In a post for CBS Sports, Jon Heyman writes:

At this point, (Chris) Davis’ real competition isn’t himself, but Yankees single-season legend Roger Maris, who Davis and most straight thinkers consider the legitimate single-season home-run record holder for his hallowed 61 home runs in 1961. At this point, it’s obvious that all those 60-something homer hitters and those two 70-homer hitters had a little help to unseat Maris, who is being re-seated at No. 1 by right-thinkers. Davis, on pace to hit precisely a record-tying 61 home runs going into Sunday’s game at Yankee Stadium (or 60.75 to the last decimal point), has a legit shot to get the legit record. And yes, despite all the Internet yahoos, it must be considered legit. There are some very good reasons why he’s breaking out yet again, and they have nothing to do with steroids.

OK, call me a crooked thinker, but I am pretty certain the single-season home run record for Major League Baseball stands at 73, as accomplished by Barry Bonds in 2001. I know this because Barry Bonds hit more home runs that year than any other Major League Baseball player has in a season and records are not subjective.

Watch every home run Davis has hit this year in one GIF.

If Heyman or anyone else wants to consider Maris’ 1961 — or, eventually, Davis’ 2013 — the most impressive power-hitting season in baseball history, it’s a free country. Bonds’ legacy, like those of fellow 65-plus home-run hitters Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, is undeniably tarnished by allegations and assumptions of performance-enhancing drug use, even if Major League Baseball did nearly nothing to stop players from chemically bolstering their performance during that era (and even if plenty of the pitchers were doing it too).

But so many of baseball’s records are tarnished by context. Maris’ 61-homer record famously came with an asterisk because he had more games in which to homer than Babe Ruth did when the schedule was shorter in 1927. And in 1927, Ruth hit 60 homers against a league in which minorities were not yet permitted to play.

It goes beyond that: Longtime career home-run leader Hank Aaron admitted to taking amphetamines while he played. So did Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Grover Cleveland Alexander drank during Prohibition. Ty Cobb bragged that he killed a man in 1912. The Hall of Fame is lined with liars and cheaters and addicts and racists and otherwise indecent individuals celebrated only for being awesome at baseball.

To assert that Maris is the “real” record-holder — as Davis himself has — is to attempt to whitewash an important and often exhilirating era in baseball history, one many of us legitimately and blissfully enjoyed while it was happening, and one in which every single home run then hit still counts toward the outcomes of those games and in the annals of baseball history.

That Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001 should not take anything away from what Davis is doing in 2013. Davis’ outburst comes in a markedly different offensive era, and if he maintains this pace it won’t be unreasonable at all to argue that it is among the greatest slugging seasons in history, if not the single greatest.

But it won’t be the record, because records don’t work like that. Time and baseball march forward. You can’t go back and stick a marker at one point in history or put parenthesis around another, because nothing has ever existed in a perfect, black-and-white world without mitigating circumstances or necessary explanations. That Cy Young was able to win 511 games around the turn of the 19th century didn’t make it any less amazing when Greg Maddux won 355 around the turn of the 20th.

We know they pitched in very different circumstances, just as we will come to understand that Davis hit in a very different time than Bonds and McGwire and Maris and Ruth and Frank “Home Run” Baker.