Baseball · 2007 · San Francisco, USA
756
With steroid allegations splitting opinion on whether it counted at all, Barry Bonds hits the home run that passes Hank Aaron's 33-year-old career record.
No. 756
Career home run
Mike Bacsik
Pitcher
Hank Aaron (755)
Previous record holder
Barry Bonds began the 2007 season one home run short of Hank Aaron's career record of 755. The chase came wrapped in years of allegations, later substantiated in court testimony and a subsequent perjury case, that he had used performance-enhancing drugs across the seasons in which he set his single-season home run records. The baseball commissioner Bud Selig's ambivalence about the pursuit, including his choice not to attend the game in person, became a story of its own.
On 7 August 2007 at AT&T Park in San Francisco, Bonds hit career home run number 756 off the Washington Nationals pitcher Mike Bacsik, a solo shot to centre field that broke the record outright. Fireworks went up, the crowd rose, and a taped video message from Aaron himself played on the stadium scoreboard, congratulating him.
Few individual records have divided the sport's audience so thoroughly, read as a legitimate career milestone on one side and as permanently asterisked on the other. Bonds finished his career on 762 home runs, still the all-time record as of the mid-2020s, and the argument has not moved much since.
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