Nothing has changed with the Yankees, even with Juan Soto over at Citi Field now: Aaron Judge is still the Yankees. We talk all the time about how Shohei Ohtani is the new Babe Ruth, at least when he is both a hitter and starting pitcher. But so, too, is No. 99. More than a hundred years after The Babe got to town, Judge is a Sultan of Swat. Sometimes he makes you think that he has reinvented the home run the way Ruth really invented it once he was a Yankee.
Judge is the Yankee the fans want to watch. He is the cool great Yankee the way Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera were. But it’s different with Judge, because of the home runs, his ability to hit baseballs out of sight, and not just over that Little League wall in right field at Yankee Stadium. He hits them everywhere, and not just at the Stadium. The best story of the first week of the season wasn’t torpedo bats. It was Aaron Judge once again having any kind of bat in his hands.
Ohtani was having his innings on the other side of the country, of course. He hit a home run in Tokyo and gave the people what they wanted in the process. He hit that walk-off home run the other night at Dodger Stadium. But there is still no better at-bat in the game than a Judge at-bat.
“Nobody left their seat when I was coming to the plate,” Reggie Jackson told me one time.
It is the same way with Judge, who last season nearly became the first Yankee in history to hit 60 home runs twice. People came to the new season wondering how much he was going to miss having Soto, perhaps the most complete hitter in the game, right there in front of him in the batting order. Maybe he will miss Soto as the season goes on. For now, what he doesn’t miss are crush-me pitches.
At 6-6, he is not just bigger than Babe Ruth (6-2 and 215 pounds) was. He is also bigger than life the way Ruth was. Ruth’s most productive four-year stretch of home runs started in 1927, when he hit 60. From ’27 through 1930, Ruth hit a total of 209 homers. For the four seasons before this, Judge hit 196.
Last year Soto gave Yankee fans another player to watch along with Judge, absolutely. But now that Soto is a Met, we are back to where we were with Judge when he hit 62 homers and passed Ruth and passed Roger Maris: He is the Yankee keeping everybody in their seats when he walks to the plate. Even with another sketchy pitching staff (three games with seven or more runs allowed out of the first six) and no real leadoff man, he is the one who makes you think the Yankees can have a chance to make it back to the World Series.
Or put it another way: On another $300 million-plus payroll, who else on the Yankees makes you want to buy a ticket?
By the way? In case you missed it, here is what the captain of the Yankees said the other day when asked about the possibility of changing to a torpedo bat:
“What I did the past couple of seasons speaks for itself. Why try to change something if you have something that’s working?”
Why indeed? He got to 500 extra-base hits the other day, and only Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio ever got there faster. He became the first player in history to hit five home runs and have more than 15 RBI in his team’s first six games of a season.
Is there a huge box he hasn’t yet checked? You know there is. He made his first World Series last October but still hasn’t won one. He made the biggest error of his career in Game 5 of the Series against the Dodgers. When that ball bounced out of his glove on what should have been a routine play, it was as if Judge and the Yankees were rolling toward next season. So many people think that Judge was just getting his swing back by Game 5, and might have been ready to roll if the Yankees could have pushed the Series back to L.A. We’ll never know, because they didn’t hold that 5-0 lead in Game 5. Before the night was over so were the Yankees.
Then they lost Soto to the Mets during the offseason, and so it would just be that one year of Soto and Judge doing Ruth and Gehrig and Maris and Mantle things together for the Yankees. Now they are a world apart even with Soto one borough over, and Soto will get the chance to be as big a star in Queens as he was in the Bronx.
But the good news is that Judge is still in the Bronx and still hitting home runs and still the face of the Yankees the way Jeter was once the captain and face of the Yankees. In his time as a Yankee, really since he hit 52 as a rookie in 2017, Judge has accepted the responsibilities of the team, the place, now the role of captain. He has been everything we want our sports stars to be. He has been injured and come back from the injuries. He had the chance to leave as a free agent but did not leave. Now he is asked to carry the Yankees again.
The Yankees are always going to matter around here, as much as any team we have, because of all the great Yankees before Judge and because of all the winning they did in the last century. But Judge, because of his power, because of the power of the baseball personality he brings to all this, makes them matter more. And no matter what, he keeps looking ahead.
“I’ll look back when I’m an old man coming to Old Timers’ Day,” Judge said the other night.
Don Mattingly was a great Yankee who never came close to a World Series. Judge made it there last October. Made it as far as Game 5. So there is that kind of work still to be done for him. But not the work of being a great Yankee. He is already there. He knows how to do it. And seems to be getting better at it.
MAKE PETE A FOREVER MET, STEPH MUCH MORE THAN A SHOOTER & PITINO’S PLAYING DEFENSE …
Here’s my official position on Pete Alonso:
I want him to keep hitting home runs until he finishes his career as a Met.
Kind of torpedoed out at this point.
Maybe the MIT dude who came up with the bat will stop being covered as if he reinvented the internet, and not baseball bats.
Though I am happy that he came up with equipment who makes things easier for Anthony Volpe to hit more home runs, just because Volpe is such a nice young man.
As always, curious as to how much the bats had to do with all these home runs the Yankees have been hitting, and a ballpark that sometimes seems more home run friendly than the Little League one in Williamsport.
As much as I’d love to see LeBron make one more trip to the NBA Finals, I’d love to see Steph Curry make it even more.
I’m not ready to line up with Draymond Green yet, ready to say that the Warriors are going to win it all now that they have Jimmy Butler.
But if they ever did, and Steph won another one — one that would put him one title behind Michael — we would have to reimagine all over again where he ranks with the very greatest players of all time.
And even Michael and LeBron never did what Steph has done since arriving in the league from Davidson:
They didn’t change the way the game looks, didn’t expand the dimensions of the court and possibilities for shooters the way Steph Curry has.
We constantly talk about how he is the best shooter of all time.
But he’s so much more than that.
Take the best centers of all time out of the conversation.
Curry really is right there with Michael and LeBron and Magic and Larry and West and anybody else you care to throw into this particular conversation.
If you haven’t yet bought my Hall of Fame pal Bill Madden’s new book, “Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals and Cooperstown: A Baseball Memoir,” you need to do it today.
This is a wonderful trip through Bill’s baseball life, and especially the parts that included George Steinbrenner and the old Yankees.
Bill had a backstage pass for all of it.
He remains one of the best baseball writers we’ve ever had, and this book reminds everybody that he’s still on top of what is still a grand old game.
Here is what Rick Pitino now tells Vice TV about his benching of RJ Luis Jr. against Arkansas:
“[Luis] was not only getting down about his game, he wasn’t playing the defense we needed. He wasn’t playing the transition defense we needed. He wasn’t blocking out. All the missed shots and the forced shots were affecting him.”
Got it.
At least we know that Luis’ coach can still play defense.
I don’t know whether Ja Morant, terrific basketball player, is a slow thinker or not.
But he sure is a slow learner if he thinks he’s the coolest guy in the room pantomiming shooting a gun after he makes a big basket.
Yeah.
Who doesn’t love a good gun joke, no kidding?
Finally today:
Happy birthday to our youngest son, Zach.
Even before “Glue Guy” became such a hot property on Instagram, Zach was always the glue guy of our family.
For a lot of reasons.
But none bigger than this:
As big a heart as I know about.
