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Lincicome: When Judge homer chase fails to excite, what does that say for baseball?

Irony is not baseball's friend yet when New York Yankee Aaron Judge's 61st home run of the season sailed over an outfield sign promoting gambling, it seemed the right detail to frame where baseball exists.

This is not the same game that Roger Maris played, nor Henry Aaron, even Barry Bonds, that handy poster lug for selfish ambition and cooperative chemistry.

Maybe the last real moment of untainted baseball joy was the Cubs winning a World Series when karma conspired to make the impossible true, a golden moment since dulled by real life.

What's missing in Judge's exceptional season is anticipation, a sense of involvement, a caring about how it all turns out.

His achievement cannot even start a decent argument, whether Judge should be the all-time season leader in homers because those others who passed Maris were fakes, not to mention heartbreakers when the truth arrived.

But there is Sammy Sosa, in the 60s three times and Mark McGwire and Bonds in the 70s, real numbers achieved while bands played and children laughed and America's game was OK again. Fool us once, or twice, or three times ...

Our caution this time can be blamed, surely, on Bonds, and Sosa, and McGwire, who took our imagination and abused it, phony heroes whom we believed were valid.

No, we are not going to be duped again into over-appreciating frauds, not that there has been the first hint that Judge is anything other than what he seems to be, a genuine ball crusher worthy of every number he puts up.

Maybe it is just an earned apathy to baseball itself, a generational declining where what once seemed crucial is now trivial, lost in the general grab bag of amusements available.

Still, football seems no less vigorous than ever; basketball, too. Even soccer, the worldwide game of lawn chess, tugs at the attention span.

The Chicago baseball season passed without great anguish on either side of town, the Cubs better than they were supposed to be and the White Sox worse than imagined to be.

What fixes may come will come without causing alarm or agony.

Baseball confesses its own inadequacy by tinkering with itself, getting lost in spin rates and launch angles, labor issues and defensive shifts, cheating and sign stealing, larger bases and pitch clocks, extra inning gimmicks, cornfield stunts, all the while taking longer and longer to play a game.

Throw the ball. Hit the ball. Catch the ball. As simple as that.

Judge's season, as well as that of Los Angeles Angel Shohei Ohtani, a truly remarkable player, ought to be enough to goose the game, as did Sosa and McGwire, as did Bonds before the truth.

Being an acceptable hero is vital to baseball's self-renewal, and maybe even to our present national temper.

The single season home run record of Maris lasted two years longer than Babe Ruth's did, not that the world ever became convinced that Maris was the man and not the Babe.

When McGwire broke the Maris mark of 61 home runs, muscle building supplements and pharmaceuticals aside, McGwire was celebrated with all the proper noise innocence can muster.

McGwire's achievement lasted only three years before Bonds broke it, suspicion still abated, and it seemed a little bit like the next guy to reach Mt. Everest waving hello as Edmund Hillary hiked back down.

Those few of us to whom these things matter - that is, the ones with newspaper columns and live bar bets - set our own rules and one of the rules is we cannot perceive the new guy as a cheat.

Now it is two decades later and it is not the number that brings shrugs, but the evidence that dreams cannot be trusted.

Being an acceptable hero is vital to the baseball's self-renewal, and maybe even to our present national temper.

If Judge it is, then Judge it is. Baseball does need someone to step up, to do something riveting. And home runs are the great imagination magnets.

Baseball needs the honest, unmanufactured reassurance of great performances in order to sustain its essential stuff, those generational connections so carelessly mishandled. And even that may not be enough.

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