Forget whether the ball was juiced or not. Forget whether Alex Rodriguez was juiced or not. Fifty home runs in a season remains one of those numerical targets that matters to baseball fans. My pal Joel Sherman writes often about how effectively random milestone numbers are — if you get 3,000 hits, you were every bit as good a hitter at 2,999 — and he’s right.
But fifty remains nifty, even if we have to suspend out belief in some cases. Maybe it’s because I was raised a baseball fan during the 24-year stretch from 1966-89 when only one man — George Foster in 1977 — topped 50 in a year.