… Yes… but Maitreyi Anantharaman asks, which victors. A Sunday football installment…
In late July, before a game against the Boston Red Sox, Bryce Harper sat slumped in a chair in the Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse, a baseball bat in hand. Philadelphia was the latest stop on Rob Manfred’s leaguewide speaking tour; ahead of a CBA negotiation that virtually everyone in baseball expects to involve a 2027 work stoppage, the MLB commissioner spent the summer visiting all 30 teams, trying to get players on board with his plans to restructure the league’s economics. When the subject of a salary cap came up late in the meeting, Harper rose from his seat. He walked closer to Manfred until their noses almost touched, and told the commissioner that if Manfred wanted to talk salary cap, he could “get the fuck out of our clubhouse.”
A couple months later, at the Minnesota Lynx’s end-of-season press conference, Napheesa Collier had some words for her league’s commissioner, too. The WNBA is in the thick of labor talks these days: The league and players’ union recently agreed to extend their collective bargaining negotiating period through January. Collier’s sport is undergoing its own economic transformation. Amid a women’s basketball boom, WNBA team prices have skyrocketed, and the league’s new media rights deal is valued at a figure six times the old one. Today’s labor fight pits players who feel they’ve driven this growth against the owners who feel they’re owed for years of losses. In Collier’s telling, commissioner Cathy Engelbert is a poor steward for the moment, a leader who takes the WNBA’s talent for granted. “The league believes it succeeds despite its players, not because of them,” Collier said, adding later that “the best players in the world” had “the worst leadership in the world.” The measure she took was public and not so lurid a confrontation as Harper’s—no baseball bats involved. But the basic idea was the same: to establish whose clubhouse it really is.
For an emblem of player-commissioner relations in the NFL today, the New York Times reporter Ken Belson writes, look to the “Roger Goodell Bro Hug.” [see the picture above] Every spring, the newest first-round picks bound across the NFL draft stage and wrap their arms around the commissioner. Sometimes they lift him off his feet. A hug Goodell shared with Baltimore Ravens draftee Malaki Starks this past April lasted 21 seconds. Speaking to Belson, an agent laments the annual show of affection for management, though he can’t help but admire the bleak triumph it signals: “You have to give kudos to the NFL for making it that way.”
Apposite: “Big Blue Machine“- on big money in sports and what it can buy (“When the Dodgers spend nearly $500 million on salaries, including deferred payments and tax penalties, one sees the American way of life come into focus anew: a few at the top thriving in the abundance of Ezra Klein’s wet dreams, the rest of us surviving on scraps…”)
* William L. Marcy (a U. S. Senator in 1832, justifying President Jackson’s “spoils system”)
###
As we ponder plutocrats, we might spare a thought for George “The Gipper” Gipp; he died on this date in 1920. Notre Dame’s first All-American football player, he succumbed at age 25 to a streptococcal throat infection and pneumonia three weeks after a victory over Northwestern in his senior season and was the subject of Rockne’s “Win just one for the Gipper” speech. In the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American, he was portrayed by Ronald Reagan.
Bowling has been around for over 5,000 years; it’s played by over 120 million people in more than 90 countries, almost 70 million of whom are in the U.S. But, as Dave Denison reports, the state of play is challenged…
Bowling is an old sport—ancient, really… There’s a lot of churn in the bowling world; alleys go out of business all the time. I bowled in leagues for several years at a venerable old heap just outside of Boston. Opened in 1942 and originally called the Turnpike Bowladrome (for its location on the Concord Turnpike in Cambridge), it had one level devoted to candlepin bowling, a once-popular New England variant, and an upper floor for regular tenpin. I met people in the leagues with whom I would otherwise never have rubbed shoulders: a genial postal worker with noticeably less genial political views; a retired military man who also ran the nearby Air Force base’s bowling alley; and a Thai immigrant who told me he developed his technique by watching YouTube videos—he delivered the ball with a precise, balletic style. I even got to know the mechanic who fixed the automatic pinsetters and ran the machine that oiled the lanes. But developers had been eyeing the land for years, and finally, in its seventy-fifth year, the place then called Lanes & Games fell to the wrecking ball, replaced by a “luxury” apartment complex.
Most longtime bowlers can tell a similar story. Their home lanes were sitting on land too valuable to justify its use as a bowling alley. Or their family-owned center had no one to maintain the business. Or there just weren’t as many regulars as there used to be. It’s been said that the industry overbuilt when the development of automatic pinsetters in the 1940s led to a bowling boom in the 1950s and 1960s. Bowling leagues were especially popular in the industrial Midwest, where factory workers could bowl and drink beer after a shift. Budweiser sponsored a team in 1954 that launched bowlers Dick Weber and Don Carter to fame. Four years later, the Professional Bowlers Association was founded in Akron, Ohio, giving superstars like Weber, Carter, and the dominant left-hander Earl Anthony the chance to go on tour and make a good living.
But the number of bowling centers in the United States, which peaked at about twelve thousand in the mid-1960s, has been steadily falling for four decades. The number was down to about 3,800 in 2023, according to the USBC. Political scientist Robert D. Putnam [see here] famously cited the decline of league bowling in his 2000 book Bowling Alone as one of many indicators that civic engagement was collapsing across America, noting that league bowling declined by 40 percent between 1980 and 1993. The updated figure is even more dramatic: from a high of about 9.8 million league bowlers at the end of the 1970s, the number of USBC members in leagues for the 2022–23 season was 1.09 million. That’s a decline of 89 percent…
Denison explores the consequences of the consolidation of ownership (of both lanes and equipment manufacturers– spoiler alert: private equity) and the impact of technology. But mostly (and best), he explores the culture of the pastime.
As we grab our balls, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that Marlene Dietrich visited a new bowling facility in Knokke-le Zoute, Belgium to roll a few frames and to inspect their new automatic pin-setting equipment.
Marlene studying the workings of the automatic pinspotter (source)
The enshittification of the major social media platforms has become impossible to ignore… and has led many to predict a more decentralized future for the web. But as William Gibson famously observed, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Case in point: Ben Smith‘s blockbuster Semafor post on the flourishing ecology of private chat groups that has emerged, starting with…
Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.
This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures. None of their participants was surprised to see Trump administration officials firing off secrets and emojis on the platform last month. I did not have the good fortune to be accidentally added to one of the chats, which can be set to make messages disappear after just 30 seconds.
But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.
Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp. There’s a big China-friendly group over on WeChat. Elite podcasters have one…
… Many of the [Chatham House] chatters celebrate their success in driving the ascendant politics of the Trump era, which they hope will bring back patriotic industry and traditional cultural norms. Some who have left or lurk consider it a sinister phenomenon in which Andreessen exerted unspoken gravitational pull, as one participant put it: “You’d see that the writers were bending toward the billionaires, and even the ones who prided themselves on being iconoclastic were bending to the tastes and the centers of gravity of power.”…
… You should therefore be very suspicious of anyone who claims to be in the Genuine Ideas business but who is afraid to fully speak their mind in public. For the past half decade at least, America has been bombarded with the grumblings of influential people griping that they are not “allowed” to say what they really think, these days. Because of wokeness, and witch hunts, and things like that. What do they mean when they argue that they are not “allowed” to say something? Do they mean that they might be snatched by government agents and deported for writing a humanitarian op-ed in a student newspaper? No. What they mean, usually, is that they hold opinions that many people would find objectionable and if they say those opinions out loud people will get mad at them. In many cases, they also hold prestigious positions at media or business or academic institutions that claim to have some anodyne progressive values, and because their objectionable ideas are objectionable in the specific sense of “being some variety of bigotry,” their colleagues at those institutions would be mad at them, making their lives unpleasant. (It is darkly funny that, in the years that all of these people have been complaining about the woke censorship they are suffering, the people who have actually suffered the most professional retaliation for voicing their beliefs have been those who spoke out for the human rights of Palestinians. That has proven to be far more dangerous to one’s livelihood than being a bigot.)
It is important to notice the fact that, in truth, all of these whining people very much are allowed to say what they think. They sure can. No one is stopping them. What they are really objecting to is not censorship, but rather the honest reactions that their honest ideas will elicit. In other words, they cannot handle The Discourse. They are not equipped to participate in the Ideas industry. They are unable to carry the burden of telling the truth as they see it. This is fine, if you’re a regular person; no one is obligated to get yelled at for their beliefs. But it is not fine if you are someone—a writer, a leader, an intellectual influencer of the public—who is supposed to be pushing ideas. Those people must either say what they believe, change what they believe, or accept the fact that they are intellectual cowards.
These are the things that I thought last night when I read Ben Smith’s Semafor story about the many exclusive group chats, full of pundits and quasi-journalists and Substack writers and Silicon Valley business titans and political activists, that have served as private petri dishes of reactionary thinking since the start of the pandemic. It is a juicy story, replete with tales of the wounded signatories of the infamous Harper’s Letter forming and reforming little Signal chat groups where they could hold masturbatory agreement sessions with Marc Andreesen and Mark Cuban and similar tech gurus who fancy themselves masters of the nation’s future. Over and over again, participants in these chats explain that they were places where they could speak more openly than they would in public. “People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media,” goes one typical comment from an entrepreneur, “and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone.” It’s not just the businessmen— “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens,” agrees one popular blog thinkfluencer, who presumably is not giving his public readers his important or interesting stuff…
… Sometimes you say what you think, and guess what happens? People get mad. People yell at you. Yes. That goes with the territory. I will put the = hate mail and death threats and angry internet comments that I received during my Gawker years up against anyone’s. And, hey: that’s the fucking job. Whether you write for Gawker or Substack or the New York Times or Harper’s—or whether you are a CEO or tech visionary or a venture capitalist who goes to the Aspen Ideas festival and has a bazillion Twitter followers—the only requirement of the job is to speak your mind honestly. Because, because, by asking the public to listen to you, you are telling the public that they will be getting, as best as you can manage it, your truest ideas. We ask people to give us their attention, and their time, and in turn we give them our honest thoughts. When you are operating in this world and you stop giving people your honest thoughts, you begin ripping people off.
Feel free to hide your honest thoughts in private group chats if you like. Rather than speaking forthrightly, retreat into a little hole where you can stage manage and coordinate the rollout of soft versions of your unpopular ideas in friendly forums. But if you do, don’t pretend that you are a member in good standing of the (absurd, enraging, pompous, but ultimately socially valuable) Ideas industry. Say what you think, cowards! Or stop pretending that your beliefs are important enough for other people to care about in the first place…
… it’s worth pointing out that the dynamics of these group chats only makes sense when you keep in mind that these people are doing something literally everyone on Earth does — post in a group chat — but think they literally invented the future of media. Peak rich guy brain at work here. They, also, spent the lead up to Semafor publishing their piece freaking out about it, which hilariously hyped the shit out of it.
The interesting thing here, though — well, beyond the fact that we now have hard evidence that a secret network of the country’s richest men have been using Signal groups to coordinate a soft coup and inadvertently crashed the global economy in the process — is the timing. According to Semafor, the big digital rats nest of middle-life-crisis-havers started forming after Andreessen published the “It’s Time To Build” blog post, one of the many manifestos he would publish during his manic post-COVID era. The essay went viral on Clubhouse (lol) and led to the earliest versions of these group chats forming on, first, WhatsApp, and, then, Signal.
I was particularly vicious about Clubhouse when it launched, a site I’ve often referred to as a dinner party simulation app. And I was especially angry that the social network was being astroturfed into a “thing” by men like Andreessen. To me, Clubhouse stands as the moment Silicon Valley fully lost the plot, effusively hyping up an app that literally just let them hear their own voices. The snake finally eating its own tail. As I wrote back in 2021, “Clubhouse, by the very fact both its initial user base and its subsequent hype was basically dreamt up by Silicon Valley insiders, was, in my opinion, a test of whether or not venture capitalists had enough influence to dream up a new — honestly, very bad — social network and force it upon the rest of the internet.”
Well, it turns out Clubhouse’s hilariously fast crashout did not deter these guys from continuing to try and make fetch happen and they’ve spent the last four years coordinating behind the scenes to remake the country in their own image. Well, at least until President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement last month, which seems to have really broken the right-wing tech coalition that’s been flourishing on Signal since COVID.
And according to Semafor, these group chats did have a profound impact on how we’ve understood the world for the last four years. These groups coordinated harassment campaigns — they especially hate journalist Taylor Lorenz, apparently — and affected how narratives were shaped online and in the media.
Networked oligarchy, but, also, the most typical radicalization story you could ever tell. Men, isolated by the pandemic, found each other on a public network, Clubhouse, and moved to a dark social platform, Signal, to speak more freely and openly and then spent years radicalizing each other. This is as true for the Silicon Valley dorks as it is for QAnon as it is incels as it is for ISIS. And it’s darkly funny that some of the men who built the internet as we currently use it were not immune from the indoctrinating social pathways they funded or built. Or to put it more simply: Silicon Valley has secretly getting very high on their own supply for years.
But the ultimate takeaway is that, yes, the intellectual dark web is real. The right wing are working together closely. They are texting each other constantly and sharing resources and tactics and if we have any shot at getting ourselves out from under their thumb, we have to have the same level of coordination…
The future of the web- not so “public” (nor “civil”) discourse?
* Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
###
As we ponder pontificators, we might recall that it was on this date in 2015 that a baseball game between the Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards in Baltimore set the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball: zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests over police brutality to Freddie Gray.
Fueled by its viral moments of crystalline violence, the combat sport of Professional Slap Fighting—in which combatants take turns smacking each other in the face—is soaring in popularity online and off. The estimable Ander Monson (and here) investigates…
The image that I can’t forget—the one that truly pulls me into the savage, surreal, and ridiculously compelling world of professional slap fighting—is the open hand of heavyweight champion Damien “the Bell” Dibbell smashing into the giant bearded face of Ryan “the King of Kings” Phillips in slow motion. In the moment, I can’t tell whether my horror or pleasure is greater. Phillips’s eyes are closed, all 255 pounds of him anticipating the blow, hoping to endure it so he can return fire. He can’t move to evade the slap. That’s not allowed in this relatively new, super-fast-growing combat sport. Flinching is a foul—spiritually, the greatest foul in slap fighting—and the penalty is that your opponent gets an extra chance to smash you in the face. So you just have to take the blow. Dibbell’s slap takes maybe a second to deliver in real time. Phillips drops—whatever was him, gone at least briefly—and his body crumples to the ground…
The moment Ryan “the King of Kings” Phillips was KO’d by the heavyweight champ, Damien “the Bell” Dibbell, at Power Slap 7
… Most articles incorrectly trace slap fighting back to a 2019 video from a Russian strongman competition that went viral. But they’re wrong, at least according to JT Tilley, CEO of SlapFIGHT Championship (SFC), the original slap-fighting league, which continues as an underground, more intimate alternative to [the newer, better financed, and bigger] Power Slap. Tilley tells me that he started slap fighting as a rules-based sport four years earlier, in 2015, after he saw a viral video from Lubbock, Texas…
… It was after seeing that video and the response online, says Tilley, that he decided to “invent” slap fighting as a proper sport. That meant giving it shape and rules. And also trying to make it safe—by which he means safer relative to what it was at the time, which was a total free-for-all. The underground videos he was watching online were wild and compelling, sure. But he remembers thinking, Somebody’s going to die out there. So Tilley worked out a simple set of rules and the format. SFC started streaming its first events in 2017, and from there it grew.
The sport began to catch on overseas, including in Eastern Europe. A couple years after Tilley launched SFC, he was asked to consult with an unregulated Polish slapping show called PunchDown. Tilley says he told the organizers that they needed to incorporate his safety rules to protect the fighters. They didn’t. And shortly after that, someone did die. In 2021, Artur “Waluś” Walczak, a Polish bodybuilder, suffered a stroke in PunchDown 5 and died in the hospital. People freaked out. PunchDown disappeared, and, briefly, so did every other slap-fighting organization except for SFC.
But the visceral appeal of slap fighting was too potent not to attract new competition. And soon it caught the eye of the unofficial king of combat sports himself. In 2022, Dana White, the longtime president and impresario of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), founded Power Slap in Vegas, based on SFC’s rules and even using some of its fighters. Power Slap held its first bouts in January 2023, debuting on the TV network TBS. The initial ratings were disappointing, however, so Power Slap moved exclusively online, where it has been booming ever since.
The metrics tell the story of slap fighting’s social-media popularity. From April 2023 to early May 2024, Power Slap’s YouTube subscribers jumped from 121,000 to 2.4 million and its Facebook followers more than doubled, from 1.6 million to 3.3 million. The Power Slap YouTube channel has racked up more than a billion views in roughly two years. And White has leveraged that audience to help Power Slap acquire sponsors such as Anheuser-Busch, Crypto.com, and Fanatics. SlapFIGHT can’t match the speed and scale of Power Slap’s growth trajectory, but it still boasts a pretty robust global following. The SFC YouTube channel has some 250,000 subscribers, with more than 57 million views since it launched. Tilley claims that SFC has garnered more than 2.5 billion views globally across all platforms and says the league has been televised in Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, the South Pacific, Nigeria, and the Middle East. Its most recent event, says Tilley, was seen online by 500,000 people live.
Slap fighting is unsafe, but all combat sports are. This is why we watch them. Frankly, most contact sports are dangerous, points out Power Slap president Frank Lamicella, who was tapped by White to run the league. The proven connection between football and CTE doesn’t seem to be hurting the NFL, after all. Both Lamicella and Tilley say that slap fighting is safer than boxing or MMA. Lamicella, who happens to be a lawyer, rattles off a whole list of medical precautions his league takes. Power Slap errs on the side of safety, he says. “So far we’ve had zero positive CT scans and really a very low hospital-transport rate compared to other combat sports.” Plus, he points out, no one is being forced to compete in his sport. “We live in a country where it’s capitalism and your freedom to do what two people want,” he says. “Look, people want to fight. We provide the platform to do it; we spend the money to make sure they’re safe and healthy. We make sure it’s as safe as possible.”…
… I met Tilley, the SFC founder and CEO. A former wrestler, Motown singer, comedian, and Hall of Fame MMA promoter, he is a big, burly, likable guy who recently turned fifty. He has a promoter’s jovial personality, a genuine smile, and an infectious enthusiasm for slap fighting and especially for the people who slap and get slapped. He is the face of SFC and, with retired MMA star Mark “the Hammer” Coleman, does the play-by-play on all the SFC live streams. From our first communication, he was super welcoming and described what they do as a family operation. That would come to be echoed by nearly every person involved with SFC. Tilley is a self-described inventor of “bullshit sports,” as he told me with a laugh, like carjitsu, “jujitsu but inside of a car,” a new sport for which he signed a deal with ESPN; ultimate tire wrestling, “a big stack of tractor tires, and your objective is to stuff the other guy inside the hole,” also ESPN bound; beast ball, “one-on-one football in a shipping-container unit”; sumo boxing, which I couldn’t entirely figure out; and a new one he was developing where two guys get roped together as in the “Beat It” video and have to fight…
* Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
###
As we trade blows, we might recall that it was on this date in 1980 that LOT Polish Airlines Flight 007 experienced engine failure and crashed on approach to Okęcie Airport in Warsaw. All 87 people on board were killed, including 14 boxers and 8 staff members of the U.S. boxing team and Polish pop singer Anna Jantar. Future world heavyweight champion boxer Tony Tucker was supposed to be on Flight 007 but could not go because of a shoulder injury.
The Inimitable Ray Ratto in the always-illuminating Defector on the legend that was Bob Uecker, who died, ten days shy of his 91st birthday, on January 16…
It is not difficult to find people who loved Bob Uecker unreservedly. There is a good reason for this: He was the last genuinely and instinctively funny person in baseball history. He was the god of Milwaukee even if you include all the Green Bay Packers going back to before Vince Lombardi. He was the face and voice of baseball cinema, the man whose line-reading made “Ju-u-u-u-st a bit outside” so good that “iconic” doesn’t remotely cover its impact. Even if you’re not a seamhead, you likely came across Bob Uecker and smiled.
So Thursday’s announcement that Uecker has died at age 90, due to small cell lung cancer, came as a blow. Nine decades is a good long run, but there was never a sense that he was running out of material; Uecker was still a joy to hear on Brewers broadcasts even in Year 54 of being the voice of Wisconsin baseball for two-and-a-half generations. The reaction to his passing was unanimous in the same ways and for the same reasons that the response to Vin Scully’s death was unanimous—it was an outpouring of both sadness at the loss and gratitude for all the time we got to spend with him. In an epochally angry time in America, at a moment when it isn’t hard to find even anti-puppy polemics with a keystroke, Uecker gets a pass from most everyone. Yes he defined baseball, but he also managed to become more than merely Mister Baseball. From the moment of his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s definitive version of the Tonight Show, which Uecker earned merely by mastering the tripartite arts of comedy writing, unabashed self-deprecation, and martini-dry humor, he was recognizable as that rarest of Americans, the guy you’d sit back down to listen to even if you were already halfway out the door. Put another way, Norm Macdonald thought he was one of the funniest men he ever met. Beat that with a stick.
He did WrestleManias. He starred in a not-entirely-forgettable sitcom, Mr. Belvedere. He did Major League and Homeward Bound; he did Puppy Dog Pals and Futurama. He did beer commercials that didn’t make you want to hurl bricks through your appliances. He did a Hall of Fame speech that exceeds all other such orations by a significant margin because he’d had years to perfect it, even though his playing career was its direct antithesis. Uecker was skilled enough to remain in the major leagues for six years, and smart enough to parlay a lifetime batting average of .19973—not .200, which is what his Baseball Reference page reads—into a career. One-ninety-nine-and-change. He managed to make that his calling card until he could replace it with his far superior ability to help others enjoy their day.
Like Scully, Uecker passed through life with almost no detractors, and not just because his methodology was to beat everyone to the detracting. He gave off an aura of knowing who he was and was not. Just as important, he knew where he was and was not. Uecker was more than content with being the definition of Milwaukee, staying in the Brewers’ radio booth for more than half a century, all while doing the movies and ads and national broadcasts that somehow made him even more Milwaukee-centric. It was an act of rooting to the ground that is almost unheard of today. Uecker didn’t put a shine on the Brewers when they didn’t deserve one, but he didn’t kick them when they were down, either. That’s because he wasn’t parlaying the Brewers gig into some better team in a bigger city. Mostly, he was revered for never leaving town even when Los Angeles might have been more logistically favorable. Who knew that being grounded was the best way to fly?
There will be flurries of other tributes in the next few days, from all corners; Uecker covered a great deal of ground despite starting his public life in a perpetual squat. Unlike nearly every other athlete of his era, Uecker was actually far better and more popular at everything that wasn’t athletics-based. He got 90 years out of this simple-to-explain-and-hard-to-deliver formula, and he succeeded less by luck or planning and more by simply being what he was—the guy who made everyone happier by the simple act of entering their space…
As we honor the authentic, we might spare a thought for Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron; he died on this date in 2021. Considered one of the greatest Major League baseball players in history, he spent 21 seasons with the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves in the National League (NL) and two seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers in the American League (AL). At the time of his retirement, Aaron held most of the game’s key career power-hitting records. He broke the long-standing MLB record for career home runs held by Babe Ruth and remained the career leader for 33 years, until Barry Bonds surpassed his famous total of 755 in 2007. He hit 24 or more home runs every year from 1955 through 1973 and is one of only two players to hit 30 or more home runs in a season at least fifteen times.
You must be logged in to post a comment.