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“He was so dialed in, and made it look so easy,” Marakovits said. “I’d joke with him occasionally, like, ‘Oh, only one home run today? That’s all you’ve got? Slow day for you.’ ”
Judge’s blast proved enough, as Frankie Montas hurled five one-hit innings before Clay Holmes survived late drama to seal the club’s eightieth win. Holmes surrendered three hits before pinning the go-ahead and winning runs on base, ringing up Yandy Diaz with a called third strike that the Rays believed was low.
At 101.7 mph, it was the fastest pitch Holmes had ever thrown in the big leagues; the game on the line, Holmes said that he had decided: “If he was going to beat me, he was going to beat me on my best bullet.”
Even if the pitch was a tick or two out of the strike zone, it represented a much-needed break to conclude a rough road trip. Watching on television after a fifth-inning ejection, Boone joked that his pacemaker (installed during spring training in 2021, a scary episode when his heart rate had dipped below fifty beats per minute) “was kicking into overdrive.”
Holmes said, with a smirk: “I thought it was a great pitch.”
HOMER #54: September 5 vs. Minnesota Twins’ Trevor Megill (6th inning, two-run)
Exit velocity: 109.6 mph. Distance: 404 feet. Launch angle: 34 degrees. HR in 03 of 30 MLB parks.
It was Labor Day as the Yankees returned to the Bronx, hosting the Minnesota Twins to begin a four-game series. As he had done many times before, Gary Sánchez was making a slow trot around the basepaths. The excised catcher may have enjoyed this one more than the rest, savoring each moment of the 473-foot drive he’d parked to the back of the bleachers. For all the polarization that Sánchez’s inconsistency had created within the fan base and at higher levels of the Yankees organization, no one could debate this: when “El Gary” got a hold of one, it still traveled a long way.
It took all of one inning for Sánchez’s onetime Baby Bombers teammate to respond. Facing righty Trevor Megill, Judge belted a 3-1 slider down the left-field line; Megill, in his second big-league season, dropped his shoulders and stared at the infield grass. The ball landed in the second deck, marking a piece of franchise history; now Judge and Alex Rodriguez were the only two right-handed Yankees to hit 54 homers in a single season, with A-Rod having done it during his 2007 AL MVP season.
It was three straight games with a homer for Judge, putting him on pace for 65 with twenty-seven games left. “Just trying to do what I can every single day,” Judge said after the Yanks’ 5–2 win.
“That sealed it for me,” said Brendan Kuty, a beat reporter for NJ Advance Media. “It felt like it was an inevitable march toward history at that point. He was on fire, healthy, he seemed nonplussed, like he was just shrugging this off his shoulders while we’re looking at the calendar and the record books, saying, ‘Oh man, this is going to happen. This is unbelievable.’ ”
Even Boone was beginning to find himself at a loss for words to describe Judge’s exploits. Teams were pitching around Judge, not issuing intentional walks—at least, not yet—but focusing on him as the force in the Yanks’ injury-ravaged lineup whom they could not let beat them. “What am I going to do, slam my bat down?” Judge said. “It is what it is.”
Sooner or later, they gave him a pitch to hit, and Judge always seemed ready for it.
“He’s our leader,” Isiah Kiner-Falefa said. “He goes about his business the right way. Everybody sees it, everybody feeds off his energy and just the way he does things. Everybody notices it. I’m excited for what’s to come for him.”
HOMER #55: September 7 vs. Minnesota Twins’ Louie Varland (4th inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 102.1 mph. Distance: 374 feet. Launch angle: 28 degrees. HR in 21 of 30 MLB parks.
Opposing pitchers seemed helpless to slow Judge’s torrid pace, but Mother Nature still could. Heavy rain prompted a postponement, delaying the inevitable before Judge homered for a fourth straight game. New York City schools were not reopening until the next day, but the stadium was still mostly empty for the first game of a doubleheader, a Wednesday afternoon.
It marked the big-league debut for Louie Varland, a twenty-four-year-old righty plucked out of the Twins’ backyard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Months later, Varland would still salivate about the postgame spreads delivered to the visiting clubhouse, recalling the bounty of shrimp, mussels, scallops, and rib-eye steak his teammates were served. Oh yeah, and he remembered going up against Judge.
Fielding questions from a group of youth athletes, Varland heard one boy call out: “Aaron Judge hit a home run against you.” Yes, indeed he did.
Varland struck out Judge in their first matchup, but he wouldn’t be quite so fortunate the next time. Judge was ahead in the count, 2-1, and Varland left a changeup hovering over the outer part of the plate. Judge hammered it, clearing the left-field fence, where two fans in the front row collided and knocked the ball back to the warning track.
“I was happy to get a run on the board,” Judge said. “The rookie was making his debut and kind of had us shut down there for a little bit. He had a good quick pace, working all of his pitches. It kind of got some stuff going, got this offense going a little bit.”
Judge’s blast sparked a comeback from three runs down, coming in a game where the Yanks’ injury-depleted lineup looked a lot like the type of squad they’d have brought on the road for a spring training game. Five players wore uniform numbers in the nineties: Judge (99), Oswaldo Cabrera (95), Oswald Peraza (91), Ron Marinaccio (97), and Estevan Florial (90).
But the nineties were in vogue: Gleyber Torres homered and Cabrera drilled a twelfth-inning walk-off single to end the first game of the twin bill, then Kiner-Falefa hit a grand slam in the nightcap. “It doesn’t matter if our big guys are here or they’re not,” Judge said. “We walk out there, we’ve got the pinstripes, we’re wearing the ‘NY.’ Every single guy that walks in this clubhouse is going to get the job done. These kids are ready. They’re not scared. They’re ready to go from the very first pitch.”
The promise of history was drawing larger crowds to the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue, though the Yankees needed no attendance boost on a very special night. September 8 marked the long-awaited date to celebrate Derek Jeter’s 2020 induction to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had pushed his Cooperstown ceremony back a year.
As an active player, Jeter had little appetite to watch baseball games that he wasn’t involved with—A-Rod once visited Jeter’s home in Tampa, Florida, and had been incredulous to find that Jeter’s television package didn’t have the YES Network activated. But as he stood in a conference room on the stadium’s suite level, even the former captain acknowledged that he was paying attention to Judge’s march against Maris.
“Fifty-five home runs. You know, I can’t relate,” Jeter said. “It’s hard enough to get a hit. I’m no expert, but I would assume you can get into some issues if you’re trying to hit home runs. It can backfire on you. But the thing that’s impressive is that he still hits for average. That’s something that’s overlooked and undervalued in today’s game. He’s hitting for average, driving in runs, hitting home runs. He’s doing it all. He’s got a chance.”
It was a pregame lovefest for Jeter, the fourteen-time All-Star who’d delivered five World Series championships to the Bronx. Jeter, his wife, Hannah, and their family waved as they rolled at slow speed across the outfield in a motorized cart. Jeter set foot on the infield grass, gripping a podium near home plate and delivering remarks to a nostalgia-drenched house, ready to roll the clock back to the dynasty years. As he did, Jeter heard the familiar echoing chants of his name. “DE-rek JE-ter (clap, clap, clap-clap-clap).” He sensed that he was exactly where he belonged.
“I did miss the place. This is home for me,” Jeter said. “I was here for twenty years, across the street and in this building. It’s twenty years where I played pretty much every day. This is where I feel most comfortable.”
CC Sabathia, Tino Martinez, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Joe Torre were all in attendance, grinning and backslapping ahead of Jeter’s parents, Charles and Dorothy; sister, Sharlee; and nephew, Jalen.
But the ceremony turned sour when Hal Steinbrenner emerged from the home dugout, clutching an oversized check to represent a $222,222.22 donation in the name of Jeter’s Turn 2 Foundation. There were loud boos, and Jeter wasn’t having it.
Grabbing the microphone, Jeter admonished the crowd sternly: “Let me tell you something, you’d better cheer. Trust me.” Jeter thanked general manager Brian Cashman, which prompted more jeers. To that, Jeter quipped: “I see you guys are ready for the playoff push.”
Jeter said that he was surprised Steinbrenner and Cashman would receive such harsh treatment from the fans, especially during a season in which Judge was challenging a beloved record and the team was still in first place, despite their second-half swoon. Then he sighed.
“But they boo everybody here. I got in trouble once for not telling them to stop booing,” Jeter said, referring to the 2005 season, when Jeter was criticized for not defending teammate Alex Rodriguez against public outcry. All A-Rod did that year, by the way, was play in all 162 games while leading the American League in runs, homers, slugging percentage, and on-base plus slugging, winning his second MVP award.
Jeter occasionally wondered if his dynasty-era teams had set the bar too high by winning so frequently in the late 1990s; he joked about that later, saying that he’d “screwed it up” by insisting that any season the Yankees didn’t win the World Series was a failure. But that mindset had been established by George Steinbrenner, not Jeter. The Boss refused to accept that baseball isn’t football, and even a dominant team can lose one out of every three games. Organizational old-timers delight in telling stories about how Steinbrenner would threaten firings if the Yankees lost spring training games televised on the old Channel 11.
Even Jeter’s admonishment couldn’t quiet the crowd that night, jeering a dud of a contest in which Minnesota’s Carlos Correa hit a late go-ahead homer. Forever stained by his involvement in the 2017 Astros scandal, Correa said he found “extra motivation when you play on such a big stage like Yankee Stadium and you’re the villain.” Jeter never experienced that; instead, Jeter appreciated the pulse of a rabid fan base that had spent the better part of two decades adoring his every action.
“Yankees fans expect excellence. They’re never satisfied, which is a good thing,” Jeter said. “Yankees fans boo because they want to win.”
Jeter wasn’t the only retired superstar tracking Judge’s pace closely. It had been twenty-four summers since Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa toured the country on their home run chase. Members of the Maris family had been in attendance at St. Louis’s Busch Stadium on the evening of September 8, 1998, when McGwire hit No. 62, a low line drive off the Cubs’ Steve Trachsel that cleared the left-field wall by inches. Play stopped for eleven minutes that night as McGwire and 49,987 fans celebrated the moment, with the Cardinals offering their Paul Bunyan–esque slugger a vintage 1962 Corvette in recognition of setting the new single-season home run record. He’d go on to hit 70 homers that season, the first of six times that Maris’s mark would be surpassed.
It had also been twelve years since McGwire admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs during his playing career, including the ’98 season that had seemed so magical. McGwire had called Maris’s widow, Pat, to apologize. Mrs. Maris was said to be disappointed.
“She didn’t want to believe it,” McGwire said. “I told her that I had to be honest. I told her I was so sorry for her, her family and Roger.”
McGwire’s admission, plus clouds of performance-enhancing drug suspicion regarding the home run totals of Sosa and Barry Bonds, prompted members of the Maris family to call for the restoration of 61 as the true major league record. McGwire belted 583 home runs in a sixteen-year career with the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals, retiring after the 2001 season. In ten years of eligibility for the Hall of Fame, McGwire never received more than 23.7 percent of the necessary 75 percent of votes from members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
The Hall’s Veterans Committee had also passed on McGwire, who had coaching stints with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres. He now spent his days watching his sons play high school ball near his home in San Juan Capistrano, California. When Judge had hit his 50th home run of 2017, breaking a rookie record set by McGwire in 1987, “Big Mac” had pinged Matt Holliday to acquire Judge’s phone number.
McGwire left a voicemail message congratulating Judge, telling reporters at the time: “The future for him as a bona fide home run hitter is bright. Who knows what the number is going to be? Watch out, 73. Seriously.”
As Judge clobbered opposing pitching late in 2022, McGwire doubled down, predicting that Judge was “definitely” going to eclipse Maris’s Yankees record.
“I truly believe he’ll break Barry’s record, too,” McGwire said. Not in 2022, mind you—McGwire hypothesized that Judge was only getting warmed up. The retired slugger envisioned Judge finishing with about 65 home runs in ’22, then positioning himself to “get to 73 to 74 in the next five to eight years.”
“I really believe he’ll have that opportunity,” McGwire said. “He’s going to get close to it, and say, ‘Where can I bunch in nine more homers?’ God willing that he stays healthy, he’s going to do that, too.”
As for the debate concerning the steroids era, McGwire flatly indicated that he considered Bonds’s 73 home runs in 2001 to represent the all-time home run record, as Major League Baseball also did.
“Seventy-three is the record,” McGwire said. “Judge will have the record once he passes Barry.”
* * *
Like McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and now Albert Pujols, the resurgent St. Louis Cardinals star who was unexpectedly taking aim at joining the 700 home run club, Judge’s at-bats were attractions. The sight of No. 99 on deck eased traffic at Yankee Stadium’s concession stands and lavatories, prompting fans to delay their concourse wandering for just a few moments.
It was a phenomenon that reminded Brian Cashman of Darryl Strawberry’s late-1990s tenure in the Bronx, across the street at the old stadium. “People stopped,” Cashman said. “If you were in the stands going to get a beer or popcorn, and Strawberry was being announced, they stopped because this was something different. People would completely focus on it. Aaron’s like that.”
That kicked into high gear now as Judge’s thudding footsteps grew louder behind Maris, though there would be no more long balls for the remainder of the homestand. The Yankees took two of three games from the Rays, recovering from a brutal opener in which the embattled Aaron Hicks was benched for missing two consecutive fly balls to left field that fell for run-scoring doubles.
Judge singled twice in a six-run first inning as the Yanks torched old friend Corey Kluber in a 10–3 rout, with Judge’s three-hit effort raising his batting average to .307. Boone could sense that opponents were pitching around Judge more now, and the manager advised him to “take what the game gives you,” a phrase that Boone said he’d lifted from Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt during his days as a Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse rugrat.
“Aaron does a great job of that,” Boone said. “You can’t go start chasing for it. You’ll get yourself in trouble, and he knows that. His job is to go up and have a plan and try to execute, and control the strike zone, which he’s done at such a special level with all of this going around.”
* * *
The next day was September 11, and Judge wore customized size seventeen spikes for the moment—his left shoe read “9/11 Patriot Day” on the back and the right “9-11-01.” Judge had toured the World Trade Center site during his first September as a big leaguer, gazing upon the reflecting pools where the massive towers once stood. He remembered solemnly reading the names of the fallen, trying to make sense of the events that took place there. Years later, Judge said he would get chills on the back of his neck just thinking about the visit. “You feel something different about that spot,” he said. “You can feel the pain; there’s something there. When I went through the tower, learning more about the history of what happened, it was something I’ll never forget.”
Judge was nine years old on the morning of September 11, 2001. He learned of the horrific events in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, while eating breakfast. Patty Judge was already awake, watching coverage in the kitchen of their Linden, California, home. Upon arriving at his elementary school, Judge found many of his fellow students gathered around a television in the cafeteria, where footage of the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seemed to be on a constant loop.
“Our teachers broke down what happened, what was going on and how big of a situation it was,” Judge said. “Being that age, the severity didn’t really hit me. I remember how affected everybody was. Anything you turned on was talking about it; the news, sports channels, anything.”
In the days that followed the attacks, U.S. flags began appearing on vehicles throughout the country, including across Judge’s hometown. That enduring message of patriotism was one that Judge saw represented when he toured the National September 11 Memorial & Museum late in 2016, along with fellow rookies Tyler Austin and Rob Refsnyder.
“The coolest thing was, I remember seeing how we bounced back as a country,” Judge said. “It didn’t matter who you were, where you were from. Seeing how the whole country united arms and said, ‘This isn’t going to tear us down,’ I remember seeing that as a kid. It brought people together, and it didn’t matter your race, color or anything. We’re all Americans, and we had each others’ backs.”
