On Wednesday night, with the Yankees leading the Pirates 11-2, Aaron Judge walked. The assembled fans at Yankee Stadium didn’t like it one bit, and they booed and booed and booed. They wanted to see their hero hit another home run, and it’s not like the Pirates were going to win. Just pitch to Judge.
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They were right to boo. Not because the poor Pirates pitcher deserved to be the rabbit meat in a snare trap, but because it’s fun to watch Judge pull the still-beating heart out of a baseball and show it to the crowd. It’s the purest example of why to watch baseball in the first place. Baseball is a promissory note, and you sit through infield-fly rules and pickoff throws because you’re promised adrenaline and joy. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes the payoff is glorious and extended, and the anticipation of the Happy Baseball Moment is almost as good as the Happy Baseball Moment itself.
When the glorious and extended payoff is happening, a part of you knows that it won’t last forever. Any attempt to deny you this simple, everlasting joy is a personal affront to you. I know this because I was a Giants fan in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. I don’t hold personal animosity toward Larry Dierker, but I do know that he stole joy from me. He was a fine pitcher, broadcaster and manager, but I mostly know him as a memory thief. He stole some of my best baseball memories by refusing to pitch to Barry Bonds in September 2001.
So boo, Yankees fans, boo. What Judge is doing right now is mesmerizing, and you are owed every last drop. Just pitch to him, you weenies.
However, I’m picking up on something around the greater content-o-sphere. It’s en vogue to celebrate Judge’s amazing, transcendent, historical, glorious season by saying it’s more impressive than Barry Bonds in 2001.
Jon Heyman: “Are we watching the greatest individual season ever?”
Joel Sherman: “It is the most impressive season I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this professionally.”
Buster Olney: “This is the greatest single-season performance by any hitter in the history of baseball.”
The Associated Danged Press: “As Judge approaches milestone, what counts more: 61 or 73?”
I’m not interested in rebutting these ideas because that would require me to pretend that Judge isn’t doing something worth celebrating. He is. Different circ*mstances, different era, different context. And if you want to lay out the case for Judge doing things that baseball just doesn’t see very often, please do. He’s a delight, a marvel.
You can make the argument that as soon as Judge hits number 62, he’s the true home-run king. My old co-worker and good friend Marc Normandin made this argument for Ryan Howard, and while his tongue was firmly in his cheek, there was something to the idea. And if Judge gets past the amphetamine and pre-integration era leaders, all he has to contend with is the performance-enhancing-drug leader. PEDs absolutely helped Bonds stay healthy and fresh, which helped him hit more dingers, so compare and contrast as you see fit. It might be more impressive to hit 60+ homers in 2022 than it is to hit 70+ in 2001. Heck, yes, make those arguments! I love a good baseball argument.
You can make the argument that Judge has a tougher slog because he sees pitchers throwing 95 mph or harder every single day. Not only that, but every team has a cadre of analysts, whose job it is to figure out exactly how to pitch to Judge. It’s not like Bonds didn’t see velocity — he hit .306/.452/.551 against Randy Johnson in 62 career plate appearances, which gets funnier and funnier every time I look at it — but he also saw a lot of pitchers who wouldn’t make it out of Double A today. Judge also has to hit in an era where the fielders are better than ever, and they’re positioned better than ever.
(I’d counter here with the death of the left-handed specialist. Here’s a list of pitchers who faced exactly one batter in games from 2001 through 2004. Bonds faced lefties designed in a lab to face a team’s toughest left-handed hitter. But now we’re quibbling. Nobody likes a quibbler.)
These arguments don’t bother me, and they shouldn’t bother you. Judge rules. I absolutely love the way this tweet is presented:
MLB home run leaders, 2022 (so far):
60 Judge
59
58
57
56
55
54
53
52
51
50
49
48
47
46
45
44
43
42
41
40 Schwarber
39
38
37 Alonso, Álvarez, Riley
36 Trout
35 Betts, Goldschmidt, Walker
34 Ohtani
33
32 Tellez
31 Adames, Rizzo, Seager, Suárez
30 Vlad Jr.— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) September 22, 2022
When Bonds was setting the single-season record, Luis González wasn’t too far behind, threatening 60, and, oh, Sammy Sosa actually hit 64. Judge is doing his thing this season without anyone even close to him. It’s hilarious. It’s a home-run season unlike any other since Babe Ruth was lapping the field.
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But I stop when I hear or read things like, “most impressive” or “greatest performance in baseball history.”
No. Absolutely not. Barry Bonds from 2001 through 2004 was the most impressive baseball performance of all time, and it’s not especially close. If you want to pick a season, it doesn’t matter if it’s 2001 or 2004. It’s all of them. They’re all the best season ever.
At the risk of being an old curmudgeon and claiming that people today don’t understand what it was really like back in the day, I would like to point out that people don’t understand what it was really like back in the day.
Boos rain down as the Brewers intentionally walk Aaron Judge with two outs in the third.
That was his 17th of the season, two ahead of Cleveland's Jose Ramirez.
— Todd Rosiak (@Todd_Rosiak) September 17, 2022
Bonds had 18 intentional walks before the end of April in 2004. The Dodgers intentionally walked him four times in one game, with the last one coming in the 12th inning. Now that’s a situation to boo. Again, it was April.
He still hit .472 with a .696 OBP and 10 home runs that month. None of those numbers are typos.
Bonds has 688 intentional walks in his career. The Tampa Bay Rays have existed for 25 seasons, and only 662 of the 149,958 batters in their franchise history were issued an intentional walk. Bonds was given first base more often than an entire team has received that free pass in the quarter-century of their existence.
Over the span of those four seasons, Bonds amassed 2,443 plate appearances in 573 games. He hit 209 home runs and had a slash line of .349/.559/.809. His OPS+ was 256 in that four-season stretch, which means it was like he had the greatest season of all time … for four consecutive seasons. Even though he was getting walked several times every game.
Take the single-season home-run record. Please. Have it. But if we’re talking about the most impressive sporting experience of my lifetime or anyone else’s, it’s Bonds doing what he did, despite seeing one or two hittable pitches per game, and still doing things like hitting 73 home runs or leading the league with a .370 batting average. You can dock home run points for the PEDs, and you can reassign them to Judge for being clean, but that doesn’t change the remarkable exhibition of discipline, focus and patience that Bonds put on for four seasons. It’s not the raw total of homers, but the ability to square up one baseball per game, with regularity, over four seasons.
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The season before and after those four seasons weren’t bad, but they were merely Hall of Fame-type seasons. We’re talking about the best performance in baseball history. Nothing compares to Bonds’ ability to see a couple pitches to hitin an entire series and still come out ahead. When I ranked the greatest home runs in San Francisco Giants history, Bonds’ 70th home run was prominently featured, especially because of this context:
With the Astros scrapping against the Cardinals for the NL Central, their strategy against the Giants was to not let Bonds beat them, and they employed it to a ridiculous degree. Here are all of his plate appearances in that series to this point:
- HBP
- Walk
- Single
- Intentional walk
- Groundout
- Strikeout
- Walk
- Walk
- Intentional walk
- Single
- Walk
- Groundout
- Walk
- Intentional walk
After all that, the Astros brought in a left-hander who threw 100 — back when that was freakish — for his second career outing. This was their secret weapon. The first pitch was blown right past Bonds. The second pitch was thrown up and in. The third pitch went very, very far.
The whole at-bat is worth watching, but go back to that list of what the Astros were doing to Bonds in the games before this. Walk, walk, walk, walk. Then they tried to surprise Bonds with an M-80 of a left-handed arm, and he didn’t care. Not one whit.
The most impressive baseball performance of all time belongs to the hitter who was prevented from hitting at almost every opportunity, yet still found a way to hit better than anyone else ever. Give Judge the single-season record if he passes Roger Maris. Give him the career record if he hits another 500+ home runs before he retires.
Bonds can keep the most-impressive medal, though. What Judge is doing is monumental, literally monumental, considering how he’ll probably be honored at Yankee Stadium one day, but it’s not the same thing. I’d love an alternate-reality ray that could show me how many homers Bonds would have hit if opposing managers weren’t such fraidy-cats, and I’d love to see what would happen if Judge saw even fewer pitches inside the strike zone.
Without that ray, though, let’s agree to stop conflating the genius of Aaron Judge with a season from two decades ago. It’s not about who has more home runs.
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It’s about what impressed you the most. And I don’t care if Steph Curry throws for 400 yards against the Broncos, watching Bonds work counts and pounce on the perfect pitch will always be the greatest Bay Area sports experience there is.
(Photo of Bonds in 2001: John G. Mabanglo / AFP via Getty Images)
Grant Brisbee is a staff writer for The Athletic, covering the San Francisco Giants. Grant has written about the Giants since 2003 and covered Major League Baseball for SB Nation from 2011 to 2019. He is a two-time recipient of the SABR Analytics Research Award. Follow Grant on Twitter @GrantBrisbee
