So now the baseball spring is about to begin in Tampa and Port St. Lucie for the New York teams and, as always, there are questions to go along with the optimism that comes to this moment along with pitchers and catchers:
Did the Yankees do enough over the winter to get themselves back to being the undisputed heavyweight champ of the American League East, and past the second round of the playoffs? Did David Stearns do enough to get the Mets back into the playoffs, and back into play for first place in the NL East? Or did Stearns, over his mad-scientist baseball winter, do too much?
But the biggest question remains the one around the biggest guy — and the biggest player in town — and that means Aaron Judge:
Has Brian Cashman finally put together a team good enough — and worthy enough of what Judge has done and what he has meant to the Yankees over these past four Ruthian seasons — to help Judge win a World Series?
No one would suggest that No. 99 is somehow entering a personal back nine as he approaches his 34th birthday, about to begin his 10th full season as one of the truly great Yankees of all time. Just last season he was as great as ever in another MVP season. And there are plenty of players in the modern world who have kept going strong past their 34th birthday, and all the way to 40. A notable example is David Ortiz in Boston, who in his age-40 season for the Red Sox hit 38 home runs and knocked in 127, batted .315, and had Red Sox fans begging him to come back from one more season.
Ortiz won three World Series with the Red Sox. Judge has played just one, two years ago, and is still waiting to win his first. Once Don Mattingly was the greatest Yankee to have never won the Series. Now it is Judge, ten years in the big leagues, 11 in all counting the handful of games he played in 2016.
The next year, his actual rookie year in 2017, he hit 52 home runs and set a rookie record (one that would be broken by Pete Alonso two years later) and he was knocking on the door of the Series right away, the Yankees making it all the way to Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Astros. It took seven more years for him to finally make the Series after that, against the Dodgers. Only then it was Freddie Freeman hitting the kind of famous World Series home run Yankee fans still dream about Judge hitting, before Judge finally dropped the ball in Game 5 the way just about everybody on the Yankees did that night.
Last October, Judge tried to save them with that Roy Hobbs home run off the foul pole when the Yankees were trying to come all the way back against the Blue Jays. In the end, he batted .600 in the 4-game series (9-for-15) hit that majestic home run, knocked in six. Finally in October, All Rise finally rose up. But in the end, it still wasn’t enough.
After it was over Judge said this:
“You play to win, and when you don’t win, it’s not a good year.”
He also said this:
“[I wish] spring training was in a couple of weeks.”
Now it is here. The Yankees have Gerrit Cole coming back at some point and Cody Bellinger coming back and Cam Schlittler coming off all the late speed he showed late last summer and into the fall. Carlos Rodon will be healthy at some point, and so will Clarke Schmidt, still a promising young guy even if he turns 30 next week. Ben Rice will get the chance to do it again. All that.
The people in charge — almost defiantly — defend the decisions they have made to essentially roll once again with the team that won 94 games without Cole a year ago and without Juan Soto, believing that the team’s prolonged midseason slump was some sort of aberration, even though the Yankees seem to always have a slump like that. And those in charge conveniently ignore the record of the ’25 Yankees against other playoff teams. They have a perfect right to think that way, of course.
But if those in charge actually are going to be right about the possibilities for this team, and that means Canyon of Heroes possibilities, they need for Judge to be Judge. They need for this to not be a year when there is some sort of significant drop in his production. Because take another good look at the numbers he has put into the books starting with the 2022 season, when all he did was hit more home runs in a season than Babe Ruth ever did, and Roger Maris, more than any American League hitter in history ever had:
2022: 62 homers, 131 RBI.
2023 (a season when he missed 56 games): 37 home runs, 75 RBI.
2024: 58 homers, 144 RBI.
2025: 53 homers, 114 RBI.
Yankee fans have been blessed with someone who has mattered as much as Mickey Mantle once did in his prime, as much as Derek Jeter did in his own prime. It is just that the Yankees of the ’50s and early ’60s and the Yankees of the ‘90s and into the 2000 season, rode Mantle and Jeter to all those World Series titles, when the Yankees were still king of the hill and top of the heap.
Now Judge gets another chance. There are all the other stories about the 2026 baseball season in New York. Not one is bigger than the one about the big man, and whether this is his time at last, as he does things in the ’20s of this century that Ruth did in the 1920s.
