Because Aaron Judge bet on himself.

Aaron Judge’s home runs announce themselves more loudly and reach the seats more quickly than anyone’s, and no position player so large—he’s a physically dense six-footseven—has ever played such a brutal and refined version of baseball at once. When he’s injured, as Judge was for portions of the 2018, 2019, and 2020 seasons, it seems like evidence that a person in a body his size cannot play the way he does.

When Judge is right, his full-spectrum brilliance somehow seems even more impossible.

So when Judge did what he did this year with the Yankees—break Roger Maris’s single-season American League homerun record with 62 and lead the league in RBIs, runs, walks, and slugging and on-base percentage with a .311 batting average—it was both astonishing on the merits and very much the sort of season he’d always been on the verge of having. This was the year.

Making it the more delicious was the small fact that on opening day, Judge declined a seven-year contract extension. The contract, while rich, would have been less so than those signed by superstars Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, and Bryce Harper in recent years, and Judge believed, rightly it turned out, that he was their peer. This year, Judge not only held the attention of the nation’s addled and seething sports fans but also bet on himself and won in a way that figures to land him a far bigger deal as a free agent this offseason, either from the Yankees or some other team. The last bit is the big one. By refusing to take less than he felt he deserved and delivering as he did, Judge carried the Yankees and stuck it to them at the same time—giving both Yankees fans and Yankees haters something to admire.