Barry Bonds Breaks the Single-Season Home Run Record

On October 5, 2001, Barry Bonds hit his 71st and 72nd home runs of the season at Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco, surpassing Mark McGwire's three-year-old record of 70. Both came against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The 71st, a 442-foot blast off Chan Ho Park, cleared the right-field wall and sent the ballpark into a frenzy at 8:14 p.m. Pacific time. The 72nd followed later in the same game.

Bonds had been chasing McGwire's record for the final month of the season with a patience and selectivity that contrasted sharply with McGwire's 1998 pursuit. Pitchers threw around him constantly. He walked 177 times that year, a total so extreme it demanded its own conversation. When they did pitch to him, he made them pay. His 73rd and final home run would come two days later, on the last day of the regular season.

The atmosphere surrounding Bonds's chase was different from the McGwire-Sosa summer of 1998. The September 11 attacks had occurred less than a month earlier, and baseball had paused for six days. When play resumed, the country was in a somber mood. Bonds continued hitting, but the national attention was elsewhere.

He finished 2001 with a .328 batting average, 137 RBIs, a .863 slugging percentage, and an OPS of 1.379. The slugging percentage and OPS remain single-season records. His 73 home runs have not been matched. The record carries the weight of the era in which it was set, and the debates over performance-enhancing drugs have followed Bonds through every milestone of his career.