Barry Bonds remains baseball's home-run king. But Aaron Judge's 62nd homer transcends his own era. | Opinion

Aaron Judge is the American League’s single-season home run king. How about a poisonous cocktail of comparison to celebrate?

On Tuesday night, Judge struck his 62nd home run of the season, shaking free from a deadlock with fellow New York Yankee Roger Maris, who famously hit 61 in 1961. Judge has also surpassed Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs in 1927, and among his contemporaries, teammate Giancarlo Stanton’s 59 home runs for the Miami Marlins in 2017.

There’s no one on his circuit, living and breathing or preserved merely on newsreels, for Judge to pursue. That leaves little more than a toxic discourse surrounding Judge and the last man ostensibly in his sights.

Barry Bonds.

Good luck finding a sports gabfest that doesn’t already have the “Judge vs. Bonds” chyron cued up, and a bad-faith “debate” well-rehearsed to pose a variation on a foolish question that’s bedeviled baseball for two decades, now.

“So, who’s baseball’s real single-season home run champ?”

None other than Roger Maris Jr. threw pomade on this fire when he suggested Judge already holds this title, an unnecessary sideshow after Judge's 61st home run tied his father.

Judge + 62 = hysteria, in that the six home run seasons superior to Judge’s were achieved in the National League by three men either admittedly or strongly tied to performance-enhancing drug use. Next in his sights is Sammy Sosa, who hit 66 homers in 1998, 64 in 2001 and 63 in ’99. Mark McGwire, Sosa’s running mate in their dual bids to destroy Maris’ mark, hit an unheard-of 70 in that summer of 1998.

And then there is Bonds, whose 73 home runs will remain safely atop the list after the Yankees play their 162nd game of the season on Wednesday.

ROGER MARIS JR.:  Judge should be 'the actual single-season home run champ'

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Bonds' only route to the Hall of Fame is through a committee vote more often intended for the older, largely forgotten and less accomplished player, an absurd fate for one of the top five players of all time. There’s no telling if his PED use was more impactful, or simply better-documented than hundreds of his contemporaries.

Bonds’ 73 home runs in 2001 undoubtedly had a little, um, wind behind their back. Determining how many and by how much is, as we’ve known for decades, a fruitless and frustrating exercise. It’s a large reason why Bonds’ all-time home run mark of 762 is often derided as less “real” than Hank Aaron’s 755, never mind that Aaron, too, played in an era loosey-goosey to enhancements and for nearly a decade called a home run launching pad in Atlanta his professional home.

Now, Judge has nudged Bonds’ single-season mark back under the microscope. Yet rather than parse Who Did It Better, it’s much cleaner and much fairer to accept this overriding fact:

Bonds and Judge both lapped the field within the parameters of the game.

It’s a standard maneuver for Bonds deniers to bemoan that he couldn’t just play the game cleanly, that he was a good enough player without BALCO products, a Hall of Famer with only naturally occurring chemicals in his body.

Funny, but those folks were nowhere to be found in 1998.

It was Bonds’ 13th major league season, and at age 33, he was still as dominant as that “skinny kid in Pittsburgh” so many seem to remember, batting .303, producing a 1.047 OPS, leading the majors a seventh consecutive season with 27 intentional walks, stealing 28 bases. And he hit 37 homers.

You wanna know what 37 home runs got you in 1998?

No. 18 among the major league leaders, behind not just McGwire and Sosa but also six other players eventually linked to PED use – Jose Canseco, Juan Gonzalez, Manny Ramirez, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez and Mo Vaughn.

Thirteen players hit between 40 and 70 homers; just one of them – Ken Griffey Jr., who hit 56 – was an eventual Hall of Famer. Greg Vaughn hit 50 homers.

Bonds nearly went 30-30 for a sixth time in his career, got on base at a .438 clip, produced a 178 adjusted OPS in a juiced offensive environment — and finished eighth in NL MVP voting for a club that won 89 games.

So, he did what any reasonable employee might do – learn what was valued and go achieve it.

And the world was not ready for Juiced Barry Bonds.

His 49 home runs in 2000 heralded a new, dominant era.  And 2001 laid waste to any pretenders to Bonds’ crown as the game’s greatest player: 73 home runs, a .515 OBP, a 1.379 OPS, a 259 adjusted OPS. A year later, he boosted that adjusted OPS to 273, hit .370 just for the heck of it, played in his first World Series.

Drug testing arrived the following spring.

Funny, McGwire and Sosa were credited with “saving baseball” thanks to their home run chase. Perhaps it was Bonds who saved baseball, blowing up an ecosystem everybody knew was polluted and paving the way for a generation of players to compete under more level playing fields.

Players like Judge.

The beauty of Judge’s home run chase is its singularity. He has a 16-homer edge on Kyle Schwarber’s 46, with Mike Trout's 39 currently second in the AL. He’s held a 100-point OPS edge for most of the season. There is no Gehrig chasing Ruth, no Mantle pressuring Maris.

It’s just Judge, and seasons like these are the topline reason MLB and, eventually, the players embraced rigorous PED testing: Separate the greats from the fakers, a distinction just as important as the fringe players on the other end of the spectrum who got there honestly and not by their chemical romance.

We remain wary of PED use in the game, still an unfortunate default setting so that moments such as Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 80-game suspension are merely surprising, not stunning. The game will never be “clean,” but at the same time, 17 years of increasingly strengthened PED testing affords us a chance to appreciate greatness without constantly fretting that the other shoe is about to drop.

So congratulations to Aaron Judge, the greatest home run hitter in Yankees and American League history. It is Bonds who remains the all-time king, but like Judge, he can be appreciated in a similar fashion: As the greatest player within the boundaries the game presented.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Aaron Judge passes Roger Maris, but Barry Bonds' 73 still stands