The Single-Season Home Run Record: Ruth, Maris, McGwire, Sosa and Bonds

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

How the single-season home run record rose from 27 to 73, with each record year in context: Ruth in 1920 to 1927, Maris in 1961, McGwire and Sosa in 1998, Bonds in 2001, and what Judge did in 2022.

The single-season home run record has been broken only a handful of times, and every time it moved, the baseball world argued about what the number meant. Ned Williamson's 27 in 1884 stood for 35 years. Babe Ruth raised it to 29 in 1919, then to 54, 59 and 60 within eight years. Roger Maris reached 61 in 1961, Mark McGwire 70 in 1998, and Barry Bonds 73 in 2001, where the record has stood ever since.

The total tells you almost nothing without the year attached. A home run in 1927 was a rarer event than a home run in 2001, and the seasons in between changed the length of the schedule, the number of teams, the baseball, the parks and the way pitchers were allowed to throw. This article takes each record in turn, with the numbers from the historical record through the 2025 season, and then compares the great home run years on the same scale: how many home runs a hitter hit relative to the league he was playing in.

It also deals directly with the part of the story that makes people uncomfortable. The two most recent records, 1998 and 2001, fall in the years of the steroid controversy, and any honest account has to say what is documented and what is not.

The record at each step

Two things stand out. First, Ruth set or raised the record four times, in 1919, 1920, 1921 and 1927, and then waited six years between his last two steps. Second, the climb was front-loaded: the record doubled from 27 to 54 between 1884 and 1920, and then it took 71 years, from 1927 to 1998, to gain another ten.

Ned Williamson and the old world: 1884

The first record belongs to the era before the modern game. Williamson hit 27 home runs for Chicago in the National League in 1884, with Fred Pfeffer second in the league at 25 and Abner Dalrymple third at 22. Historians who have looked at that season point to the very short fences in Chicago's home park, which turned fly balls that would be outs or doubles elsewhere into home runs. Whatever the cause, the number stood for 35 years, which is why Ruth's 29 in 1919 was so notable: he did not just lead the league, he passed a mark that had been on the books since 1884.

In 1919 the second-highest total in the American and National Leagues was Gavvy Cravath's 12. Ruth was playing in Boston at the time and still pitching now and then; his career pitching record in the database is 94 wins and 46 losses with a 2.28 ERA. The move to New York for 1920 coincided with the end of his regular pitching, and the home runs followed.

Ruth: 54, 59 and 60

Ruth's 1920 season is the one that changed what a home run meant. He hit 54, nearly double the 29 of the year before, in 142 games, and the second-place total in the major leagues was 19, by George Sisler. The major leagues averaged 0.26 home runs per team per game that year, and Ruth himself was hitting 0.38 per game, so he was outhomering the typical team. A year later he hit 59 with 171 RBI and a .378 average.

The 60 of 1927 came in a 154-game schedule. Ruth hit them in 151 games and 540 at-bats, an average of one home run every nine at-bats. Teammate Lou Gehrig hit 47, and the National League leader, Cy Williams, hit only 30. Ruth's 60th came in the last week of the season, on September 30, off Washington's Tom Zachary. The Yankees finished 110-44 and swept Pittsburgh in the World Series, four games to none. Gehrig, not Ruth, was named the American League's Most Valuable Player.

The 1927 context is what makes 60 remarkable. The average major-league team hit 0.37 home runs per game that year, which over a 154-game schedule is about 57. Ruth, by himself, hit more home runs than the average team in baseball. Between them, Ruth and Gehrig hit 107 of the Yankees' 158, which is 68 percent. This is the cleanest illustration of the gap between Ruth and his era, and it is why his record, rather than the later and larger ones, is the benchmark for the purist.

The close calls: Wilson, Foxx and Greenberg

For 34 years Ruth's 60 was approached but not passed, and the closest calls came from three different hitters. Hack Wilson hit 56 for the Cubs in 1930, a National League record that stood until 1998. Jimmie Foxx hit 58 for the Athletics in 1932, and Hank Greenberg hit 58 for Detroit in 1938. Context matters again here: 1930 was a famous hitters' year, with 0.63 home runs per team-game against 0.37 in 1927, so Wilson's 56 was less remarkable against his league than Ruth's 60 had been against his. (Foxx's Philadelphia years are covered in our Athletics history.)

Maris and 1961: the asterisk that never was

The most controversial record in the book is Roger Maris's 61. The American League expanded to ten teams in 1961 and lengthened the schedule from 154 games to 162. Maris hit his 61 homers in 161 games and 590 at-bats. The league average was 0.95 home runs per team-game, more than two and a half times the 1927 rate, and the Yankees as a club hit 240.

Commissioner Ford Frick said during the season that a record set after the 154th game would need a distinguishing mark to separate it from Ruth's. That statement became the source of the "asterisk" story, but in fact baseball's record books did not carry an asterisk; the symbol was a creation of the press. Maris, who had not passed 60 by the 154th game, hit his 61st on the final day of the regular season, October 1, off Boston's Tracy Stallard. In 1991 a committee of baseball's record keepers removed the separate listing and recognised 61 as the record.

Mickey Mantle, Maris's teammate, finished with 54, and for most of the summer the two chased the record together until Mantle was slowed by injury. Maris had 142 RBI, tied with Orlando Cepeda for the major-league lead, and a batting average of only .269, a reminder that the season was about power rather than average. He was the American League MVP. The Yankees went 109-53 and beat Cincinnati in the World Series, four games to one.

The record stood for 37 years, the longest wait in the table.

1998: McGwire, Sosa and the race

The 1998 season was the most-watched home run chase in baseball history. By then the league had 30 teams, the average was 1.04 home runs per team-game, and the sport was coming off the 1994 strike. Mark McGwire had hit 58 for Oakland and St. Louis in 1997. In 1998 he hit 70 in 155 games and 509 at-bats, a home run every 7.3 at-bats. His 62nd, to pass Maris, came on September 8 against the Cubs. He hit the last of his 70 on the final day of the season, September 27.

Sammy Sosa of the Cubs hit 66, with 158 RBI and a .308 average, and passed Maris as well. The two did not take the record from each other in a straight chase; they traded the lead for stretches of the summer, and Sosa finished four short. Ken Griffey was third in the majors with 56. Sosa, not McGwire, was named the National League's Most Valuable Player, because the Cubs made the playoffs as the wild card at 90-73 and McGwire's Cardinals finished 83-79. The vote is often cited as an example of how much voters weigh team success.

McGwire took the record with an exceptional plate-discipline season: he walked 162 times, the most in the majors, and drew 28 intentional walks. His on-base percentage that year, computed from the database's totals, was about .470 and his slugging percentage about .752. In 1999 he hit 65 and Sosa 63, so in two years the two men hit more than 60 home runs four times, a total that had been reached only twice in all of previous history.

2001: Bonds, 73 and the walks

Barry Bonds had hit 49 in 2000 and would hit 46, 45 and 45 in the three years after, but 2001 was a season of its own. He hit 73 home runs in 153 games and 476 at-bats, a home run every 6.5 at-bats, the best rate of any record-setting season. He batted .328 with 137 RBI. And he walked 177 times, the most in the majors, including 35 intentional walks, which means that pitchers chose to put him on first base 35 times with the bat in his hands. Computed from the database, his on-base percentage was about .515 and his slugging about .863.

The league he did it in hit 1.12 home runs per team-game, the highest rate of any of the record years, though the Giants' home park was widely regarded as a good one for pitchers. Sosa hit 64 that year and led the major leagues in RBI with 160, so the National League had two players above 60 again, but only one record. Bonds hit his last few in the final series of the season, at home.

The record has now stood for 24 years, through the 2025 season.

The latest chapter: Judge, Raleigh and the others

Since 2001 a few hitters have come close to the top. Ryan Howard hit 58 in 2006, Giancarlo Stanton 59 in 2017, and Aaron Judge 58 in 2024. Two have reached 60. Judge hit 62 for the Yankees in 2022, in 157 games and 570 at-bats, passing Maris's 61 and setting the American League record. And in 2025 Cal Raleigh, a catcher, hit 60 for Seattle; Kyle Schwarber hit 56 and Shohei Ohtani 55 that year. Nobody has approached 73.

Ten times in baseball history a hitter has reached 60. Seven different players have done it, and six of the ten seasons come in the 1998 to 2001 stretch.

Comparing across eras

The cleanest way to compare is to ask how much a hitter outpaced his own league. The league's home run rate per team-game tells you how common the event was; the hitter's rate per game tells you how often he did it.

By this yardstick Ruth is far ahead of the rest. A hitter in 1920 who matched an average team's home run pace on his own would have hit about 40; Ruth hit 54. That is a measure of how far ahead of his era he was, not of how strong he was in absolute terms.

The figures need caution. A team plays nine hitters, so a hitter's rate should be compared with a single hitter's share of a team's total, about one-ninth. By that standard McGwire at 43 percent of the league's team rate is roughly four times the average hitter, and Ruth in 1927 at 107 percent is nearly ten times the average hitter. The comparison favours Ruth, and it is still not a clean one, because pitchers, parks and the number of players with significant at-bats all changed.

The steroid question

Any account of 1998 to 2001 has to deal with performance-enhancing drugs, and the facts are these. Major League Baseball had no testing program with penalties before 2003 and 2004. McGwire acknowledged in 2010 that he had used steroids during his career. Bonds was investigated in the federal inquiry into the BALCO laboratory and has said he did not knowingly use banned substances; his 2011 conviction for obstruction of justice was later overturned. Sosa has said he never used illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

What the data can say is limited. Home run rates rose across the whole league, from 0.95 per team-game in 1961 to 1.04 in 1998 and 1.12 in 2001, for reasons that probably included expansion, ballparks, the baseball, training and drugs, in proportions no one can state with certainty. It is also worth noting that the league rate in 2025, a decade and more into testing, was 1.16, higher than in 2001, so a high league rate is not by itself a signature of drug use. Whether the three men's totals should be regarded as the record is a judgment, and the baseball record books list them unchanged. Readers who want to explore the Hall of Fame debate can start at the history and Hall of Fame topic page and the Hall's own site at baseballhall.org.

What about the Negro leagues?

The historical record through 2025 includes Negro leagues statistics for 1920 to 1948 as major-league data, and that changes some lists. The highest single-season home run total in those data is 32, by Mule Suttles in 1926, in 89 games for the Negro National League. That is not a challenge to the record, because the league seasons were shorter and the coverage in the database is incomplete, with many games from many seasons unrecorded. It is a reminder that some of the sport's best power hitters were playing in leagues for which the modern record is thin.

Common questions

What is the single-season home run record? 73, by Barry Bonds in 2001. The American League record is 62, by Aaron Judge in 2022.

Who held the record before Ruth? Ned Williamson, with 27 in 1884.

Is there an asterisk next to Maris's 61? No. The asterisk was a figure of speech; the record books never carried one, and the separate listing that did exist was removed in 1991.

Has anyone hit 60 recently? Aaron Judge hit 62 in 2022 and Cal Raleigh 60 in 2025.

How many players have hit 60? Seven players across ten seasons: Ruth, Maris, McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, Judge and Raleigh. The leaders pages show the top home run totals for any season.

Where to go next

For the career side of the story, read the career home run leaders, and for another milestone club see the 3,000-hit club and the 300-win club. The profile of Frank Thomas covers another slugger of the 1990s. The format that put these seasons into October is explained in the history of the playoff format and the history of the World Series. Use the players pages to look up any of the hitters above.