Barry Bonds is now one home-run away from tying Hank Aaron’s record:
SAN FRANCISCO, July 27 — Barry Bonds touched home plate early Friday evening, at the end of his trot around the bases for career home run No. 754, and the great tectonic plates that tremble imperceptibly beneath the surface of baseball’s foundation began to rumble and shift, the tremors felt across the game. History is in the making, and it could happen with Bonds’s next swing.
No. 754 was launched into a blue sky in the bottom of the first inning Friday night, when Bonds, the San Francisco Giants’ left fielder, whipped his shiny black bat through the strike zone and crushed a 2-1 change-up from Florida Marlins pitcher Rick Vanden Hurk over the fence in left-center field at AT&T Park.
The home run in the Giants’ 12-10 win ended a seven-day drought for Bonds, 43, and moved him within one of Hank Aaron’s all-time record of 755, considered arguably the most important number in American sports. Aaron’s name has stood unchallenged atop the all-time home run list since he passed Babe Ruth in 1974.
“It felt good, real good,” Bonds said. “It’s sinking in now.”
It will likely be this weekend, at home on San Francisco, that Bonds ties and even breaks the record.
In the meantime, though, Sports Illustrated’s John Donovan argues that Alex Rodriguez may just have a chance to take the record from Bonds someday:
Rodriguez has a head start: He soon will be the youngest player ever to hit 500 home runs. When Bonds was A-Rod’s age, in 1996, he had hit only 317 homers. A-Rod, then, has a 183-homer lead on the big fella. That’s a good four seasons’ worth.
He’s an iron man, relatively speaking: To this point in his career, A-Rod has been very durable. He made it into only 129 games in Seattle in ‘99, but other than that year, he’s played virtually whole seasons in every year since ‘96, when he came up full time as a 20-year-old shortstop for the Mariners. He’s been on the disabled list only three times since ‘96 — all brief stops — and none since 2000. That bodes well, you’d think, for the latter part of his career. If he doesn’t wear down, that is. And there’s been no sign of that.
He’s steadier: Whereas Bonds has put up huge numbers late in his career — between 2000 and ‘04, the year he turned 39, he smashed 258 home runs, an average of more than 50 a year — A-Rod has been steadier in the beginning stages of his career, as is evidenced by his early arrival at 500 homers. A-Rod is only the second player in history to hit at least 35 home runs in 10 straight years (with Sammy Sosa, who did it from 1995 to ‘04). And A-Rod is the first player in major league history, not that this relates directly to this argument, to hit 35 home runs and drive in 100 runs in 10 straight years. His 162-game average, according to Baseball-Reference.com, is 44 homers. Bonds’ is 41.
Give it ten years or so, but we could be at the beginning of an A-Rod record run.
