There were only about 8,000 fans in the stands, yet they produced a collective roar the likes of which New York City had never heard.

It was Sept. 30, 1927, and the crowd at Yankee Stadium was there not to witness a pennant-clinching victory -- the “Murderers’ Row” Yanks had sewn up the American League flag back on Sept. 13 -- but to see whether their hero, Babe Ruth, could send one more ball into the seats.

Ever since 1921, when a 26-year-old Ruth had raised the benchmark for a third year in a row with an eye-popping 59 home runs, the Great Bambino had been trying to reach 60. He produced some remarkable seasons, such as 1923, when he batted .393 and powered the Yankees to their first world championship, as well as an
injury-shortened 25-homer campaign in ’25 that led many to (wrongly) surmise that Ruth’s days as a force to be reckoned with were numbered. But he had yet to approach his own record, topping out at 47 round-trippers in 1926.

The 1927 season, though, was a different story. With a stud first baseman named Lou Gehrig coming into his own and batting directly behind him, the Colossus of Clout had returned in earnest. The two sluggers ran neck and neck atop the home run leaderboard all season long, with Gehrig leading, 39-38, as late as Aug. 19. But the Babe had since caught fire, launching 16 longballs in September to push his season total to 59. 

On the penultimate day of the regular season, the Yankees hosted the Senators for a Friday matinee in the Bronx. Washington’s Tom Zachary drew the ire of fans in the first inning, the crowd booing and hissing at the left-hander for walking Ruth on four pitches. In each of his next two at-bats, the Bambino singled and came around to score, knotting the game at 2-2 after six.

Ruth, who was 31-for-71 (.437) to that point in his career against the veteran Zachary, came up again in the eighth, with Mark Koenig standing on third after his one-out triple. He took a called strike, then looked at ball one. When Zachary’s third offering came hurtling down the pike, the Sultan of Swat swung with all his might and sent the ball soaring toward the section of seats beyond the right-field fence known as “Ruthville.” The Senators southpaw protested that the ball had landed foul, but the umpires disagreed. A hallowed record had been set. 

While the nattily attired scribes seated in the Yankee Stadium press box paused from clacking away furiously on their typewriters long enough to stand and salute baseball’s Behemoth of Bust, the whoops and hollers from Ruth’s Yankees teammates in the home dugout along the third-base line were drowned out by the overwhelming ovation emanating from the Bronx faithful.

“It rivalled anything that Broadway has ever given a visiting celebrity,” Charles Segar wrote for the New York Daily Mirror. “No star of the Great White Way was ever acclaimed so fervently. Even the veteran newspapermen, whose calloused souls have been accustomed to such demonstrations, stopped their typewriters, rose to their feet, and applauded.”

With two outs in the ninth inning, Senators manager Bucky Harris sent 39-year-old Walter Johnson up to pinch-hit for Zachary. The Big Train, once a pitching rival of Ruth’s before the Babe became his chief nemesis at the plate, lofted a fly ball to right that Ruth hauled in easily for the final out -- the final appearance in a big-league game for the 417-game winner.

Fans scrambled over the screen in front of the bleachers and poured onto the field from the grandstand, rushing toward their hero to give him a pat on the back. Smiling from ear to ear, Ruth made his way through the phalanx of well-wishers and into the home clubhouse, where a 40-year-old New Yorker named Joe Forner presented the prized home run ball to an exuberant Ruth.

“Sixty, count ’em, 60!” the King of Crash proclaimed. “Let’s see some other son of a [gun] match that!”

***

In the 95 years since, only one other American Leaguer has. Another Yankees outfielder, Roger Maris, famously reached 61 homers 61 years ago, in 1961. But this year, Club AL60 could potentially welcome a third member -- yet another Yankees outfielder.

Even as he paced the Majors in home runs, RBI and runs scored as the season entered its final weeks, Aaron Judge insisted he wasn’t thinking about 61. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the baseball world wasn’t. With every moonshot into the outfield seats, the media beamed out updates on Judge’s home run pace and how it compared to those of Ruth and Maris during their remarkable seasons. Statisticians calculated how many plate appearances per home run Judge would need to break the record, while fortune tellers envisioned the stars aligning for No. 99 to follow Nos. 3 and 9 into Yankees longball lore.

It all made for a good bit of fun during the dog days of summer. But as the season winds down and Judge’s total reaches into a stratosphere rarely touched, the attention will grow exponentially. Broadcasts of other MLB games will break away for live look-ins of Judge’s at-bats, national media will converge upon Yankee Stadium to try and land an interview with the star slugger, and the “MVP!” chants in the Bronx will -- somehow -- grow even louder. 

Much more than a power hitter, Judge has earned those chants in every way. Pressed into center field duty more often than in any of his six previous big-league seasons, the 6-foot-7 outfielder shined, playing 57 games of error-free ball at the position through Aug. 20. After posting a self-described “disappointing” (yet career-best) .287 batting average in 2021, Judge flirted with .300 for much of this summer. And after vowing to be more of a threat on the base paths prior to this season, he reached double-digit steals for the first time in his career on July 28.

But fans don’t throw on their No. 99 shirseys and trek to the Bronx hoping to see Judge swipe second. Their appetite for baseball destruction is insatiable, and the hulking slugger has delivered in spades this season -- including on that very night of his 10th steal, when he sent the 43,836 fans in attendance home happy with a walk-off homer in the ninth inning to defeat the Royals, 1-0. That one came a month and a half after his three-run shot off Toronto closer Jordan Romano with the Yankees trailing, 5-3, on May 10 -- the first walk-off of Judge’s career. There was also the ridiculous 465-foot moonshot he blasted in Baltimore on July 22 that had YES Network announcer Ryan Ruocco wondering aloud whether the ball might show up on NASA’s radar. Or there was the two-run shot against Kansas City on July 30 for career homer No. 200 in just his 671st career game -- making him the second fastest to reach that mark in baseball history.

“Aaron Judge, I think, is the best player on the planet right now,” says teammate Matt Carpenter. “He reminds me of the 14-year-old that lied on his birth certificate to play in the Little League World Series. He’s in another league that he should not be playing in. He’s that good. It’s fun to watch, and I can’t say enough about the teammate that he is and the guy that he is.”

***

For some players, and for some teams, the pursuit of a record such as Maris’ could become an unwelcome distraction. The Yankees have high hopes for 2022, and every regular-season win will matter greatly as they jockey for postseason position. But this being New York -- and this being Aaron James Judge -- no one in the Yanks’ clubhouse is too worried about it being a problem.

“It’s not his first rodeo,” says teammate Giancarlo Stanton. “He was in the 50s before. He understands what this place brings and how much more attention there will be. And there’s no better guy to handle it.”

And there’s no guy who understands what Judge can expect better than Stanton.

Five years ago, Stanton was the No. 2 hitter for a “fun, dynamic” Miami Marlins team that spent much of the season in contention for a Wild Card spot under its second-year manager, Don Mattingly. Speedster Dee Strange-Gordon set the table, with future NL MVP Christian Yelich batting third and Marcell Ozuna, who would finish with 37 homers and 124 RBI, in the clean-up spot.

Everything was clicking for Stanton. After coming up short in a bid to defend his Home Run Derby crown -- Judge, the eventual AL Rookie of the Year, won the 2017 contest instead -- he started the second half on fire, cranking 25 home runs in his first 43 games out of the All-Star break, including one stretch of six consecutive games with a homer in mid-August.

The 27-year-old Stanton, then in his eighth big-league season, kept his head down and stayed focused on the task at hand. But when he got up into the 50s in late August and started seeing his own name alongside some of the National League sluggers he had grown up watching on TV -- Stanton on pace to match McGwire’s ’98 mark -- and writers from USA Today and The New York Times started showing up in the Marlins’ clubhouse, he could sense a change.

After crushing 18 homers in August, Stanton had hit just six in September when the Marlins welcomed Atlanta to Miami for a four-game set to close out the season. In the series opener, he clubbed two home runs to get to 59, but despite playing in front of larger-than-usual crowds the final few games, he fell short of No. 60.

“That would have been a special number and what a lot of people would have liked to see; what I would have liked to see,” says Stanton, whose 59 homers and 132 RBI led the Majors and earned him the NL MVP Award in his final season before the Marlins traded him to New York. “You always like a round number. It’s like batting .299 instead of .300. You’re like, ‘Yeah, you did a good job but ... _dang it._’”

That same year, Judge took the league by storm, breaking McGwire’s MLB rookie record of 49 home runs by putting up 52 at age 25. This year, he’ll have the added advantage of experience. With about 700 big-league games now under his belt, Judge understands how pitchers will try to attack him, and he has developed a strike-zone awareness that no rookie could possibly expect to own. 

And if his teammates around him in the lineup are all healthy, that could be the biggest factor in whether Judge finishes with a great year or an all-time legendary one.

“When you look back at those types of seasons, there was always a guy that helps you get better pitches,” says Stanton, who along with Anthony Rizzo and other power hitters up and down the Yankees’ lineup figures to offer Judge a great deal of protection. “You’re just putting so much extra pressure on that guy to execute a pitch that it makes them slip up. If they’re not a veteran guy or they’re not used to it, and they’re like, ‘I have to get this done,’ Oh, whoops. Right over the plate. So, it’s interesting to watch. You see the guys that have been through it, and they don’t care; they’re like, ‘I’m going to execute what I know I should execute.’ And then you see guys who try too hard, and, boomp, boomp: four straight balls, or three right down the middle. It’s a ‘terrified factor’ that you put into the guy on the mound that doesn’t want to be on the other side of a highlight; you don’t want your name in the record books. So, you’ve just got to make sure your mind is set and crisp because that guy’s got to do the same on every pitch.”

***

Even if Judge gets into record-breaking territory, he will not have to deal with anything close to the stress that befell Maris, whose pursuit of Ruth’s record was hardly something to celebrate in the eyes of some Yankees fans loyal to homegrown superstar Mickey Mantle and even the commissioner of baseball himself.

After being traded to New York from the Kansas City Athletics in December 1959, Maris had an outstanding first season in pinstripes, winning the 1960 AL MVP Award after batting a career-high .283 with 39 homers and 112 RBI. He was even better the following season, but the league had gone from a 154-game schedule to its current 162-game slate, a fact that rankled Ruth supporters such as Commissioner Ford Frick. “My own idea is that some records might deserve to be listed in two categories -- the one made during a 154-game schedule and the one made during a 162-game schedule,” Frick said before the ’61 season.

But records -- even revered Yankees home run records -- are meant to be broken. After Ruth hit his 60th, Arthur Mann of the New York Evening World asked him if he’d try to top that mark. “I don’t know and don’t care, but if I don’t, I know who will,” Ruth said, pointing toward Gehrig. “Wait till that bozo over there gets waded into them again, and they may forget that a guy named Ruth ever lived.”

Gehrig would top 40 homers on five occasions but never reach 50 in a season. By Labor Day of 1961, Maris and Mantle had each gotten to 50, and with the eight extra games on the schedule, Ruth’s record was in serious peril.

Having Mantle hit clean-up behind him was a boon to Maris, but when Mantle’s regular season ended in late September due to a leg injury, he lost that protection in the lineup. The Mick’s 54th and final homer came on Sept. 23, and he played his final game on Sept. 26, when Maris tied Ruth with a home run off Baltimore’s Jack Fisher at Yankee Stadium. Ruth’s widow, Claire, was in attendance and told Maris after the game, “You had a great year. I want to congratulate you, and I mean that, Roger, sincerely. I know that if Babe were here, he would have wanted to congratulate you too.”

There were four games left on the schedule at that point, but Maris, feeling that he needed a mental break, sat out the first one. The pressure of trying to top Ruth’s record within 154 games, thus avoiding any sort of asterisk, had been unlike anything he could have imagined.

“I was beginning to feel like a freak in a sideshow,” he said in Roger Maris At Bat, the book co-written with Jim Ogle that was released following the ’61 season. “Everywhere I went I knew eyes were on me. When I went out to eat, when I walked into the hotel lobby, as soon as I appeared on the field there were always eyes, eyes, eyes. It was like that for the last month of the season. It made me feel very uncomfortable.”

He failed to go deep in either of the first two games after his short respite, leaving Sunday, Oct. 1, as his last chance to make history. A crowd of 23,154 turned out to see Maris launch Red Sox right-hander Tracy Stallard’s fourth-inning fastball into the right-field stands and into the hands of Sal Durante, a 19-year-old from Brooklyn, whom Maris -- knowing that there was a $5,000 reward for the ball -- told to keep it.

“It was the greatest thrill that I have ever had or hope to have,” Maris wrote in his book. “I was very happy now for many reasons, but I was happiest because it was all over. The pressure, the excitement, the anxiety were gone. There can be no more talk of home-run records. It is all in the book, and the book is closed.”

***

And now, 61 years later, that book might be reopened. With 53 home runs through the Yankees’ first 134 games, Judge was on pace for 64 dingers in 2022.

“Obviously, he’s on a crazy run right now,” says fellow outfielder Andrew Benintendi, who had admired Judge from opposing dugouts before getting traded to New York in July. “He’s getting pitched the toughest out of probably anybody in this league, but he’s hitting for a lot of power, he’s hitting for a high average, he’s taking his walks -- he’s doing it all. He has put together a great season so far, and obviously there’s a long way to go, but he has definitely set himself up for success.

“If he gets cooking, it’s a different ballgame.”

So, will Judge get hot enough that 2022 ends up the same way 1927 or 1961 did in the Bronx? Will some unfortunate pitcher have his name etched into the record books for eternity, a la Tom Zachary and Tracy Stallard? Will some lucky fan become the next Joe Forner or Sal Durante?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

What we do know is that all eyes will be on No. 99 as Judge aims to put an exclamation point on a season that has been downright dominant. He will loft a ball deep into the Bronx night that spurs the crowd to “all rise” in unison. The floodlights will flicker at Yankee Stadium, and by the time Judge points to the sky and touches home plate, thousands, if not millions, of people will know that he hit another one, thanks to the magic of 21st century communications. He will not be mobbed on the field, as Ruth was, nor will his hair have begun to fall out, as Maris’ did. He will definitely not be playing in front of mostly empty seats: At more than 38,000 per game, the Yankees lead the AL in average attendance.

Perhaps Judge’s final homer of the regular season will cap a great 2022 and send the Yankees into the postseason on a high note. But if it’s something more?

“It’d be amazing,” says Stanton. “And being able to watch it all year, not from another clubhouse or seeing it on TV, but being able to be here, to watch the work, watch the days that you can tell he doesn’t feel his best, and yet he grinds it out and is able to get some hits or even scrape out a homer … These types of years, it’s about how you handle it when you don’t feel that great. Pushing through those days and getting 15 extra balls up in the air throughout the season when you were feeling tired, that’s the separator.”