Roger Maris Jr. blasts MLB, says Aaron Judge’s potential 62nd home run should be single-season record

“I think it means a lot, not just for me, I think it means a lot for a lot of people,” he explained. “He’s clean, he’s a Yankee, he plays the game the right way. I think it gives people a chance to look at somebody who should be revered for hitting 62 home runs and not just as a guy who did it in the American League. He should be revered for being the actual single-season home run champ. That’s really who he is if he hits 62 and I think that’s what needs to happen. I think baseball needs to look at the records and I think baseball should do something.”

Maris has shared his opinion on the matter in the past as well, but MLB hasn’t expunged their record books of Bonds’ 73 home runs in 2001, as it still stands to be the number to beat in the regular season. All three players, though, haven’t been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Barry Bonds Reveals How Close He Was to Joining Yankees

Bonds shared the eyebrow-raising story on ESPN’s KayRod simulcast during the Yankees’ matchup against the Red Sox on Sunday Night Baseball. Speaking with hosts Michael Kay and Alex Rodriguez and fellow guest Roger Clemens, the 14-time All-Star revealed he considered the Yankees, albeit for a brief moment, after Kay asked if the deal was close to happening when Bonds was a free agent in 1992.

“It was very close, for about 15 or 20 minutes,” Bonds said. “Because, what happened was, and I tell people the true story, the Yankees offered me the same contract I think Ryne Sandberg had at the same time, or a little bit more than that. And, unfortunately, they said you have until 2 o’clock this afternoon to make a decision and my agent said, ‘I’ll get back to you about it.’”

Startled by New York’s urgent timeline, Bonds said he then went to grab lunch, thinking to himself, “Wow, that was kind of strange,” but insisted he thought nothing else of it. But, as luck would have it, Bonds’s agent called him back shortly thereafter to tell him a better offer had come across the table.

“By the time I got to the place to get something to eat, my agent called me back and the San Francisco Giants offered a higher contract and I said, ‘This is great, I want to go home.’”

Aaron Judge home run debate: Roger Maris’ untainted 61 is real record

Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961, which also happens to be 61 years ago. So perhaps it’s fitting another great Yankee right fielder can break Maris’ home run record, which held for 37 years until both McGwire and Sosa combined with their respective drug dealers to captivate a naïve nation and cheat Maris out of his rightful record. Then Bonds, knowing he was better than McGwire and Sosa combined, and also that he had access to Balco and even better chemicals via Victor Conte, stole the record from Thieves One and Two.

That was a long time ago, back in the steroid era, and we’ve learned a lot since then. Bonds, McGwire and Sosa transformed their bodies into home run machines. Their numbers in those years are a mirage. Their game was a scam.

Everyone knows this, including my esteemed colleague Mike Vaccaro, who in Tuesday’s excellent column on Judge separated the “clean” 50-homer hitters from the “dirty” ones. It’s all in the open now, even if baseball’s powers that be don’t want to completely acknowledge it, and correct what’s obvious to all.

The debate about how Bonds turned himself into a better Babe Ruth in his late-30s, about how Sosa went from a skinny, base-stealing prospect traded for an old DH (Harold Baines) to a North Side hero (for a while, anyway) and about how McGwire transformed from aging and injury prone to a monster who made the old Busch Stadium look tiny ended long ago.

The inflated numbers of these three talented scoundrels are about as legit as Bernie Madoff’s accounting records. We’d be fools to continue pretending their dealers don’t deserve half the credit, or more.

A rebuttal from Mike Vaccaro