This is some dalliance baseball is having with history, as the chill of autumn kicks weary summer to the curb. The other night, Aaron Judge caught the Babe at 60 dingers, and sometime this weekend he might catch, and then pass, Roger Maris.
And in Los Angeles last night?
In Los Angeles, Albert Pujols, perhaps the quietest transcendent player in baseball history, transcended another rarely glimpsed milestone.
He clubbed career home run No. 699 off Andrew Heaney in the third inning, and then sent No. 700 on its flight in the fourth, launching a hanging slider from Phil Bickford into history. Baseball has only seen three other men do that, and their names are Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds.
Nos. 699 and 700 also got Pujols to 2,208 career RBI, second only to Aaron's 2,297. And he now has breached the 1,400 extra-base-hit mark, joining only Aaron and Bonds.
This makes Pujols, at 42, a generational great, one we sometimes fail to appreciate because there is so little flamboyance to him. For 22 seasons he’s produced excellence with such consistency he’s made it seem routine, as if excellence were a thing that simply rolled off some metaphysical assembly line. And so it was easy sometimes to forget what we were seeing night in and night out, and summer to summer.
The usefulness of No. 700, then, is to remind us what we've been seeing all these years.
We hadn't seen it, after all, in 20 years, when Bonds breached the 700 plateau. Before that, it had been 29 years since Aaron did it in 1973. And before that, it had been 39 years since the Babe did it.
In other words: We got to see a man do something last night that had only happened three other times in 88 years. Three times, in further other words, in a period eight years longer than the time between Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor.
Savor it, boys and girls.
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