Chasing ghosts ... and goblins

 Sixty-one left the joint in a hurry, rocketing off Aaron Judge's bat before falling to earth 394 distant feet away. In their VIP seats above the Yankees dugout, Roger Maris Jr. hugged Judge's mom. All around them, Toronto's Rogers Centre Stadium howled.

It has been some chasing of ghosts these past few weeks, and just the thing baseball needed. The next one Judge hits -- and he has seven more games to do it -- will lift him beyond the past and back into the now. But for one more night, Roger Maris hovered close, and baseball's crowded yesterdays were as touchable as ever.

So I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about not only ghosts, but goblins.

I bring this up not because I have an instinct for ruining vibes, but because, a few nights ago, someone brought it up to me. I got to talking with another baseball fan about Judge and Maris and the Chase, and how no one had hit this many home runs in a space of years. And then the goblin reared its vile head.

"Wonder if it's possible Judge could be juiced?" this other baseball fan said, or words to that effect. "No one's even suggested it, but ..."

But, yes, this is the ugly legacy of the Steroid Years: Baseballs start jumping off a guy's bat with rarely seen frequency, and sooner or later someone's going to raise a question -- or, rather, THE question.

I've come to accept that Barry Bonds' 73 single-season home runs and 762 lifetime dingers are the official records now, a product of their time just as every other record is the product of its time. If Bonds (and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and all the rest) were juiced, so were a whole lot of others during the Steroid Years -- and that includes a fair number of the pitchers off whom they hit all those home runs.

So, a level playing field, more or less. It's rationalizing, I get that, but you come to terms with things however you can.

This does not mean I don't resent the way the juicers skewed the way we see things. I do. I hate that whenever a man chases baseball's ghosts these days -- two decades and change after McGwire and Sosa and Bonds and all the rest -- the goblins come with them.

And so when The Question surfaced the other night, I reacted with scorn. This is partly because I refused to entertain it; it's also because Aaron Judge is a 6-foot-7, 282-pound monster, and so when he hits the round ball square it's going places. And consequently he's been making people's jaws drop with his power forever.

So he gets it honest, and I think it's absurd to suspect otherwise. If you're the size of an NFL tight end and the bat looks like a toothpick in your hands, why would any of us need to suspect otherwise?

And yet ...

And yet, thanks to the Steroid Years, someone somewhere always will.

Damn the juicers. Damn them all.