The Year After is a fascinating study. The Year After Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, he hit 54 more. The Year After Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, he hit only 33 — and he never hit as many as 27 again for the rest of his career.
And that’s actually exactly as it should have been. Ruth was one of the great hitters of his era, and he was still very much in his prime. Maris was an excellent player, and 1962 was a terrific year for him, as he knocked in 100 runs for the third — and last — time of his career. But his 1962 was every bit as representative of his career as Ruth’s 1928 was of his.
One was a pantheon player.
One was a very good player.
So when Aaron Judge reports to Steinbrenner Field to begin the most anticipated baseball sequel since “Major League 2,” we can state with a fair amount of certainty two things:
1. He is unlikely to match last year’s otherworldly numbers which, besides the 62 long balls, included career highs in runs (133), RBIs (131), hits (177), batting average (.311), slugging percentage (.686), OPS (1.111) and OPS+ (211).
2. If he merely maintains his health and produces as he had before last year’s epic output, that still puts him among the five best players in baseball. And that’s a hell of a place to start when you assess the 2023 Yankees.
“What I want more than anything else is to be on the field when the Yankees celebrate their next championship,” Judge said a few weeks ago, on the night when he received his MVP award at the Baseball Writers’ Association of America dinner in Manhattan. “And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be in that conversation every year. But especially this year.”
Last season was an odd one in many ways for the Yankees, who spent the better part of the first half looking every day like they might set a new gold standard for team excellence, then spent much of the second half watching Judge chase one of the great individual achievements in the sport’s history.
So few teams have had the fragmented year the Yankees did. They spent three full months looking like they were going to run away and hide from the rest of the American League. They spent too much of the next three months looking like they just wanted to find a place to hide while the other elite teams in the AL caught up to them.
They won back-to-back elimination games in the AL Division Series, proving they had a strength of character that only a handful of teams possess in any given year; then proceeded directly to a four-game sweep in the ALCS to their most bitter rival, leading for only a handful of innings the entire series, looking for all the world like the reluctant owners of a glass jaw.
“It was,” Judge understated, “a different kind of year.”
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But weeks after the final game of the season was played the Yankees secured a victory second in importance only to Houston’s title-clinching win in Game 6 of the World Series: they got Aaron Judge’s signature at the bottom of a nine-year, $360 million contract after a few worrisome starts and stops.
So Judge is the face of the Yankees now. He is the captain of the Yankees now. He embraces both truths, and already seems to understand that with the metaphorical “C” on his chest comes an added burden or responsibility. The hard truth of the Yankee captaincy is that there are two subsets.
There is Lou Gehrig, Thurman Munson and Derek Jeter, on whose watches the Yanks won 11 of their 27 championships. And there are the others, notably Graig Nettles, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry and Don Mattingly, who all achieved various levels of affection among the fans but never captained champions.
There is reverence attached to one, mere respect to the other. But the chasm is notable, and noted.
“It’s an incredible honor,” Judge said, “and not one that I take lightly.”
There are so many variables between now and Halloween that either allow or forbid these stories from having happy and fulfilling endings. Starting with Judge, though? That’s a fine foundation. That’s a considerable cornerstone. You start from a position of strength when you write No. 99’s name in the lineup card every day.
