The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)

Is Aaron Judge Fred Lynn all over again?

- Owen Canfield

Remember to fly Old Glory today, Flag Day. June is bustn’ out all over, with its blistering­ly hot weather and Aaron Judge is bustin’ out all over with his smoking hot bat.

With his 6-foot, seven-inch, 282-pound body, the young Yankee slugger, who hit his 22nd homer of the year Monday night against the Angels in California, has also demonstrat­ed high-level skill with the glove in right field, a bulls eye arm and trustworth­y instincts on the bases. He is the talk of baseball and should be.

Maybe you stayed up to watch Monday’s game. I saw Judge whiff twice and draw a walk. Then, even my usually reliable coffee

failed me and I fell asleep and missed the best part, namely:

Aaron came up again and launched his 22nd HR over the fence some 430 feet away. (W.C. Fields would have referred to that one as “a mere bag of shells’’ since Judge had hit one 495 feet the day before.)

That provided the winning margin for the division-leading Yanks, who won their sixth game in a row.

Judge’s parents were in the stands, having driven some distance from Linden, Calif., in the northern part of the state, to Anaheim in Orange County, way down south, to see their suddenly famous son play ball. Play he did.

As noted, everyone’s talking about the 25-year-old from California. Except the man himself, who deflects most questions about himself to laudatory comments about teammates and the team. You can bet your new hat Patty and Wayne Judge, both school teachers, talk him up when with their friends. I learned from an Internet story they adopted Aaron when he was one day old. He has an older adopted brother, John. He signed with the Yanks out of Fresno State for a bonus of $1.8 million, according to my research.

I’m thinking it may be too early in the season and in Judge’s career for comparison­s to be made to Ruth, Mantle and some of the other great sluggers of the past. Mantle was known for his mighty homers and his other baseball gifts. The Mick clubbed some of the longest in history and Judge has displayed the same type of power.

As I type this on Tuesday, well before the start of the Yankees-Angels game in Anaheim, The Kid was leading the league in all three triple crown categories – homers, RBIs and batting average.

Could a rookie win a triple crown? Not likely, but then, Judge is an unlikely superstar and leader.

Remember when Fred Lynn played center field for the Joe Buzas’s Bristol Red Sox and Jim Rice played left field? Rac Slider was the manager of that 1973 Eastern League team. Lynn and Rice were stars, both of them and two years later they led the Boston Red Sox to the American League pennant and into a memorable World Series against the Reds.

That was the year Lynn won both the Rookie of the Year and the Most Valuable Player awards. Rice was not far behind in the voting in either individual competitio­n.

Now people, especially Yankee fans, are wondering with delicious anticipati­on, if Aaron Judge is 2017’s Fred Lynn.

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