I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that MLB is as popular as ever, or even as popular as it was in 1998, but it's always fun to watch players pursuing hallowed numbers. I expect Judge will end up with 62-64 HRs for the season, but what's really going to be a nail-biter is the pursuit of the Triple Crown. And while none of this is a record per se, he's also likely to be the only player other than Ruth himself to ever lead the league by 20+ HRs. Pujols is on a trajectory to finish with 700 or 701 career HRs if they start him for the rest of the season. I'm rooting for both of those guys, but the actual MLB record of interest to me rests with Framber Valdez, currently sitting on 25 consecutive quality starts with a chance to tie deGrom and Gibson's MLB record tomorrow night and break it next week.
All of this while Shohei Ohtani is outperforming his historically significant 2021 MVP year and Justin Verlander is outperforming his own historically significant MVP season, well, it makes for quite a season for those of us with intersecting interests in baseball and statistics.
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