Aaron Judge is Chasing 60. Nobody Else Can Hit.

Brilliance, in context: Even better

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It isn’t just that the Yankees’ Aaron Judge is once again on a 60-homer pace, although there’s something about that number, 60, that still stirs the baseball romance in us. That was a holy grail of a number for a long, long time. Babe Ruth hit 60, and for a lot of folks that was simply that.

Here in 2024, Ruth’s 60-homer total has already been surpassed eight times — but this is a statistic in desperate need of some context. Here are the top six single-season home run totals of all time:

Bonds, 73 (2001)

McGwire, 70 (1998)

Sosa, 66 (1998)

McGwire, 65 (1999)

Sosa, 64 (2001)

Sosa, 63 (1999)

Depressing, ain’t it? An entire history of home-run accomplishment obliterated by a couple of players during one of the most blatant drug-cheat eras in the entirety of the sport. (I did not say the only such era, just the most blatant.) It is a stain the sport won’t ever erase, because Major League Baseball saw it happening, was making big bank off of it and thus did virtually nothing to stop it. MLB is now stuck with the results and with the tortured, mewling justifications — “Hey, who’s to say who was cheating back then? Let it go!” — that often accompany them.

Meanwhile, you know…Babe Ruth.

Anyway, Ruth hit his 60 homers in a 154-game schedule in 1927, and it was not until 1961 that Roger Maris, using the new 162-game schedule, broke it. Maris hit 61 in ‘61 and probably wished he had some drugs — sedatives, at the very least. The daily strain and scrutiny he faced en route to taking down a sacred record, which made him unpopular to most of baseball fandom, was so intense that Roger’s hair began falling out in clumps. “That’s when we understood what kind of pressure he was under,” teammate Clete Boyer once said.

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And then there’s Aaron Judge, who just sort of casually blasted 62 homers two years ago. He’s huge, he’s always been huge, he bashes home runs at a consistent Godzilla pace, and there isn’t much controversy around him because he’s huge and he’s always been huge and he’s always bashed home runs at a consistent Godzilla pace. Only injuries have ever slowed him.

Judge cranked two more bombs Wednesday night and another in his second at-bat on Thursday against Cleveland, which put him at 48 homers in 128 games. After Wednesday’s performance, his teammate, Yankees pitcher Nestor Cortes, said, “I watched this in 2022, all year. It felt like every time he was up, it was either a homer or a walk. And that’s exactly what’s happening now.”

It sure is. After a slow start to the season, Judge has gone wild lately: Six homers in his last seven games, seven in his previous 10, 16 in his last 33.

Say, that’s quite a few trips to the boneyard. It’s cartoonish. And it does indeed place Judge on a 60-homer pace. Well, technically, the numbers play out to a total of 60.75 home runs over 162 games. We’re rounding down to allow for fatigue, or whatever.

Nobody is accusing Judge of anything untoward, either, unless you count an irate Little League coach from Staten Island who didn’t think Judge gave his kids enough love during the MLB Williamsport game last weekend. (Having read several accounts of what happened, I’m dismissing the coach’s case with prejudice, but your mileage may vary.)

But what really separates Judge from the world right now is — frankly, it’s the entire rest of baseball. Judge is doing what he is doing during a summer in which well-struck baseballs, or any kinds of baseballs being struck at all, are a rare sight.

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Across all major league players this season, the batting average is .244. The OPS, which is a very useful metric that combines a batter’s on-base percentage plus his slugging percentage — that is, how often he gets on, and whether he has extra-base power when he does hit — is .713.

Those figures, .244 and .713, are among the lowest in MLB in more than 30 years, and the .244 batting average, assuming it holds, will be among the lowest of all time. The offensive drought in baseball is so severe that the league’s overlords are trying all sorts of things to end it, including the ban on defensive shifts, wider bases meant to encourage more stealing, a pitch clock designed to force pitchers to work faster (and thus potentially tire more quickly) — even a three-batter minimum for relievers.

This is the landscape upon which Aaron Judge is absolutely carving up opposing pitchers. As I type this, Judge is batting .335, with an OPS of 1.193. Remember, the league averages are .244 and .713, respectively. That’s insane — and the Yankees game Thursday isn’t even over at this moment of word creation.

Shohei Ohtani, about which nothing more needs to be said, trails Judge by nine home runs — almost 20 percent. Judge also has 118 RBI; second-best in baseball is Jose Ramirez at 101, and after that the drop is even more precipitous.

Again — no scandal, and no hint of it. This is simply a moment in time in which an offensive player is lapping the field. I don’t know if Aaron Judge will get to 60 homers, but on some levels it doesn’t matter. He is an athletic outlier on the order of which we’ve seldom seen.

P.S.: One of the only years that compares with what Judge is doing? That would be 2022, when Judge finished with 62 homers and the next-closest guy hit 46. Godzilla, I’m telling you.