ARLINGTON, Texas -- A gorgeous moment in baseball history unfolded Tuesday night. Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees' fearsome slugger, walloped his 62nd home run against the Texas Rangers in the first inning of his season's penultimate game. The dugout emptied like a Little League team, everyone rushing to meet their friend at home plate, to celebrate him and his greatness, and by the time Judge arrived there, his face still frozen in a wondrous grin, the roar from 38,832 at Globe Life Field apexed.
What happened in the subsequent minutes and hours -- and what will continue in the coming days, weeks, months, years -- did not ruin that tableau. But the discourse over the meaning of the number, of what 62 actually represents, takes that little slice of baseball heaven and drags it through a forest of intellectual dishonesty and plants it in a graveyard of ahistorical flimflam.
There are opinions, and there are facts, and when adjudicating history, only the latter matter. So here are two incontrovertible facts.
Aaron Judge on Tuesday passed Roger Maris for the single-season home run record by an American League player, a mark that stood for 61 years.
Barry Bonds is the single-season home run record holder in Major League Baseball with 73.
Now, there are layers to these facts, and the trouble begins when the true believers refuse to admit that many things can be true at once. It is a fact that Bonds used performance-enhancing drugs. It is also a fact that 73 balls he hit flew over the fence in 2001. One colors the other. It does not -- it cannot -- erase it.
Because the moment moral superiority supersedes fact, history becomes illegitimate. Sometimes it's difficult to grapple with the ugliness of history, and yet what is baseball if not sodden with ugliness? Owners conspired to keep Black players out of the game until 1947. The records set before then remain records despite that sad fact. However much it might call into question the authenticity of accomplishments, history does not include a delete button.
Trying to diminish history opens up a Pandora's box with which advocates seldom want to grapple. Roger Maris Jr.'s presence at the games leading up to Judge's tying of his father's record meant enough to Judge that he recognized it in his postgame news conference Tuesday. Left unsaid was any mention of Maris bloviating that "baseball should consider making two separate home run records" -- one for PED users and one for "clean" players, as if he or anyone else knows the body chemistry of a ballplayer.
This is where the dishonesty and illogic enter the fray, where opinions overwhelm facts, where bliss is sought through ignorance. Cheating courses through the game's veins across generations. Apply Maris' reasoning to championships, and the last five Yankees championships are dirty. Four reported or penalized PED users in 2009, 10 players from 2000 named in the Mitchell Report, half a dozen in 1999, three in '98, a pair in '96 -- the Yankees' last "clean" championship would be in 1978, and even then the notion of a "clean" clubhouse, free of the amphetamines that pervaded the game for decades, is specious.
The inconvenient truth of sporting morality is that those who engage in it often refuse to tease out its further implications. The notion of judging games in such a stark fashion is fanciful, the territory of black-and-white thinkers in an industry that exists in gray. Fair play is an ideal worth preaching, yes, but not if its pursuit serves to advance personal agendas and, in the process, scrub from the record things that actually happened.
The acknowledgment that Bonds is the single-season and all-time home run leader is not rooted in cynicism toward institutions that clearly failed with regard to PEDs. On the contrary, it's an acceptance of those institutions' frailty and fallibility, an admission that sports cannot undo what's been done. To frame sports any other way is to willfully play ostrich -- something not even Judge himself is willing to do when asked about Bonds' 73.
"That's the record," Judge said after hitting 61. "I watched him do it. I stayed up late watching him do it. That's the record. No one can take that from him."
It also leads to actions diametrically opposed to their purpose. Efforts to look at Judge through a prism of Bonds' accomplishments shifts the narrative away from what Judge has done in 2022, which is turn in one of the most magnificent offensive seasons in the game's history. No sport reveres its history as much as baseball, so perhaps it's foolish to isolate Judge's achievements, but consider his bona fides: In a game where fastballs sit at 94 mph and regularly top 100, a game where pitching labs spit out specialty uberarms, a game where defensive positioning regularly robs players of hits, Judge is depositing balls into the bleachers once every 9.2 at-bats while threatening to win the American League Triple Crown.
That is the proper context of Judge's season: one in which the sins of the past neither heighten nor lessen the triumphs of the present. Aaron Judge can be amazing in 2022, and so was Barry Bonds in 2001 and Roger Maris in 1961 and Babe Ruth in 1927, and those all exist independent of one another. It doesn't matter that Ruth's performance enhancer was 85-mph fastballs. He still hit 60 home runs in a season, and that, by itself, is worthy of acclaim, even if the arms delivering the meatballs were only one skin color.
PED pearl-clutching represents the height of sporting pretense. To act as if the drugs themselves did the lion's share of the work ignores the 99.9% of PED users who didn't hit home runs like Bonds or Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa, the only three players still ahead of Judge on the single-season list. To insist that a changed body grants a player superpowers is to say out loud that you don't know the difference between correlation and causation. Even if there are causative elements -- and certainly there are, with the strength and stamina PEDs confer helpful to any athlete -- nobody can say to what degree. And anyone who tries without conceding that legal supplements attempt to do the same, or that drugs that affect brain chemistry also can enhance performance to an unknown and unknowable end, is a hypocrite.
We all have a choice. You can be Roger Maris Jr., who in trying to bifurcate history instead fractures it and by extension the foundation upon which sports is built, or you can accept that disappointing outcomes are outcomes nevertheless -- that history tells us unequivocally what we've been even as it guides us toward what we should aspire to be.
Which is a people that venerates those gorgeous moments when lucky enough to witness them, refusing to fall prey to attempts to invalidate those of the past.