IT’S A ROCK STAR RIDE
Aaron Judge now is Dwight Gooden then. It is that kind of moment in New York sports. His home runs now are what Gooden’s strikeouts were like in 1985, when Gooden finished 24-4 and we had the K Corner up there and out there at old Shea instead of the Judge’s Chambers at the new Stadium. The difference is that we used to have to wait five days for Gooden, at 20, to get another start and try to strike out the world, and remind you of a young and righthanded Koufax. Judge? Sometimes it seems as if he hits another one out, and occasionally tries to hit one to the moon, every single day.
There have been other moments for young New York stars between the young Gooden and Judge, you know there have been. We had one with Matt Harvey, when he was the Dark Knight of Gotham and gave Mets fans somebody to watch again, before just about everything under the sun began to go wrong for him, as fast as his fastball used to be. It will be four years ago next month that Harvey started an All-Star Game at Citi Field. It already seems like four lifetimes ago.
We had Linsanity the year before at Madison Square Garden, a moment that not only didn’t last for Jeremy Lin, but didn’t even last into the next Knicks season. So of course there are no guarantees with Aaron Judge, the kind of great big action hero that the late Chuck Daly used to talk about when he was describing not just the talent of Shaquille O’Neal, but the appeal of O’Neal. Judge could go into a bad slump, or baseball could find a hole in that great big swing of his. Or he could get hurt.
For now, though, the player in baseball that everybody is talking about and everybody wants to watch is a home run kid for the New York Yankees, the kind of home run kid that Mickey Mantle once was. Shane Spencer once had a home run September when he was 26, when he showed up to join what might have been the greatest Yankees team of them all to hit 10 September home runs, three of them grand slams.
It is different with Judge. We are moving up fast on half-a-season of this with him, a halfseason when he has been the most exciting and most valuable player in baseball, even in this time when the game seems to have as much young talent as it has ever had. Bryce Harper hasn’t gone anywhere. He showed up in the city this week to hit home runs, on what people continue to assume will be his own spot in Aaron Judge’s outfield at Yankee Stadium. Mike Trout, who has been hurt lately, continues to perform like one of the best all-around players in all of baseball history. Truly, Trout’s skill set and his numbers are most comparable to Mantle’s at this same point in Mantle’s career.
But Judge is a Yankee at Yankee Stadium as the Yankees are making the kind of noise in baseball they haven’t made in a long time. The real noise starts with the crack of his bat. Everybody knows what Gary Sanchez did at the end of last season, and what he was starting to do this season before he got hurt the other night on the West Coast. If you combine his numbers for 2016 and a 2017 season shortened for him because of an April biceps injury, Sanchez has hit 31 home runs in 91 games, and has hit 11 in 38 games this season. It’s hardly unreasonable to think that if he’d played a full season so far, his home run total wouldn’t be all that far away from Judge’s. Still: Judge has become the rock star, with 23 home runs that included a 3-run shot in Oakland on Friday night, through 63 games. He came out of Friday night with a 1.160 OPS and a .713 slugging percentage and a batting average of .339. These were the kinds of numbers Barry Bonds used to have across the board, in those first brilliant seasons in San Francisco especially, before he bulked and BALCO-ed up.
In a baseball world in which we obsess more and more about things like exit velocity, Judge has made this kind of grand entrance across nearly the first three months of this baseball season. And he has made us all remember what it was like the year when Gooden was 24-4; when every start of his became an event, even at Shea; when you were afraid to miss a start because that might be the night when he was going to be the first Met to pitch a no-hitter or strike out 20 guys.
Judge has been that kind of moment, one you want to last the way it didn’t really last for Gooden, for all the well-documented reasons, because of drugs and injuries. A year and a half after that ’85 season, he began the ’87 season not at Shea Stadium in Queens but a rehab facility in Manhattan known as Smithers. Doc’s career wasn’t over. He would eventually pitch his no-hitter for the Yankees. But things were never as good for him as they were in 1985, when he was 20, and he made the whole baseball world watch him.
Now we get a quiet and respectful slugger whom Joe Girardi compares to a defensive end. We get the Judge’s Chambers and the reaction shot from his teammates in the dugout the day Judge nearly hit a baseball 500 feet at Yankee Stadium. We get this home run spring from the kid. We get this moment. One we can only hope is built to last now that all this time after we had a doctor in the house in baseball New York, we’ve
got a Judge. Capital J.