NEW YORK -- The New York Yankees' season was crumbling again, like it had every year since Aaron Judge first arrived in the Bronx, bounding too fast toward another failure. From April through September, Judge had lived what looked like the idealized baseball life, full of acclaim and records, so prolific that his name and a special number in baseball lore became intertwined to the point of indistinguishability. Judge, all the while, never paid it any attention. While the world trained its collective eye on him, on his achievements, he was looking at this moment, October in Yankee Stadium. And it was playing out so much differently in reality than it did in his mind's eye.
Nothing about his behavior changed, not as the outs left in the season whittled away, as the truth of his disappointing postseason contributed to the funereal atmosphere of the ballpark, as the specter of his future and whether he'd ever again wear a Yankees uniform sharpened into focus. Judge could have pirouetted in the outfield to catch glances of all the familiar sights of his triumph, done something to acknowledge the emotion, the pure sort of love that only the most super of stars feels with the city that deifies his rise. But no. That would have been a betrayal of himself.
Judge ascended to the top of his sport through rigor and exactitude, convinced in his belief that a blinkered, perfectly straightforward existence, as crisp as the pinstripes on his jersey, would deliver him the championship that mattered to him far more than the obsession of others. The ninth inning arrived, just as 170 other ninth innings had this year, and the context of it, the urgency, did nothing to alter his ingrained habits. He jogged to right field. Warmed up his arm. Threw the ball into the bleachers for a fan to cherish. Watched the Yankees record three outs. Loped back into the dugout. Stepped into the on-deck circle. Took a few swings. Moved into the batter's box. Inhaled a deep breath. Swung and missed. Stared at strike two. And topped a slider back to the pitcher to record the final out of the Yankees' 2022 season, the year that was his until it wasn't.
Before Judge made it back to the dugout, "New York, New York" had started to play on the stadium's loudspeakers. If he could make it here, he could make it anywhere, and no longer was that a hypothetical. His season was over. Free agency beckons. Judge is the best homegrown Yankee since Derek Jeter -- "He's the planet," said CC Sabathia, a mentor and former Yankees teammate, "around which everything orbits" -- and this offseason, he will choose where he plays next. For someone as disciplined as Judge, someone who says the same prayer of thankfulness and grace every time he goes to right field to start a game, who venerates stability and sameness, this winter, and the manifold unknowns it holds, will tilt that planet off-axis more than anything to this point in his career.
Judge has spent his entire professional baseball life as a Yankee. In May of his rookie year, the famously traditional guardians of Yankee Stadium built a special section, the Judge's Chambers, replete with wood paneling, in the right-field stands. This season, his pursuit of the American League home run record that had stood for six decades -- and before that was held by Babe Ruth -- earned the attention of millions and a multiplicative number of dollars. In six years, Judge and the Yankees have become a pairing that feels as perfectly suited as any in baseball.
"He exemplifies what being a New York Yankee is all about," Yankees first baseman Anthony Rizzo said. "His demeanor, the way he handles himself on the field, the way he handles himself off the field."
Until Judge's successful chase of a record-setting 62nd home run, the Yankees' brand had not been so closely associated with present-day excellence since their 2009 championship, a fact that should theoretically make his return a matter of when rather than if. And yet there is nothing linear about the winter ahead. Los Angeles offers sunshine and winning, San Francisco an easy car ride for his dutiful parents to make from the small central California town where he grew up, a borough-hop to Queens to play for the Mets an option if Judge enjoys the trappings of New York without the traps of being a Yankee. It is a mess of curves and twists, of sales pitches and posturing, of fantastical amounts of money and the duties that dollars connote. Judge, the son of two educators, already is a richer man than he could ever have imagined. He was making $19 million this year and, over the course of the season, played himself into a deal that should exceed $300 million.
That's still true, even after Judge went 5-for-36 in seven postseason games. That final out capped a 1-for-16 showing in a humiliating American League Championship Series sweep by Houston. Two dreadful weeks won't stop any owner from remembering what Judge did this season to get the Yankees there in the first place. In the second-unfriendliest hitting environment of the past 30 years by OPS -- only 2014's .700 was lower than this season's .706, and it has been a half-century since a worse batting average and on-base percentage -- Judge was as head and shoulders above his peers in hitting as he is in stature.
But as scattered boos rained down from Yankee Stadium, as they did once on Jeter, they were a stark reminder that being a Yankee is byzantine, obtuse -- antithetical to Judge's simple, Point A-to-Point B approach. It's what complicates his return, which across the industry is seen -- perhaps fallaciously -- as a fait accompli: Even if he is built for New York, is New York built for him?
Amid the chase this fall, the 30-year-old Judge made it clear, whenever he spoke, that wins mattered more to him than home runs, that he'd happily eschew the aesthetics for something more substantive. He operated on a fixed ideology: The more wins, the better the team. The better the team, the likelier to end a World Series drought that had reached a dozen years. However much the home runs captivated and enthralled, they were only a means to an end that goes beyond 62 and centers on 28, the number of the next championship for the Yankees.
As the home runs piled up, excellence metamorphosed into a quest and history became actuality, Judge addressed individual achievement in plural -- us, we, our. His allergy to speaking in the first person endured as he led baseball with 131 RBIs, 133 runs, a .425 on-base percentage, a .686 slugging percentage, 391 total bases and 11.5 FanGraphs wins above replacement. All the while, as he built this monolith of a season, he harkened back to his days in college, where his coach fined players $1 every time they said "I" or "me" or "my."
It's one reason the Yankees are perfect for Judge, who sees himself as a piece of a machine, a cog that had might as well go nameless, fit for the only team whose jerseys identify players only by number. Throughout ballparks this summer and fall, jerseys with his No. 99 on the back filled the stands.
But this winter, Judge faces a decision he'll have to own. There is no "we" in free agency. It is him, alone, in complete control of his own actions, which isn't necessarily an unfamiliar position. He authored one of the most remarkable regular seasons in the history of a century-and-a-half-old game against the backdrop of rejecting the Yankees' seven-year, $213.5 million contract extension offer during spring training. Even then, Judge revealed a glimpse of the self-assuredness that will have to carry him through this winter.
On that April day, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman went public with details of the offer, peeving Judge. Rizzo, with whom he has grown close in a short time, inquired about it soon thereafter. Judge's response still sticks with him today.
"You don't think I'm worth more?"
THIS SUPPRESSION OF SELF, deeply ingrained in Judge, is represented by another number that's part of his lore: 40. At the beginning of his freshman year at Fresno State, he went to a dinner at the house of his new coach, Mike Batesole. The team sat on chairs in the backyard. He looked at Judge, whom he had offered a scholarship after watching him take three swings.
"Judge, stand up. Did you pitch a complete game in your state final in high school?"
Yes, Judge said.
"Did you end up getting the home run to give you guys the lead?"
Yes, Judge said.
"Well, guess what?" Batesole said. "Nobody here cares. So sit down."
What mattered, Batesole told his team, was not one person but 40 -- the 35 players and five coaches. Judge embraced the essence of Batesole's program and soon established himself as a favorite of the coaching staff. During fall conditioning, the team would play 5-on-5 touch football. In the first game, Judge's team ran a wide receiver screen for him. He had played high school football, but nobody expected him to cut "like Barry Sanders," Batesole said, this inimitable combination of size, quickness and agility. Batesole soon nicknamed him "Big Ass Judge" and still, to this day, calls him "Big Ass."
In Batesole, Judge found a coach whose principles sounded like someone else's he knew: his father, Wayne, the head high school basketball coach for three years in Linden, California, Judge's hometown. Wayne had met his wife, Patty, while studying at Fresno State, like Aaron later did his wife, Samantha Bracksieck. Wayne and Patty adopted Judge the day after he was born and lived in Linden, a farming town of 1,729 about 80 miles from San Francisco.
From ages 10 to 12, Judge attended Wayne's practices as a ball boy. He saw the stars and the bench players, the guys who would run through a wall for the team and the troublemakers who needed reeling in. He noticed how his dad looked for what might motivate the individuals on the team and who led and how. Patty ran leadership activities and camps for students. Judge studied the intricacies of body language. Even today, his ability to know when someone is down or needs a pick-me-up astonishes teammates.
Less than a week after the Yankees selected him with the 32nd pick of the 2013 draft, the team invited Judge to take batting practice at Oakland Coliseum, where it was facing the first-place A's. Judge walked into the clubhouse and saw Mariano Rivera and Robinson Cano and didn't make eye contact or say a word. He sat at the table in the middle of the room by himself until the one person his size nearby sidled up next to him.
"Hey, man," Sabathia said. "What's going on? You're from around Stockton? I grew up in Vallejo."
Sabathia was a six-time All-Star, the linchpin of the Yankees' pitching staff, the fulcrum of the clubhouse, in the middle of a $161 million contract. He was still around when Judge debuted three years later as a top prospect and struck out 42 times in 84 at-bats. Sabathia continued to dispense wisdom, as did Brett Gardner, Mark Teixeira, Chase Headley, Brian McCann, Matt Holliday. Judge kept a mental diary of how they handled slumps, teammate strife, meetings. He noted phrases that landed and others that didn't. He studied the game like they did, with long film sessions, and tried to work even harder in the batting cage, capable of handling in his 20s what their 30-something bodies couldn't.
This was the blueprint, though Judge knew he needed to tweak it to suit his needs. He worked obsessively on his swing, vowing never to forget his unsightly batting average in his first taste of the big leagues, .179. In his first full season, he cracked 52 home runs, won Rookie of the Year and finished second in MVP voting. Judge struggled to stay healthy, missing time in 2018 (broken wrist), 2019 (oblique strain) and 2020 (cracked rib and collapsed lung). He pared back the number of swings he took, embraced the pursuit of playing every day, trusted that the skills he displayed in 2017 hadn't eroded. They were simply dormant and needed nurturing. Age would not ruin him.
Judge played in 148 games last season and followed with a career-best 157 this year. He hit his 60th home run in the Yankees' 147th game, looking as if he'd blow past the AL record with ease, then managed just one more, to tie Roger Maris, over his next 13 games. The season was coming to an end, a new milestone was no longer a certainty, but Judge held firm to his process, convinced that what had taken him to this point, had kept him healthy, would help him, and more than that the Yankees, prevail. Even when it looked like he needed a break, when frustration bubbled to the surface in Game 1 of a doubleheader against the Texas Rangers on Oct. 4, he found comfort in the philosophies of Batesole and his parents and his teammates: The nobility of the work, ensuring it's for the benefit of others, would always matter more than records and numbers and ghosts.
"Yes, he's aware of his statistics," Yankees ace Gerrit Cole said. "But why would you get to a certain point in the year and say now I'm going to make it about something else when the whole time it's been about X, Y and Z?
"If he were not to have hit 62, he would've been more disappointed that he wouldn't have been able to deliver it for everyone else than that he wouldn't have the record. It's not that he necessarily says anything. He just has a way of looking at you, like, 'Hey, man, I understand everything that's going on. And I'm right here with you.' I do feel like we share those moments good and bad. For me, there's just a comforting feeling to know you're not in the battle alone."
What his teammates might not have realized is that Judge, too, found solace in them. "That's where my strength lies," he said. "It lies in the guys in this room that I can count on on a daily basis, day in and day out, who are grinding just like I am and having tough days just like I am."
When 62 arrived -- in the 161st of a 162-game season, Game 2 of the doubleheader, top of the first, hitting leadoff, a 27-year-old named Jesus Tinoco on the mound -- Judge was ready. An 88 mph slider hung in the zone, and Judge's hands moved back to load, then forward to attack, and it looked good off the bat, good enough that the dugout almost instantaneously started to empty. By the time it landed in the first row of the left-field bleachers, the fans were screaming and Judge smiling and pinstriped jerseys moving toward home plate to greet Judge as if this were some little league game and not the 5,150th home run in the big leagues this season.
There were duties that he would fulfill because it's what was expected of him. On his way to a news conference, with cameramen walking backward to capture the full stroll, he held Sam's hand. He feigned comfort, but having everyone want a little sliver of your moment, your life -- the very thing this winter is bound to become -- was far more obligation than desire. At the news conference, Sam and Patty held hands, seated next to Wayne and Judge's agents, Page Odle and Dave Matranga. They beamed for him -- and maybe also for their good luck, as this chase around the country, the previous two weeks of which they witnessed in person, wasn't for naught after all.
Eventually, they decamped to the field, where Wayne saw Boone and said: "Thanks for putting him in the lineup." Boone hugged Judge. He respects Judge for his talent and loves him for who he is. Cameras started to click -- photos of Judge and his inner circle; of Judge and Cole, who that night had set the single-season strikeout record for the Yankees; and eventually of Judge, Cole and an admirer.
"I'm just a fan of greatness," said Micah Parsons, the Dallas Cowboys linebacker who in two NFL seasons has himself tasted it. He came to Arlington, Texas, to watch Judge's pursuit of 62 because he likes baseball, but more than that, because he likes what Judge represents. Athletes across sports share stories. They commiserate. The pursuit of excellence, the effort they deliver, the sacrifices they make -- it matters not if the ball is round or oblong. They understand the weight of transcendence and will go out of their way to celebrate those in the fraternity with the temerity to pursue it anyway.
"It takes something to be great and it takes something to make history," Parsons said. "It doesn't just happen. A guy bets on himself, shows that [he's] going to be the best player? Now that takes guts. ... I just really just love how people overcome adversity. Sometimes it takes more than people around you. It takes will within."
ON THE NIGHT Judge hit No. 62, Josiah Trevino had a gift for him. He asked his dad, Jose, the Yankees' All-Star catcher, if he could give Judge some fruit snacks. Trevino humored Josiah, taking him into the clubhouse, handing him an ice cream cone, figuring that Judge was nowhere to be found and that they'd see him tomorrow. Then they heard a voice.
"Who's that walking right there?"
Josiah, 4, froze.
"Judge walks from his locker to where the clubbies' office is and hangs out with my son for three minutes," Trevino said. "My son doesn't understand. But I understand. This dude just hit one of the biggest home runs in baseball history, and he's taking time to talk to my son."
For all of the big things Judge does with his bat, what ingratiates him to his teammates is something different: the little things, the shared moments, which prompt them to speak with a rare sort of devotion. They marvel at the generosity he shows daily, laud the discipline shown by his words and the substance behind them. He really does believe his credo of us, we, our over I, me, my.
Third baseman Josh Donaldson wanted to grab a shake in the clubhouse and needed a straw. Judge insisted on getting it for him. Catcher Kyle Higashioka was eating dinner without a drink. Judge grabbed him a bottle of water from the refrigerator. Whenever a batter makes the last out of an inning, Judge wants to bring his glove and hat onto the field so he need not return to the dugout and hunt for them. They're tiny gestures, minuscule, that feel big.
"He just never takes anything for granted," Higashioka said. "Maybe that example of leadership could possibly have been taken from Jeter, where it's like he just knows his responsibilities as a leader and as a teammate and always just -- I feel like he's here to serve. In order to lead, you need to know how to serve. He's constantly taking care of all of us when at the end of the day it should be all of us doing whatever he needs and catering to his every whim. But you always feel like with him, he's always here to take care of you."
When Trevino arrived at the Yankees' Florida complex after being acquired in a trade this spring, Judge was among the first to welcome him. Two days later, as camp was set to break, Trevino asked him to point out the head clubhouse attendant so he could tip him. Judge told Trevino not to worry about it. He'd take care of it.
Quickly Judge became Josiah's favorite player. In the final weeks of the chase, when he'd visit with his father after games, he'd be wearing Judge's 99 instead of Trevino's 39. When asked who he wants to be for Halloween this year, Josiah said Judge. He changed his swing, too, finishing with his hand near his face to be more like Judge.
"If that's the one guy my son wants to root for and have posters of in his room," Trevino said, "I will buy him wallpaper with Aaron Judge on it."
Judge maneuvers about a clubhouse freely and comfortably, dapping, back-patting, sharing a smile or a laugh. His social acumen is something to behold. He talked college football with Tyler Wade and Aaron Hicks on a Sunday morning in September. He controlled the music in the room, a job he inherited as a rookie, a rare responsibility for a first-year player to earn, one of which he still proved worthy toward the conclusion of this season when tapped his phone for Tony! Toni! Toné!'s "Anniversary." The song ended:
I've got to find out what was mine again
My heart is saying that it's my time again
And I have faith that I will shine again / I have faith in me
On my own
On my own
On my own
Later that afternoon, on Sept. 18, Judge hit home runs 58 and 59 in Milwaukee. The Yankees came back from a 3-0 first-inning deficit to beat the Brewers 12-8.
"He just touches everyone in here in a different way," Rizzo said. "'Hey, man, how are you?' He acknowledges people. He's just really good at bringing guys together."
Three days earlier, Judge had scheduled a team-bonding activity for the off day. He had gotten everyone tickets and transportation to a suite at Fiserv Forum for a Post Malone concert. It was supposed to be an escape, though after two or three drinks the talk invariably went back to baseball, their commonality.
"I'm with these guys more than my family," Judge said in an interview with ESPN earlier this month. "I'm here at the field on a day game, 8 a.m. until 4, 5. And especially at night games, I'm getting here at 1 and not leaving until midnight. I'm with these guys every single day. And we got to have a good working relationship. We got to be able to be real with each other. I feel like sometimes if you don't get to know your teammates that well, if I try to say something to somebody that I don't know, 'Hey, pick it up,' they can be like, 'Well, you just pick it up. You don't know what I'm going through. You don't know what I got to go with on a daily basis.'
"Doing stuff away from the field and kind of bringing us together has always been just something I think in the long haul just makes for better chemistry -- makes for a better team environment so that when we are going through those dog days, we got something to go back on. 'Hey, remember the times we had here, stuff we're doing there?' It just brings everybody together."
Soon after Judge returned home to New York following the conclusion of the regular season, his wife told him: "We've got dinner at Tao at 9. Be ready to leave by 8." Judge didn't know that Sam had set up an evening on the town to celebrate him and all he'd done this season. The Yankees had held a get-together after Judge hit his 62nd home run at Globe Life Field in Texas, but this was the more formal celebration, one attended by almost everyone on the Yankees' roster, a show of unanimity rare in a sport in which clubhouses are cleaved by ethnicity, age, religion, temperament. Perhaps it's only natural that a group would coalesce around history, but that assumption would be a misread. The chase, the record -- they were secondary, more correlated than causative. The Yankees were there for Judge because Judge is there for them.
ONE TIME, WHEN Judge was out in New York City, a UPS driver saw his inimitable silhouette and started to gawk. He didn't stop quickly enough and rear-ended the car in front of him. The man was fine -- maybe more than fine, because he'd soon meet Aaron Judge, the undisputed king of New York sports, a true star in one of the last places that can be called a baseball town.
"I just try to be me," Judge said. "Just be me. Be real with people. Be understanding. Just try to be a normal person, like we all are. I don't try to go out there and be somebody I'm not. When I see somebody crash their car, I ask if they're all right and then keep it moving."
Sometimes Sabathia encourages Judge to loosen up -- to pimp a home run or to be more like the younger, less-cautious version of himself who, after a Game 2 win of the 2018 AL Division Series, exited Fenway Park with a boombox on his shoulder blasting "New York, New York." The Yankees lost the next two games at home, and though the best explanation is that Boston was better and this wasn't the baseball gods conspiring to punish him, Judge has no desire to put himself in that position again.
"That's not me, C," he tells Sabathia. "You know that's not me."
Who is he then? As much as the 2022 regular season offered one answer and the postseason another, never will Judge so actively telegraph his priorities as he does this winter. Free agency is about choices. He can choose to set $300 million as the starting bid for teams interested in the preeminent hitter in baseball. He can choose to seek the captaincy of the Yankees, an honor rarely bestowed by the organization, as a contingency of his return. He can choose to be where it's sunny or where his parents don't have to bebop across the country to see him or where ownership considers money no object in pursuit of a championship. He can choose to be the guy without necessarily having to be the only guy, as he was far too often this season.
"You can plan for the future and you can have set goals, have a game plan on what you want to accomplish," Judge said earlier this month. "But I'm not going to get to that end goal without every single day putting in the work to build myself up to get there. You know? So when I have the mindset of what can I do now? What can I do today to get myself in the best position to help us win the game tomorrow? The noise early in the season when it's April and you're not hitting that well and people are booing you and it's like, 'You know, you should have taken the contract.' Well, I can put that all aside because, guess what? Now I'm in the box. And I got a job to do."
Season over, some goals reached and others unmet, no longer does Judge have the solace of the batter's box, the dangling carrot of obliging others, to calm him. Free agency is a different kind of game. This is his show and his alone, and it's confusing: for the Yankees and their disillusioned fan base, for teams that dare to dream of a lineup that features No. 99, for a baseball world that is putty in Judge's hands. As he was when his record chase united baseball fans well beyond the Bronx, Judge can be anyone's. The Yankees can offer him permanence: in their lore, in his clubhouse, in a financial bracket that makes this year's salary look paltry, in the captaincy. The other handful of teams that might consider offering him $40 million-plus a year will get the advantage of reminding him that the Yankees once upon a time indeed didn't believe he was worth more -- that they are the clean slate without a career full of postseasons gone awry.
All season, he parried questions about free agency, insisting he paid it no mind and would address it when the time came. And here was that time, in the aftermath of a Game 4 loss to the Astros. Judge slowly walked toward a backdrop adorned with the Yankees' logo, steadied himself, stole a quick breath and did something he hadn't this year -- or much at all in his seven seasons with the Yankees: talked about himself with barely a mention of us, we, our.
In one breath, he said, his goal is to remain a Yankee ("I've been clear about that since I first wore the pinstripes"), and in another, he waxed on about his teammates as if he were already gone ("I'm going to miss a lot of those guys"). And maybe he meant those teammates expected to leave in free agency, but who could tell? This was new, uncomfortable, not the time or place, with the aftershocks of the Yankees' collapse still reverberating, to take away anything meaningful. Though Judge spoke mostly in platitudes, as he's wont to do when camera lights illuminate his face and microphones capture his words, those in his orbit were definitive about wanting Judge's return. "I don't even want to think about the alternative right now," Boone said.
In the offices of Cashman and team president Randy Levine and especially owner Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees' brain trust will weigh the heavy cost of retaining Judge with perhaps an even heavier cost of losing him. Players like Judge don't leave the Yankees, at least not of their own volition, and the idea that the record-setting player and presumed MVP -- the player who occasionally arrives at the ballpark wearing a T-shirt or hoodie with four words across the front: "New York or Nowhere" -- would abscond? That's embarrassment on top of devastation.
If, in fact, this was the end -- those 10 minutes in front of the backdrop Judge's final act as a Yankee -- as much as he seemingly veered off course, talking in the first person, it wasn't entirely out of character. When the Nos. 28 and 40 are more important than 62, it's no surprise Judge bore the blame for the series, for his poor performance dooming the Yankees. "That's all on me," Judge said, "for not stepping up when the team needed it." As captain in reverence if not name, Judge wore the failure of the collective, their burdens his duty. It was his gift -- maybe his last gift -- to everyone in the clubhouse who appreciates Aaron Judge less for what he is than who he is.