NEW YORK — When the World Series ends and free agency begins, Aaron Judge will give the baseball industry a chance to answer a question that, until this point, had been limited to the realm of historical hypotheticals: What if a player, in his prime and playing for the most famous franchise in the sport, broke a long-standing home run record while nearly winning the Triple Crown … then hit the open market?
Aaron Judge is chasing baseball perfection
The question is particularly fascinating because Judge’s spectacular season tested the boundaries of one player’s impact on his franchise. At times this year, as the New York Yankees’ lineup fell apart around him, Judge kept them steady enough to hold on to the division. At other times, particularly in late September, fans packed ballparks entirely because of his pursuit of the American League home run record.
And now, as the Yankees begin another World Series push with Game 1 of an AL Division Series matchup with the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday, Judge is the centerpiece of an aging roster that would have no chance to win the franchise’s first title since 2009 without him.
“I feel responsibility [to win a championship] every year, even when I was a rookie. My first postseason in ’17, I felt responsibility not only for this team but this city to bring something home,” Judge said Monday. “As the years have gone on and we’ve fallen short and came close and fallen short, it doesn’t get better every year. You have to learn from all those experiences.”
Not since Derek Jeter have the Yankees had a star so wholly their own, but Jeter was not nearly as formidable offensively. Not since Barry Bonds has anyone charged through a season with such unparalleled power, but he did it under suspicion before MLB was testing for performance-enhancing drugs and without the shiny clubhouse reputation Judge has honed.
Judge has a Jeterian clubhouse reputation and a Bondsian stature in the box. He has the size of a slugger but enough speed to continue being a helpful defensive presence in the outfield for at least a few more seasons. He hits the market as a paragon of baseball stardom, as uncommon on the field as he is, to this point, unimpeachable off it. The only thing he does not have is a World Series title.
“There’s a pot of gold there. I guess it’s yet to be determined how much it weighs, but it’s a pot of gold, no doubt about it,” Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman said. “Good for him. It was already a big pot, and obviously it’ll be bigger. But he’s put himself in an amazing position to have a lot of choices. And clearly, obviously, we’d like to win the day on that discussion.”
The Yankees know better than anyone what they have in Judge. They offered him a seven-year, $213.5 million extension in April, so confident in the adequacy of the offer that Cashman announced the number to reporters himself to prove the team was trying to keep him.
What they have is a player who conducts himself with such careful consideration for every public word, such dogged adherence to a team-first mantra, that he occasionally seems to be crafting the exact persona the baseball world wants him to have.
“It’s not an act. He is who it is. If he’s going to show emotion, it’s after a few drinks in a private setting,” Yankees ace Gerrit Cole said. “I would say that he probably does work on it, though, because he tries to get better at everything.”
Manager Aaron Boone and other teammates have said the same things about him all season, over and over, day after day — particularly when those questions became staples of the routine during Judge’s push for the AL home run record. Boone and others insist Judge is not performing the perfect baseball attitude. He is living it. When he steps in front of dugout cameras to spare struggling teammates the gaze of millions of unforgiving eyes, that is simply who he is and always has been here. His on-field stoicism doesn’t devolve into off-camera tantrums. And his team-first shtick never seems to lapse.
Presenting perfection often comes at the expense of revealing reality, but Judge — who commands a quiet respect from teammates but never seems entirely at ease — insists the person his teammates see is him.
“These are my brothers. This is family. They see every single side of me: happy, mad, the funny side. If there’s one place you can do that, it’s here,” Judge said. “When we step out on the field, I try to keep in mind there’s always cameras watching, there’s always people watching. I try to keep it professional, about the game, about the team.”
That Judge cares about the game, particularly his game, is not in question, either. If potential suitors worry about his ability to maintain his offensive success, about whether he can replicate this remarkable 62-homer season in which he also hit .311, he seems to have found strategies to help him do so.
For years he has relied on his quirky personal hitting coach, a St. Louis-based teacher named Richard Schenck, with whom Judge’s agent connected him before the 2017 season.
After Judge hit .287 with 39 homers in 2021, he decided he wanted more regular work with Schenck, thinking the numbers could improve. So the pair mapped out a meeting schedule throughout the season in which the 5-foot-9, 240-pound teacher and the 6-7 superstar would meet at local facilities before or after games, hitting hours ahead of first pitch or late into the night to hone a swing that has allowed one of the sport’s more unusual bodies to generate all of the power it promises.
That unlikely partnership in some ways speaks to Judge’s dedication to success. He is open enough to consider the help of, as Schenck put it, “a fat old man” who was 62 when they first worked together. He knew Judge was skeptical, but he also sensed desperation. Judge was coming off a disappointing 2016 debut with the Yankees. Then, as now, he was willing to listen to whatever might help.
He gave it a shot when Schenck put a ball on a tee for himself and one for Judge and told them they would be competing, as silly as that may have seemed. The two swung, side by side, and Schenck’s bat beat Judge’s to the ball every time.
“How can a 62-year-old man hit the ball before a 24-year-old athlete?” Schenck remembered. “That got his attention. After we tried it three or four times, he finally looked at me and said, ‘What on Earth are you doing?’ ”
The explanation was simple to understand but difficult to implement. Since his college days, as seen on video from the Cape Cod League, Judge’s swing has looked similar to how it does now: hands low, hands back, front foot down, hands through. By the time he got to the majors, the stride was shorter, his hands even lower.
Schenck taught him that his load — the process of pulling his hands back to gain momentum before throwing them forward — needed to be quicker, that he wasn’t squaring up pitches when he decided to swing at them because his hands weren’t ready to swing when he decided to do so. Missing pitches he thought he could hit undermined his trust in his pitch selection. When everything was on time, he could trust his eyes completely.
The difference was, and still can be, inches. So is the difference between feeling like his bat is on the path he wants and even a bit off — as he thought it was in the days between hitting No. 61 and hitting No. 62. He grew frustrated with his bat path during the last week of the season. Between games of a doubleheader, he texted Schenck to say so.
Schenck reminded him what he needed to do, that he needed to swing as if hitting to the opposite field and let his lower half take care of pulling the ball on inside pitches. A few hours later, he pulled No. 62 into the left field seats at Globe Life Field — quick adjustment made, the swing he wanted restored. Perhaps staying in sync will not be as easy next year as it was during this charmed season. But Judge seems to have learned how to correct for fluctuation.
“He’s a big man, and he does have a tendency to get hot and cold, hot and cold, and I’ve often wondered if his … long arms, long legs is a detriment to him,” Schenck said. “Then I see him when he’s so good and I think, ‘No, I don’t think it’s that.’ The game is hard. The pitchers are so good. You’re just not always your best. Although this year …”
This year, the best of his career, Judge was almost always at his best. This year, as he has throughout his Yankees tenure, he has done everything the team could have wanted him to do — except, of course, win a title. If another team values Judge more highly than the Yankees do, this could be his last chance to do so here.
“I don’t look at it like that at all. Aaron and I have been together now for five years, and every year we’ve had a realistic shot at this,” Boone said. “We feel that way now. We are so focused on the here and the now and the present that that’s for another day.”
Source: WP
