On August 4th, 2010, Alex ‘A-Bomb from A-Rod’ Rodriguez hit his 600th home run in his MLB career and became the youngest member of the seven players in the 600 club. After hitting 599 on July 22nd, A-Rod slumped (in terms of home-run progression and average) for 12 games. Number 600 developed into a grand distraction; Michael Kay had to “layer” every A-Rod at bat as if it was going to be number 600, the umpire would deliver the specially marked baseballs to the pitcher and of the most inconvenient occurrence—the Yankees went 6-6 during A-slump.
The Yankees are tied for the best record in Major League Baseball with 67-40; unfortunately they are tied with their divisional rivals the Red Sox—excuse me, I meant to say the Rays. A-rod’s drought was not the sole reason why the Yankees lost, but if the clean-up hitter goes on a 2-24 drought—not even Gatorade can quench that thirst. To get some breathing room, the A-599 had to tell the media to “get comfortable” because he was not going to be A-600 for a while. What do you know—the next game, he hits his 600.
Now all the Yankee business aside, the big news lies under Barry Bonds’ comment, "Congratulations Alex on hitting your 600th home run today, welcome to the club. Stay healthy and focused, you only have 163 to go. I'll be watching and rooting for you along the way. Good Luck."
Barry Bonds is rooting for A-600 to become A-763? Do I believe it? No, not really—it’s just good P.R., and hey… can you blame him? Being the home run king with a tainted mark of HGH on your bat kind of hinders any public relations*.
But beyond that; we have arguably the real home run king (Hank Aaron) saying the following; "When you reach that plateau, no matter where it is, whether you're playing in the majors or the minors, it's a tremendous accomplishment. It means an awful lot to whoever reaches this achievement. ... It really doesn't matter what kind of asterisk you put by it -- 600 homers is something special."
And it is special. Extremely special. So special that the debate goes to an even more special platform—will A-600 get to A-763 and become the home run king?
Tim Kurkjian, on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight mentioned that there is no doubt A-600 will evolve into A-700, and at one point, Kurkjian even thought he’d become A-800, but not even Kurkjian knows if he’ll surpass Barry Bonds* (only to become Alex Rodriguez*).
Well let’s see what we got in his numbers. By not counting 1994, (A-Rod’s 17 game, zero homer season), he has averaged 37.5 home runs per season. Or we could even take it a step further and not count his 1995 season where he hit 5 home runs in 48 games—then his average would bump up to 39.7. A flawed way to calculate how many seasons it would take A-Rod to get pass Bonds would be to divide 163 (home runs left to be the leader) by 39.7 (average per season), which would be about 4.1 seasons. Since he is 35 years old, I think it’s safe to say that he has about another 5 or 6 years left in him.
But that method of calculating how long it would take him is flawed because he is not as dominant as he used to be; the last two seasons—he hit 35 and 30 home runs. This season, he is on pace to hit less than 30 home runs (which he hasn’t done since 1997 in the Mariners!). The exhausting search of HGH in America’s past time might or might not have affected A-Rod’s performance drastically, but if it hasn’t—then the umpires have to stop putting some kryptonite on the balls. During the 3 seasons he claimed he used the enhancements, he hit 52, 57 and 47 home runs—that’s his highest 3-year average in his career. And after the steroid drama, he is approaching his lowest 3-year average (again, this is without counting his first two seasons where he played less than 50 games).
A-600 will probably average about 30 home runs for the rest of his career (give or take 5 homers each season), and if that’s the case, it’ll average him 5.4 seasons to beat the record. So there are plenty of A-Bombs ahead of us, but how long will he be the king before Pujols comes around?
Pujols is up to 393, and he only 30 years-old. And unlike A-Rod, Pujols has consistently been hitting homers since he was 21when he hit 37 homers in his rookie season. Give Pujols eleven years, and I guarantee he will reach the 800 mark (if he doesn’t get severely injured like Griffey).
Once that happens, the home run kings will be the following:
(1) Albert Pujols
(2) Alex Rodriguez*
(3) Barry Bonds*
(4) Hank Aaron
