Aaron Judge hit his 62nd home run of the season last night, and it was special. He’s only the fourth player to ever hit that many home runs in a year, passing fellow Yankee great Roger Maris, and it came on a dramatic night, with only a handful of attempts remaining and therefore legitimate doubt as to whether he’d make the mark. Responses, for the most part, were positive. This was a cool thing we were seeing. But there were also some losers.
We’re going to address the losers here.
On one side of loserdom, you have folks chirping that because Judge didn’t pass Barry Bonds, this doesn’t matter. This is silly. You don’t have to tear down Bonds’s record to say 62’s a special number. 62 might always be a special number. I know you’re trolling, but it’s still deserving of a smack.
The other side of loserdom’s more annoying.
The other side of loserdom comes from football fans, many of whom have been complaining about having their favorite sport interrupted for live footage of Judge’s at-bats. Guys. Nobody loves football. Plenty of people like it, yes. I like it. There’s a lot there to like. The helmets, after all, are very shiny, and with only one game per team a week, max, it’s a comparable commitment to Taco Tuesday. There isn’t, though, enough there to love. Yeah, yeah, people say they love football. But you really think there’s enough meat on the bone to be loved when the two faces of the game are a 45-year-old guy going through a divorce and a 39-year-old guy who just got really into drugs? That’s not a pastime. That’s Two and a Half Men. Football lovers are not in love. They’re watching a set of midlife crises.
This is an important thing to establish, because when the dreaded football vs. baseball debates break out, football fans like to point towards their preferred sport’s broader “popularity.” In a sense, yes, football’s more popular than baseball. More people watch football than baseball. If you’re measuring who likes a thing, football wins. But if you’re talking about love, baseball will always be on top. And just as I’m told those of us who aren’t parents can’t comprehend the love of a mother or father for a child, I’m not sure football fans understand what it’s like to love a sport. Aaron Judge hit number 62. He’s not a player I love, he doesn’t play for a team I love. But he plays a sport I love, and it was the biggest moment for that sport in six years. Your 2rd-and-7 can wait.
Seventeen Months of War
Per Matt Norlander, at CBS Sports: The NCAA Council, which sounds like a really silly crew (I hope they all wear blue ties), has formally approved a women’s NIT. It has a “target start date” of March 2024, and I’ve yet to see a formal WNIT response, which means the WNIT and the NCAA are heading for a grueling year and a half of conflict. Hopefully nobody dies. After all, we all want the same thing here, and that’s more NIT action.
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Viewing schedule for the day:
4:10 PM EDT: Cubs @ Reds (MLB TV)
I always like to say goodbye to the Cubs, and specifically to their broadcasters. There’s something about the length of a Major League Baseball season—six months, 162 games—that makes broadcast crews more familiar than in other games. You develop a feeling, listening to them, that they’re talking to you. So, last night was goodbye to Boog & JD & Taylor McGregor. This afternoon is a goodbye to The Pat & Ron Show. I’ll be in the car, delivering food, listening to my friends who don’t know I exist except in a general, one-of-many sense. Until the final out is recorded, and we all go home.
4:10 PM EDT: Twins @ White Sox (MLB TV)
It’s the last Joe Kelly game of the year, and he might not get in, but if he does…look out, everyone. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 100 times: Nobody can make up a five-game gap in the standings in one inning of work. Nobody except for Joe Kelly.
2:45 PM EDT: Stoke City @ Burnley
“But can they do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke?”
Burnley isn’t playing at Stoke tonight, thankfully, but they do play the Stokers, who I’m told are actually nicknamed the Potters, probably because they really identified with the villain in It’s a Wonderful Life. The Potters have a rich history, having never fallen below the third tier and having finished in the top half of the table with some routineness as recently as last decade. Thankfully, this year they aren’t very good. Middle of the pack.
Stoke lives in Stoke-on-Trent, where there’s evidently a lot of pottery (a likely story). Its population is about 250,000 and it’s up in the West Midlands, but it’s right in between Birmingham and Manchester so I’m saying its in the northern West Midlands. Think: Fort Wayne.
7:00 PM EDT: SMU @ UCF (ESPN2)
This is the exact replacement-level game for whether or not to watch college football. Two decent mid-major teams in one of the better Group of Five conferences, each well-known, with a little history but not a lot. A one-possession spread, so we aren’t walking into a blowout. No national implications, and probably not even any conference implications. Exactly replacement-level. The Dunkin’ Donuts donut of sports.
