Judge joining Roger Maris and Babe Ruth as the only A.L. players with 60-homer seasons showed once again that no team does big moments quite like the Yankees.
It was one of those nights, the kind that reminds you of the fundamental rule of the last baseball century: There are the Yankees, and then there is everyone else. From sepia tones to high definition, no other team does history, then or now, with such grandeur and resonance.
In the ninth inning on Tuesday in the Bronx, Aaron Judge became the third player in American League history to reach 60 home runs in a season. The others were also Yankees: Babe Ruth in 1927 and Roger Maris in 1961, and both had slugging teammates pushing them along. For Ruth it was Lou Gehrig, for Maris it was Mickey Mantle.
So what else could have followed Judge’s 60th homer but a game-ending grand slam by Giancarlo Stanton, later that inning, to beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 9-8? No other active slugger can relate to Judge quite like Stanton, who once belted 59 homers in a season for Miami. It had to be Stanton to cap a night like this, with a screaming low liner into the left field seats.
“He hit 60 tonight and it’s like nothing happened,” Stanton said. “He’s got more work to do. That’s the mindset. That’s how it’ll always be.”
“I go back to him doing it in this season, the context of this season,” Boone said, noting that Philadelphia’s Kyle Schwarber has the next-highest home run total in 2022. “He’s got 40. He’s second. I mean, it’s unbelievable, 60 to 40. When I was playing, guys were routinely hitting in the 50s and 40s, bunched up in there. It ain’t happening now.
“And to be that far ahead of the field and be getting on base at the level he is, pushing for a batting title, playing the kind of all-around game that he is — in a disappointing night to that point, I tried to drink that in. I kept seeing ‘60’ on the board as he’s running around the bases. It’s hard for me to grip.”
Judge — who took a quick curtain call, mainly to keep the game moving — finished the night as the A.L. leader in each triple crown category, with a .316 average and 128 runs batted in to go with the 60 homers. Only two Yankees (Gehrig and Mantle) have won a triple crown.
For a player chasing milestones, Judge seems to be playing remarkably pressure-free. He launched his 58th and 59th homers on Sunday in Milwaukee, then got to 60 in his very next game. When Stanton hit his 59 homers, in 2017, he finished the season without connecting in his final three games.
Judge did that against Wil Crowe, a Pirates reliever and a great-great nephew of Red Ruffing, a Hall of Fame Yankees pitcher with a plaque in Monument Park. Crowe challenged Judge with a 3-1 sinker at 94 miles an hour, and Judge blasted it 430 feet into the left field bleachers.
Michael Kessler, 20, a pitcher and outfielder for the baseball team at City College of New York, snagged the ball on a bounce and returned it to Judge. He met Judge and got four autographed baseballs and an autographed bat.
Judge smiled when asked what he had thought after hitting the homer; he had struck out with the bases loaded earlier in the game, and even with his homer, the Yankees still trailed by three runs.
“Man, you idiot,” Judge said he thought to himself. “You should have done this a little earlier.”
In a historical context, though, Judge is plenty early. Ruth reached 60 in the Yankees’ 154th game in 1927, and Maris got there in their 159th game in 1961. Tuesday was only the 147th game for Judge’s Yankees — but he may be having too much fun to process his lofty place in team history.
“Getting a chance to play baseball at Yankee Stadium with a packed house and a first-place team, that’s what you dream about,” Judge said. “I love every second of it.”