Giancarlo Stanton has been launching home runs at an impressive clip, causing many to wonder just how many long balls the Miami Marlins right fielder will finish with this season.
It perhaps doesn’t matter, though, because there isn’t a consensus as to what should be considered the Major League Baseball single-season home run record.
Barry Bonds, of course, amassed the most home runs in a season with 73 back in 2001, but performance-enhancing drug suspicions cast a dark cloud over that total. The same can be said for the next five highest totals, all of which were posted by either Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa during the height of baseball’s Steroid Era.
As such, Roger Maris’ mark of 61 homers in 1961 — the seventh-highest total in MLB history — still is viewed by many, including Stanton, to be the real single-season record. However, in playing devil’s advocate in an article published Tuesday, ESPN.com’s Sam Miller made a case for Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs in 1927 being the mark that everyone should be gunning for, as the longtime New York Yankees slugger accomplished the feat when the regular season was 154 games (rather than its current 162, which was in effect during Maris’ memorable ’61 campaign).
Continuing on with the whole devil’s advocate thing, Miller then made a case against Ruth’s 60 homers being the gold standard. And from there, Miller ended up getting to a point where he made a case for Dave Kingman being the single-season home run record holder by virtue of his 37 homers in 1976.
The (admittedly wacky) case for Kingman? Here it is, via Miller:
The case for: Kingman hit a home run in 7.3 percent of his plate appearances in a season, in 1976, when the average hitter homered in just over 1.5 percent of his plate appearances. At 4.8 times the league’s rate, Kingman out-homered his league at a higher ratio than any post-integration player who batted enough to qualify for the batting title. Stanton is hitting home runs a little bit more frequently than Kingman did, but he is playing in an era in which every hitter — even Merrifield — is hitting home runs far more frequently because the ball is probably juiced! (Or the seams are flatter.)
So there you go: Kingman’s 37 home runs, against integrated competition, with (to the best of our knowledge) no chemical enhancement, in close to a full season, are your home run record. You’re very weird. But I’m glad you have something that makes you go “wow!”
Basically, the whole gist of the story was to highlight that MLB’s single-season home run record is in the eye of the beholder, thus making it difficult to truly assess Stanton’s bid for baseball immortality.
Thumbnail photo via Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports Images
