Records are more important to baseball than to any other sport, for a variety of reasons that include the game’s stability and tradition and the fact that batting records in particular reflect batter vs. pitcher competition. The game has maintained something resembling consistent rules and enough offense/defense balance continuously since the 19th century to make fans feel as if it is a reasonable argument, as it would not be in football or basketball, to compare today’s records with those of the 1950s or 1920s. The importance and comparability of records is why we argue about the game’s most impressive records, why it is controversial but important to count the records of the Negro Leagues during the period that the game was segregated, and why Ichiro Suzuki isn’t American baseball’s hit king, but something comparable.
Hardly any record is more prestigious than the single-season home-run record. Yankees fans are understandably protective of the Yankees’ hold on the record, which was broken by Babe Ruth in 1919 (with the Red Sox, with 29 home runs in a 138 game schedule), 1920 (with 54 in a 154 game schedule), 1921 (with 59), and 1927 (with 60), and by Roger Maris in 1961 (with 61 in a 162 game schedule). Ruth, for his part, averaged 54 homers per 162 games for a 12-year period from 1920 through 1931, in which he also hit .357. Aaron Judge is now threatening to break the team records of Maris for a full season and maybe Ruth for a 154 games, and that is a thing worth celebrating.
Phil has a fair argument that all the over-61 homer seasons should be regarded with a very large grain of salt. Mark McGwire (70 in 1998, 65 in 1999, averaging 63 homers per 162 games for a 7 year stretch from 1995–2001), Sammy Sosa (66 in 1998, 63 in 1999, 64 in 2001, averaging 62 homers per 162 games for a 4 year stretch from 1998–2001), and Barry Bonds (73 in 2001, averaging 61 homers per 162 games for a four-year stretch from 2000–03) all used steroids.
For my part, while it’s totally fair to brand McGwire, Bonds, and Sosa as especially egregious cheaters, the reality is that baseball has always been a game in which people cheated and got away with it, so we shouldn’t really go down the rabbit hole of weighing which kinds of cheating matter more, and we wouldn’t if Bonds hadn’t gained such a huge advantage from steroids. It’s not as if Ruth, who almost certainly corked his bat, was a stickler for the rules. If Judge beats Maris and Ruth, he becomes the Yankees home run-king, and he can claim some bragging rights for doing it cleaner — and in a much lower-scoring environment — than the muscleheads of the late ’90s and early aughts. But the record is still the record.