We are now getting spoiled by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani to the point where we sometimes might think that what the two of them are doing -- Babe Ruth East and Babe Ruth West -- is normal. No. And no matter. We can all just sit back and watch the show in real time, game after game and coast to coast.
The only reason they didn’t hit more home runs on Thursday is because neither the Yankees nor the Dodgers had a game.
Judge chased 60 home runs again last season, two years after breaking the all-time American League record and the all-time Yankees record with 62. He ended up with 58. Ohtani hit 54 for the Dodgers in a year when he also stole 59 bases.
Judge is only the second Yankee in history since Ruth -- Roger Maris was the other -- to hit more than 60 homers. Ohtani is the first Dodger to hit more than 50, and looks to be on his way to doing that again.
Ohtani is also a starting pitcher again, if only for a few innings at a time right now, the way Ruth was a star pitcher for the Red Sox. Judge? He is having the kind of run as a slugger for the Yankees the way Ruth did in the 1920s, back when he really seemed to invent the home run in baseball the way he really invented the modern Yankees.
Ruth hit 50 or more home runs in four different seasons for the Yankees. If Judge gets past 50 again this season, it will be the fourth time he has done that. And at the moment, he is not so terribly far off a pace to get to 60 again. Nor is Ohtani.
But even if the two of them get past 50 again -- do that in consecutive seasons -- it will just be more history from both of them. If you exclude players associated with performance-enhancing drugs, there are only two other players who have hit 50 or more homers in back-to-back years:
Ruth, who accomplished the feat twice (1920-21, 1927-28), and Ken Griffey Jr. (1997-98).
That is the kind of company Babe Ruth East and Babe Ruth West are keeping. Now both of them have 37 homers at the same point in the season. The only thing that would have made that swing-off at the end of the All-Star Game more exciting is if both of them had been in it.
Even at a time when Cal Raleigh is still leading the world in homers (39), the Home Run Derby we really want to watch -- in New York and Los Angeles, with a Yankee and with a Dodger -- is the one involving Ohtani and Judge.
Judge got to 37 on Wednesday night against the Blue Jays in his team’s 100th game. Ohtani got to 37 against the Twins in the Dodgers’ 101st game. This weekend, Ohtani is at Fenway Park for a series against the Red Sox, and who knows what his home run total might be?
Going into Friday’s game, Ohtani has now homered in five straight games. The record, shared by Dale Long, Don Mattingly and Griffey, is eight straight games. Ohtani’s manager, Dave Roberts, was asked the other day about Ohtani getting an opportunity in Boston to make more history like that for himself.
“That Green Monster is very short,” Roberts said. “So any fly ball [to left] he hits will be a homer.”
But Ohtani doesn’t need the Green Monster, or much help, hitting home runs. He hits them everywhere. So does Judge, who will be home at Yankee Stadium, where he is routinely tremendous, for a three-game Phillies-Yankees series. Even if both of them don’t have big home run weekends, it is hard to believe they both won’t have gotten to 40 before the season gets to August.
But then it is Judge who once said, “If what you did yesterday still seems big today, you haven’t done anything today.”
He is another hot streak away from putting 60 into play once again. So is Ohtani, who took last year off from pitching because he was recovering from Tommy John surgery on his right arm. Still managed to hit 54. Still managed to steal 59, on his way to helping the Dodgers win the World Series.
When Ruth was with the Red Sox, he won 20-plus games twice and 18 another time. He was known for that, not as a hitter. His first big year as a hitter was his last in Boston, 1919, when he won nine games as a starter while hitting 29 homers and knocking in 113. When Ohtani won nine games for the Angels in 2021 (he topped out at 15 wins in ’22), he hit 46 home runs.
Now he is in the process of stretching out his pitching arm as he keeps hitting home runs. Judge? He’s got a .345 average to go with all the home runs he’s hit. Babe Ruth East and Babe Ruth West. Doing what they’re doing in real time. Or unreal time. What a time for baseball.