Aaron’s feats are stuff of legend
MIAMI — As huge as New York is — as special as it is — it was Hamburg during the first half of this baseball season, and Aaron Judge was The Beatles. He was doing this brilliant stuff in the largest way — his hulking stature and his oversized accomplishments — yet it felt as if this was his early stuff, his incubation period, and that outside New York this could still be viewed as a fad married to big-city hype. Then Monday night’s Home Run Derby was like John and Paul, George and Ringo boarding that Pan Am flight for America. The secret was out. This was not spin. This was not the publicity machine gone amok. In the Year of the Home Run — competing against seven others who were masters of this brutal art form — the 6-foot-7 Judge was playing a different game. His competition was not — by the end — Justin Bour or Cody Bellinger or Miguel Sano. It was imagination. It was how far and how often and to how many different areas and in how many different ways he could launch a ball beyond a fence. He had folks in the same profession as him, sharing the same clubhouse, gawking at his feats, wondering aloud how a human being could flip a ball 450 feet to the opposite field so repeatedly. “Goose bumps,” said Tony Clark of witnessing the event. Clark not only heads the Players Association, but played baseball at 6-foot-8, knows the difficulty of synchronizing levers that long and just how easily the process could get out of order. “It is why you just don’t have many position players 6-foot-6 or bigger. It is difficult to get your body consistently in position to execute the same swing over and over again. I had it in windows of time, but never all the time. I’ve never seen it this consistently for a player of this size this early in his career.” Judge has been doing this all year. In plain sight. It has been documented and dissected. He has reached the cover of Sports Illustrated and a skit on “The Tonight Show.” Yet, of all things, Judge had to leave New York to substantiate it all. The largest Home Run Derby audience since 2009 tuned in and, trust me, it was not to watch Charlie Blackmon. It was to see if the man could match the legend — the country wanted to Judge for itself.
And the verdict came, in all places, Little Havana. He delivered the long-ball version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and then “She Loves You” and then “Can’t Buy Me Love” and then … one hit after another. Boom. Boom. Boom.
What does Julian Marsh tell Sawyer in “42nd Street”? “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”
Judge, whose in-season home is a hotel in Times Square, bracketed by Broadway, had to leave 42nd Street and head south to put on the most muscle-flexing comingout party ever. He did so on the site of the old Orange Bowl, in a stadium whose most distinctive feature is an LSD trip of a home run sculpture in center field.
Judge went out a rookie. He came back a star. The biggest in the sport — literally and metaphorically. Judge’s Derby performance turned anti-climactic the actual All-Star Game 24 hours later in which he went 0-for-3.
“Aaron’s presence is larger than life,” Clark said. “His personality, his humility, his respect for his teammates and his peers. He is all that is right about the game.”
Or, as commissioner Rob Manfred, said: “Aaron Judge has been absolutely phenomenal. There is no other word to describe it. He is a tremendous talent on the field. A really appealing off-the-field personality. The kind of player that can become the face of the game.”
That is the next tightrope. The world coming fast — Judge-mania. So far, so great. He has handled praise, criticism and ever-expanding fame like the batting practice pitches he mauled Monday. He has shown the opposite of runaway ego. He has invoked pride and protection from teammates and opponents rather than jealousy by being respectful and earnest.
In the aftermath of the derby, Judge praised the vanquished for motivating him to up his game, shared the moment with batting practice pitcher Danilo Valiente, and when he was asked what it was like to hit a ball 513 feet, Judge pondered and paused, and then paused some more, some more before saying: “I got nothing. (Pause.) I got nothing.”
He hits them long, keeps the answers short, dismisses flattery, embraces camaraderie. He has done this all year on what is usually the most singular stage in baseball: Yankee Stadium, where he’s emerged as the MVP and Rookie of the Year frontrunner and most-talked-about player in the game. Yet he needed to leave that Hamburg-like hamlet and stray far from Broadway to go from a star to THE STAR.
The fans came out or tuned in to see if this was all real. They said to Judge: Please Please Me. And he hit every note.