Home News Mike Lupica: As he slugs 300th HR, Aaron Judge is what makes...

Mike Lupica: As he slugs 300th HR, Aaron Judge is what makes the Yankees feel like the Yankees



Aaron Judge is both a great Yankee and great Yankee home run hitter the way Babe Ruth was when he basically invented the Yankees and invented the home run in baseball and made baseball the national pastime. Judge is the face of the Yankees and captain of the team the way Derek Jeter was before him, but there is an excitement to him every time he steps into the batter’s box the way there was with Mickey Mantle when Mickey was young, and probably the most popular Yankee who ever lived.

Now, after hitting more than 50 homers as a rookie and then hitting 62 two years ago and passing both Roger Maris and The Babe, No. 99 is the fastest to ever get to 300 home runs. It should have been a Yankee Stadium moment and a Yankee Stadium sound he heard when he did it, not something that happened in Chicago and against a White Sox team that is the worst in the world.

It was another home run moment for Judge, anyway. It was another one of those swings. He may not get to 60 again this season, though also, he might. But he is a better hitter now, two years after he broke the Yankee record for home runs and the American League record for home runs, than he was then. You can pitch around him all you want. You can intentionally walk him, the way he got intentionally walked in the second inning the other day. But eventually you are going to have to throw him another pitch he is going to hit out of sight.

So he hit his 300th in Chicago, which was never a magic number until now. He did it in the eighth inning, on a 3-0 pitch from White Sox reliever Steven Wilson. In the process, the remarkable season the big man is having got a little bigger. The Dodgers have Shohei Ohtani, you bet, and when his arm is healthy again, he will hit home runs and strike people out the way Babe Ruth did in Boston, before he got to New York. Judge has Juan Soto, a wonderful hitter having a wonderful season of his own, in front of him.

But as good as Soto is, and as important as he is to whatever the chance Judge is going to have to finally make it to the World Series, it is Judge who is the MVP of everything right now. It is Judge who is the best player in the world, one even thinking a Triple Crown might be within his reach the way it once was for Mickey, back in his own dream season of 1956, when he hit 52 homers and knocked in 130 and hit a fast .353.

We keep talking about how the Yankees are trying to turn back into The Yankees this season, which they can do only by making it back to the World Series. And when you’re the New York Yankees, and you’ve played in 40 World Series in history and won 27, that is just the fact of things. But more than anyone, even more than Soto, who may or may not just be passing through the spot ahead of him in Aaron Boone’s batting order, Judge makes Yankee fans feel right about things. He makes the Yankees feel good about themselves while we all wait to see if this is more than another Yankee team that just good enough, and not great.

Even Yankee haters love watching Aaron Judge stand in there. More than anyone, he makes Yankee-hating difficult the way Jeter and Joe Torre and Mariano Rivera and all the rest of Torre’s Yankees did. Judge makes it seem cool to root for the Yankees again. Now comes a whole season with everybody hanging on every at-bat — when he is allowed to swing the bat at least — feels the way it did back in September of ’22 when No. 99, even without Soto, No. 22, hitting in front of him, was chasing 60, what is still one of the real magic numbers of baseball, and nowhere more than with the Yankees, because of the 60 Ruth hit back in 1927.

“It’s like, whenever he puts the bat on the ball it’s a home run,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said when asked to explain why he was the guy who had intentionally walked Judge in the second inning of a Yankees-Blue Jays game.

Then Schneider added this: “He’s in a different category I think than anyone else in the league, where he can just flip the script of a game with one swing.”

Judge does that, game in and game out. Of course Soto is doing what he was brought to the Yankees to do, which means be a game-changer. But it is still Judge who feels like the whole ballgame for the Yankees, a team that somehow went through a 10-23 streak and have not only come out of it, but came out of the weekend with as many victories as anybody in either league.

“It’s incredible,” Soto said after Judge hit another home run Sunday, even on a day when Soto hit two.

“It’s incredible,” Giancarlo Stanton said of Judge, on a day when he hit a big 3-run homer of his own.

Then Judge simply said this when asked about his chance to get to 300 faster than Ralph Kiner or anybody else had in baseball history.

“If it comes with a win, it’ll mean something,” he said.

So he hits them like The Babe. Chases the Triple Crown that Mickey got. Sounds like Jeter. Aaron Judge isn’t just all these home runs. He’s more than that. He’s the Yankees.

Originally Published:

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