to mention 203 pitching strikeouts and counting. Say good night, Babe.

But how long can Commissioner Nero and company shrug off the further dilution of real pennant race competition? The kind that would compel owners in all baseball cities and not just the big boys to make substantial investments in their teams, from the ground up, year in and year out? Whoops. Better not go there. We may be striking toward 21st century schizoid heresy.