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“I knew that our presentation was excellent; the feedback from that was outstanding,” Cashman said. “I can’t change that we’re a big market, and I can’t change that we’re in the East.”
As the world learned three days later, Ohtani’s choice was the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Billy Eppler, a one-time Cashman lieutenant who had landed in the Angels’ GM seat, felt his phone buzz and recognized the incoming call—the main line of Creative Artists Agency, which represented Ohtani. Exchanging pleasantries with agent Nez Balelo, Eppler closed the door to assistant general manager Jonathan Strangio’s office, taking the call in private.
“Shohei Ohtani wants to be an Angel,” Balelo told Eppler, who stood up, then tried to sit back down—and missed the chair.
“I whiffed,” Eppler said. “I fell all the way to the ground. There’s so much adrenaline pumping at the moment, I didn’t feel it. I was just stunned. It was a pretty remarkable moment.”
The Yankees pivoted quickly that week, reaching a blockbuster trade with the Marlins to bring in Stanton, fresh off a 59-homer campaign as the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Miami’s ownership group was looking to cut payroll, and Stanton and Judge had made fantastic theater standing side by side at the Home Run Derby that summer in Miami, where Stanton had remarked that Judge seemed to be “the twin you’ve never met: everyone’s comparing us to each other.”
New York had its Bash Brothers in Judge and Stanton, but Ohtani in pinstripes would always present a great “What if?” question. That was especially true when Ohtani won the American League’s MVP award in 2021, a season in which he hit 46 home runs and posted a 3.18 ERA. Yet even with Ohtani’s otherworldly performance and one of the sport’s great superstars in outfielder Mike Trout, the Angels had finished fourth in the AL West and weren’t faring much better early in 2022. The Yankees spanked them, 9–1, in the series opener, completing May with a league-best 34-15 record. A rainout the next night set up a doubleheader, in which Ohtani would pitch the opener.
Ohtani had never performed well at Yankee Stadium, and so perhaps his stated preference not to play in New York had been apt. The previous June, the Yanks had thumped Ohtani for seven runs, knocking him out of the game in the first inning. They had his number from the first at-bat once again, with Matt Carpenter taking Ohtani deep on the hurler’s eleventh pitch of the game.
A mustachioed veteran who’d once been a three-time All-Star with the St. Louis Cardinals, Carpenter had been sitting on his living room couch less than two weeks prior, having been released by the Texas Rangers from his Triple-A contract. When Carpenter joined the Yankees during their series at Tropicana Field, he’d expressed his gratitude for another opportunity to play at the highest level, telling Aaron Boone that he was willing to “load the bags on the plane” if that’s what the team needed. Then Carpenter had scurried off to a pregame hitters’ meeting, still clad in the denim jeans he’d worn on the flight.
They never pressed Carpenter into skycap duty; the resurgent slugger had a much more important role, enjoying the fruits of a cross-country winter mission that rebuilt his swing. After a lengthy phone call with the Cincinnati Reds’ Joey Votto, Carpenter checked into a cutting-edge baseball performance lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, hired a private hitting instructor in Santa Clarita, California, and took swings with former teammate Matt Holliday at Oklahoma State University. The journey had unlocked his previous skill set.
“I just knew I needed to go play,” Carpenter said. “I was in Texas and I started to feel that kind of click; I went down to Triple-A Round Rock and swung the bat well, and I knew that I was trending in the right direction.”
Now he was rounding the bases in the Bronx. Gleyber Torres also slugged a first-inning homer off Ohtani, and after rapping a single in his first at-bat, Judge was ready when his spot in the order came around.
HOMER #19: June 2 vs. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim’s Shohei Ohtani (3rd inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 109.9 mph. Distance: 405 feet. Launch angle: 21 degrees. HR in 30 of 30 MLB parks.
Seeing Ohtani well in both of his at-bats, Judge looked at a slider and fastball for called strikes, then laid off a bad splitter in the dirt. He flicked a heater foul to keep the at-bat going. Ohtani followed with a slider that hung, and Judge drilled it to the left-field seats.
“I was trying to get something up in the strike zone, because he’s got a nasty splitter that he likes to use with two strikes, and a good slider and curveball,” Judge said.
The Yankees went on to sweep the doubleheader by scores of 6–1 and 2–1, extending the Halos’ misery in what would be a fourteen-game losing streak that eventually cost manager Joe Maddon his job. So desperate were the Angels to snap their skid, they’d resort to using a team-wide soundtrack of songs by the Canadian rock band Nickelback as their walk-up music during a home loss to the Red Sox; Ohtani selected the 2005 song “Photograph,” not that Chad Kroeger’s vocals helped much.
As he absorbed Ohtani’s performance that day in the Bronx, Maddon mused about the ease in which the Yankees seemed to tee up his star. “They’re really good at reading pitches; they’re really good at it,” Maddon said. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything, except that they’re good at it. If you’re able to acquire things through natural means, I think it’s great. There are things that pitchers do that other teams can pick up on. We need to be more vigilant.”
The Yankees were doing nothing untoward; this was not a redux of the 2017 Astros electronic sign-stealing scandal. Rather, they were more code breakers, able to crack Ohtani’s preferred pitch sequence. Apprised of his counterpart’s comments, Boone did not disagree.
“I think we are,” he said. “We’re going to hopefully continue to be good at it.”
In the nightcap, Jameson Taillon retired the first twenty-one Angels, coming within six outs of the Yanks’ first perfect game since David Cone’s 1999 gem over the Montreal Expos. The tight 2–1 win polished off a series sweep, and the Yanks were due for a rout. They’d get one the next night, pounding the Detroit Tigers by a 13–0 score.
Gerrit Cole followed Taillon’s gem with one of his own, not permitting his first hit until the seventh inning, as the ace squeezed out some revenge for an abbreviated and awful start earlier in the season at frigid Comerica Park. By that time, Judge had already left his mark.
HOMER #20: June 3 vs. Detroit Tigers’ Elvin Rodriguez (3rd inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 104.2 mph. Distance: 378 feet. Launch angle: 29 degrees. HR in 29 of 30 MLB parks.
Trevino put the Yankees on the board with a solo homer in the third inning off Rodriguez, who would soon learn that he—as Maddon had hinted of Ohtani—was tipping his pitches. Rodriguez’s tell was far more blatant, so much so that Jimmy O’Brien could pick it up from his sofa. A thirty-something who rose to online prominence with a hilarious lip-reading video of a fiery 2019 Boone ejection, O’Brien’s latest Jomboy Media breakdown revealed that Rodriguez stared toward third base before throwing fastballs out of the stretch position, but would only glance toward third base or stare straight ahead on a non-fastball. If O’Brien could see it, so could the Yankees.
“I didn’t realize I was doing that, but I saw the video. Yeah, they got me,” Rodriguez would later confirm.
With two outs, up came Judge, who got ahead with a 2-1 count. There were no runners on base, so Rodriguez was pitching out of the full windup; no tell. Rodriguez offered a 94.4 mph fastball and Judge connected, driving it high to right field. Rodriguez’s reaction—a bemused stare—foretold that he knew the ball wasn’t coming back. So did right fielder Daz Cameron, who turned away before it landed in the seats, a few rows in front of the Judge’s Chambers in Section 104. Dillon Lawson, the Yankees’ hitting coach, couldn’t help but marvel.
“He’s so diligent and consistent,” Lawson said. “I remember they would say this about Jeter; they add up all the good days. On a given day, you might be able to outperform Jeter. But he would string so many good days together that, at the end, it would equal greatness. Judge is incredibly talented, has as much firepower as anyone in baseball, and then he was also super consistent on top of that. It doesn’t just add up to greatness. It adds up to historic.”
’61 FLASHBACK: OLD-TIMERS’ DAY
Bobby Richardson sat in the living room of a modest one-story ranch on the west side of Sumter, South Carolina, surrounded by walls that had stood firm since the spring of 1961. Still spry and active with a dollop of youth as he approached his eighty-seventh birthday, some five decades after his final big-league game, he marveled at the images flickering across his television screen. It was happening all over again.
Then the Yankees’ starting second baseman, Richardson had been a firsthand witness as Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris captivated the nation with their pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record. He had watched from across the clubhouse as his teammates handled an insatiable crush; about a dozen writers swarming Maris at his locker, then moving as a pack to encircle Mantle, then sometimes back again.
“At the time, we were pulling for Mantle to break Babe Ruth’s record, because he had grown up in the Yankees farm system,” Richardson said. “But when he couldn’t, we were glad that Maris did it.”
It had been Mantle, not Maris, who carried the 1961 Yankees in the early going. Manager Ralph Houk searched for a lineup that clicked, beginning the year with Yogi Berra hitting third, Mantle fourth, and Maris fifth. It wasn’t until the middle of May that Houk settled on the lineup that is fondly remembered from that season, with Maris third and Mantle fourth.
Dan Daniel, a reporter for the New York World-Telegram, wrote that Maris “wasn’t hitting the size of his breakfast check, which usually comes to $1.70.” Houk surmised that Maris (batting .208 with 3 homers as late as May 16) would benefit from seeing meatier pitches to hit, batting third ahead of Mantle, who led the majors with 126 walks. (By comparison, Maris generated 94 walks, none intentional.) Maris was summoned to the Yankees’ offices, located at 745 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, for a chat with owner Dan Topping and GM Roy Haney. They walked around the corner to Reuben’s Restaurant, a pleasant place on Fifty-eighth Street known for corned beef sandwiches, cheesecake, and beer.
“We want you to stop worrying about your hitting,” Topping said. “We’re not worried and we don’t want you to fret about it. Forget your batting average and go out and swing for home runs. We would rather see you hit a lot of home runs and drive in runs than hit .300.”
Then Topping mentioned that the Yankees wanted Maris to get his eyes checked; a car service was waiting to ferry him to an optometrist. Maris’s confidence was shaken, but the Yankees picked him up. He roomed with Clete Boyer during road trips, and their friendship helped Maris settle in. They were playing crisp defense, Mantle had 14 homers by the end of May, and Whitey Ford had developed what he called a “controlled curve”—essentially, a modern-day slider. Houk believed Moose Skowron, Elston Howard, and Yogi Berra could still do plenty of damage hitting behind Mantle.
“No matter what you say, Roger still had to hit all them home runs,” Mantle said. “Cut through the crap, and that’s the important thing.”
Richardson frequently thought about ’61 in his home, the one with red brick and off-white vinyl siding at a sleepy stop-signed intersection. In the front yard, a garden shaped like an irregular pentagon greeted the mail carrier; his letters, bills, and occasional autograph requests went to home plate. A large wooden cross stood sentry in the front yard, reflecting Richardson’s faith in Christ.
On the day Richardson and his wife, Betsy, picked out this plot of land, he was the reigning World Series Most Valuable Player—the only one to claim those honors in a losing cause, still stinging from Bill Mazeroski’s homer in Game 7 against the Pittsburgh Pirates. No one used the term “walk-off” then; that would come later. Richardson’s 1961 contract was for $22,500; when the home builders quoted a price of $28,000, Richardson had winced.
“Man, I won’t ever be able to pay for this,” he’d thought.
But the place was a good investment, providing shelter and happiness for children and grandchildren. They had enclosed the garage and added on to the back a little over the years, but essentially it still looked and felt the same as it had in February 1961, when Richardson had packed to travel south, rejoining Maris, Mantle, and the rest of the Yankees for spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Richardson wondered what it was like for this new kid, Aaron Judge. Every time Richardson turned on the sports channels, one of the talking heads seemed to be yapping about Judge, their words providing the soundtrack over another of the big guy’s home run trots.
“I always knew how many he had, and what the possibility was that he might break it,” Richardson said. “I think Roger would have been tickled to death knowing that Aaron Judge, a man of his character and how good he has been to the fans, would be the one to break the record. And he would be pleased that steroids are not involved in it at all.”
In ’61, Richardson hit leadoff and shortstop Tony Kubek batted second, which gave the double-play combination one overriding responsibility when they swapped their gloves for a bat: to get on base and score runs when Maris and Mantle belted the ball.
The 1957 Rookie of the Year, Kubek enjoyed a nine-year career in the big leagues, featuring four All-Star selections and three World Series rings, then spent three decades in broadcast booths as an analyst for NBC, the Yankees, and the Toronto Blue Jays.
“Hitting second in front of Roger was one of the most thrilling things in my career as a baseball player,” Kubek said. “I was on second base a lot and saw a lot of his home runs. Roger had unlimited potential, and he fulfilled it. I think he was misunderstood by a lot of people. Roger was very quiet; he was a small-town guy who was thrown into the big time, where the fans can be the biggest boosters and yet the biggest critics. That’s what New York City is all about.”
Enjoying retirement in Appleton, Wisconsin, as he neared his eighty-seventh birthday, Kubek said that he rarely watched baseball now, preferring to fill his hours with hobbies like beekeeping and tapping trees for maple syrup. Kubek said his phone still rang occasionally from a network of fans who had become friends at fantasy camps run by Skowron and Hank Bauer decades earlier in Florida. They kept him abreast while Judge chased Maris’s record.
“I’ve never met Aaron Judge,” Kubek said, “but I think players are protected a little bit more now than years ago. During batting practice, there were writers all around the batting cage, all wanting a piece of you. There was a lot more commotion, and Roger gave them pretty much free access.”
Richardson tuned into Yankees games regularly, and he considered Judge a worthy successor to the right-field lineage of Ruth and Maris. Judge and Richardson had met once, at an Old-Timers’ Day game in 2018 at the new Yankee Stadium. Standing five foot nine and weighing 170 pounds in his playing days, a bit softer around the midsection now, Richardson had gripped Judge’s right hand and arced his neck straight back—as though he were taking in the Empire State Building from 34th Street.
“You’re as big as I thought you were,” Richardson said.
Judge had flashed his toothy smile, clapping a hand upon Richardson’s shoulder. “Rich,” Judge said, “I’m glad you’re still well enough to come experience this and be a part of it.” The Old-Timers assembled in the dugout that day, a group that included Ford and Don Larsen, and they nodded with approval. The Judge kid seemed to get it.
“He was gracious,” Richardson said. “He was one that came out and talked to the Old-Timers. There are so many that just stay in the dugout. He came out on the field during our practices and dealt with everybody. He’s so friendly. Knowing him, he’ll be a great steward and honor the Lord in every way.”
Yet as for his rooting interests in the chase, Richardson had learned not to get too heavily involved in debates about the single-season home run record. Once, while speaking at the Babe Ruth World Series in Jamestown, New York, Richardson referenced Maris’s 61 homers. “But it took him 162 games!” a woman in the audience had shouted. Only later did Richardson learn that the comment had come from Babe Ruth’s daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens.
6
“ADVERSITY IS COMING FOR YOU”
Aaron Boone was no wet blanket. If anything, relentless positivity had become one of his hallmarks as a big-league manager, vowing to have his players’ backs through hell and/or high water. But as he surveyed the walls of his Yankee Stadium office in early June, there was too much baseball history within his bones to throw a victory party over two hot months. Titles were not won this early, and his family tree could tell the tale.
Overlooking his desk underneath the first-base grandstand, a hard right turn from a hidden navy-blue wall autographed by franchise greats past and present, hung a large black-and-white framed photograph of Boone’s grandfather Ray. Frozen in time, the thirteen-year big-league veteran was kneeling and holding a bat, wearing his baggy wool flannel Detroit Tigers uniform sometime in the mid-1950s.
A two-time All-Star, Ray Boone logged one World Series at-bat, coming as a twenty-four-year-old rookie with the 1948 Cleveland Indians; he’d struck out as a pinch hitter against future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn. Also decorating the walls was a photograph of Boone; his grandfather; his father, Bob; and brother, Bret, in the home dugout during an Old-Timers’ Day at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium sometime in the mid-1970s. Those had been good times for the Boones, too, as they saw their chapter in the City of Brotherly Love come together in a championship.
The Boone boys had been constants in the Phillies’ clubhouse, begging off classes across the Delaware River in New Jersey to tail their dad around Steve Carlton, Pete Rose, and the rest of the Phils. Even at age five, Boone would mimic slugger Greg Luzinski’s lumbering gait or pantomime manager Danny Ozark’s agonizingly slow trudge to the mound. The boy paid attention, so when he accepted the Yankees’ managerial job in 2018 with no prior managerial or coaching experience, Boone felt confident enough to say, “In a way, I’ve been preparing for this job my entire life.”
