The long and the short of it
Yanks slugger Judge and Astros hit-machine Altuve drive their teams in the ALCS
NEW YORK — Every once in a while, the planets align, giant Jupiter and tiny Mercury, and we get the two best players in Major League Baseball’s American League Championship Series at the same vector, in the same camera shot, near the same base, and we are left to remind ourselves, for the millionth time, baseball is a wondrous game.
Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees’ rookie right fielder, will reach down — way down — and pat Jose Altuve, the Houston Astros’ second baseman, on the back, as he did Wednesday after an RBI double in the third inning, and the game will go on. But the wonder remains.
It is a wonder Judge and Altuve even play the same sport, let alone that they are two of its greatest practitioners — the leading candidates for AL Most Valuable Player this season and the engines of their respective teams’ offences in the ALCS, a series the Yankees lead, three games to two, entering Friday night’s Game 6 at Houston’s Minute Maid Park.
Judge, 25, is a six-foot-seven, 280-pound mountain of muscle, the likes of which the sport has never seen, a National Football League tight end in Yankee pinstripes, a slugger who set a rookie record this season with 52 home runs, including the longest and the hardest-hit of the year.
He is a primary reason the Yankees stand one win away from the World Series, having gone four for nine with two homers, two doubles and six RBI, and contributing a couple of dazzling defensive plays, as the Yankees swept Games 3, 4 and 5 at Yankee Stadium this week.
Altuve, meanwhile, is listed at five-foot-six, 165 pounds, but acknowledges he is actually fivefive. A 27-year-old Venezuelan, he is a wizard with both the bat and the glove and a speeding blur on the bases, a three-time AL batting champ, the first player in history to lead his league in hits outright four straight seasons.
He hit three homers in Game 1 of the Division Series against Boston — joining a short list that includes Babe Ruth and Albert Pujols, of players who have done that in a post-season game — and almost single-handedly willed the Astros to victories over the Yankees in Games 1 and 2 in Houston, scoring the go-ahead runs in each with daring base running and robbing the Yankees of hits in the field.
“I don’t really care how tall he is. It’s his ability that speaks for itself,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said of Altuve. “He’s the most consistent player in the league, in a league that has elite performers anywhere … Five-six, six-six, 100 pounds, 200 pounds, 300 pounds — it’s more about what he does, not about the package it comes from.”
But if Judge and Altuve are the focal points of their respective lineups, the ones you never want to see at the plate at the biggest moments, they are also the largest black holes, sucking in their teams’ entire production, when they disappear.
In the Yankees’ two losses in Houston, Judge went one for seven with three strikeouts, leaving his post-season batting average to that point at .129 (4 for 31) with 19 strikeouts. In the Astros’ three losses in the Bronx, Altuve was 0 for 10 and scored just one run.
Yankees manager Joe Girardi suggested Altuve and Judge, as outliers by virtue of their respective sizes, can be victims of strike-zone biases on the part of home-plate umpires, with umpires calling strikes on Judge that are actually below his strike zone, and on Altuve on pitches that are actually high. Some advanced metrics back up that claim, with Judge, according to ESPN, ranking third in low strikes “framed against” — low balls that are called strikes.
“It’s part of what’s going to happen to him because he’s so tall,” Girardi said. “I think there are some pitches that were called on him during the series that haven’t necessarily been strikes. There’s a big difference between 1 and 1 (count) and 2 and 0, (or) 2 and 1. There’s a big difference in the way it changes an at-bat … If you’re an umpire that sees 500 pitches a week, in your mind you’re going to have an idea of what’s a strike and not a strike. And the rare bodies are the Altuves and the Judges. So a lot of times they might get more or (fewer) strikes called on them because (their strike zones are) different.”
In order to reach their current status, both Judge and Altuve had to overcome plenty of built-in biases within the sport about their respective body types. Position players of Judge’s size rarely last in the majors, their strike zones too big, their swings too long. Players of Altuve’s size hardly ever make it to the big leagues, with 5-5 Freddie Patek, who retired in 1981, being the last.
When Altuve was 16, the Astros rejected him at a tryout because of his size, but Altuve’s father begged the team to give his son a second tryout, and the Astros eventually signed him for just $15,000. And despite hitting .327 with an .867 OPS in the minors, none of the leading prospect-ranking websites named him among the top 100 prospects in the game.
Even as he became one of the best hitters in the game, Altuve has had to deal with inherent doubts, puzzled looks, whispered jabs and even outright jokes about his size.
“I’ve had to battle for every single hit,” he once told ESPN.com. “As soon as I cross the white line, I feel the same size as everyone else.”
There is a mutual admiration between Judge and Altuve, born of the understanding that despite their obvious gifts, neither can do what the other does. They spoke at length at the All-Star Game in July and have connected again in fleeting moments during the ALCS.