We live in an era of home run fatigue, with an entire generation of baseball fans, having already witnessed the obliteration of once-hallowed numbers such as 755 and 61, now growing accustomed a grotesque recalibration of historic milestones. Fifty homers in a season, or 500 in a career, used to mean far more than they do now. Flyballs are leaving ballparks at an unprecedented rate this season, 1.23 per team per game, each one a brick in the construction of a gaudy new skyscraper where a historic monument once sat.
It would be easy, in this atmosphere, to dismiss Albert Pujols’s 600th career homer, struck late Saturday night in Anaheim, California, as just another manifestation of the overall cheapening of the home run.