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What used to be one of baseball's most magical numbers — 61 home runs — now sits buried, eight lines deep, in the Major League Baseball record book. The number now at the top of that record book — 73 home runs — is steeped in a steroid-addled purgatory. These days, breaking that record is more of a wild-eyed aspiration than a realistic goal in a game that has largely been cleaned up and transformed. Baseball has returned to being more relevant on the sports landscape in 2024 but it has little to do with what used to drive these sort of surges in popularity — notably, the sort of home run chases that dominated the headlines almost daily in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
