Only nine players have hit 50 home runs in a Major League Baseball season more than once. New York Yankees superstar Aaron Judge will make 10, writes MIKE VACCARO.
Even as we have recalibrated just about every statistic that’s ever been important to us as baseball fans, there are a few things that still genuinely matter. You can say that batting average and runs batted in have been marginalised; tell that to a major-league hitter that finishes a season hitting .299, or stuck on 99 RBIs.
You can say that pitcher wins don’t matter. But there has yet to be a pitcher — starter or reliever, All-Star or ham-and-egg — who has ever voluntarily given a win away. Mike Mussina always shrugged off the fact he never won 20 games in a year but when he finally got there in 2008 — last game he ever pitched — he admitted: “Yeah. I’m proud of myself.”
For 102 years, 50 home runs in a season has been a platinum-plated yardstick in the game. Yes, the 60-homer mark has been reached (even cleanly, twice) and so has 70 (also twice, muddied up but good by PEDs). But 50 has a magic attached to it. In the modern history of the game, which stretches to 1901, it has been reached only 46 times.
“When I hit my 50th home run in 1956,” Mickey Mantle once wrote, “I figured I’d never touch the ground again. It was like a magic had taken over my body. I figured I’d never do anything like that ever again.”
Of course, five years later Mantle did it again, landing on 54 after a summer spent chasing Babe Ruth side-by-side with Roger Maris. When he did that, he joined an exclusive club that at the time numbered three: only Ruth (4), Jimmie Foxx (2) and Ralph Kiner (2) had ever swatted 50 in multiple seasons.
This is one of the many remarkable things that Aaron Judge is poised to accomplish in this splendid season of his. Judge is sitting on 49 Monday as the Yankees begin a three-game series with the Angels in Anaheim. Barring something going terribly sideways, Judge will hit No. 50 in Southern California this week, or in St. Petersburg over the weekend, or back in The Bronx sometime beyond.
Much of the conversation surrounding Judge’s magnificent walk year, as he’s spent the season straddling some historic home run paces, is whether the true single-season record is Roger Maris’ 61 (which no longer wears an asterisk) or Barry Bonds’ 73 (also asterisk-free except in the hearts and minds of most baseball fans, in which case the * is as bold-faced as your supply of ink allows).
But that’s chatter for another day. Before he gets to 62, or to 74, Judge will get to 50. And that alone deserves a moment of awe. More than 22,800 men have played major league baseball. When Judge gets to 50, he will be one of 10 who have ever reached 50 twice.
Think about that.
The 50-homer club has had some unexpected one-timers. A couple of unlikely Orioles, Brady Anderson and Chris Davis, have done it. Jose Bautista has done it. The Fielders, father and son, Cecil and Prince, did it once apiece. It has also been closed off to the likes of Lou Gehrig (career-high: 49, twice), Harmon Killebrew (49, twice) and Hank Aaron (48).
But only nine players have done it more than once. We can divide them, as we do most offensive stats now, into “clean” — Ruth (4 times), Foxx (2), Ken Griffey Jr. (2) Kiner (2), Mantle (2) and Willie Mays (2) — and “dirty” — Mark McGwire (4), Sammy Sosa (4) and Alex Rodriguez (3). Six clean, three dirty, nine in all.
And Judge will make 10.
Ten in the entire history of baseball.
There is nothing fluky about hitting 50, even if there are some other quality outlier names among the one-timers (Greg Vaughn! Luis Gonzalez! George Foster!). But you’ll also notice something that the nine multiple-50 folks have in common.
All are either shoo-in Hall of Famers (Ruth, Foxx, Mantle, Mays, Griffey), or a Hall of Famer forced to wait longer than he should’ve because of an injury-shortened career (Kiner), or would-have -been-first-ballot-loss-ins-if-they’d-made-smarter-choices (McGwire, Sosa, A-Rod).
When Judge hit 52 as a rookie, that seemed a stunning number. When he reaches 50 this year — and wherever he ultimately lands — well, by now, nothing he does is terribly surprising. Including standing where he now stands – on the dueling doorsteps of both history and immortality. Maybe he’ll start breaking records in September, maybe he won’t. Plenty of time for that.
But he’s already on the precipice of doing something only nine other men have done in the history of professional baseball, which only dates to 1869. We shouldn’t take one bit of this for granted.
– The New York Post
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