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“As Cash was talking, I was thinking, ‘Holy shit. This is not going to end well. Judge is not going to be happy about this,’ ” said Kristie Ackert of the New York Daily News. “It seemed like they were going to war.”
“$213.5 million is a lot of money,” said Brendan Kuty of NJ Advance Media. “But we don’t know what he means to the Yankees from a box office standpoint. He’s not Mike Trout; he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis. People go to the movies because their names are on the title, and Aaron Judge is that guy for the Yankees.”
Cashman said that he briefed Odle of the club’s plan to announce the figures, but Judge was furious at the turn of events. “I don’t like talking numbers. I like to keep that private,” he said. Judge vowed to test free agency at the end of the season, when he’d invite all thirty teams to make their best offers.
“We kind of said, ‘Hey, let’s keep this between us,’ ” Judge said. “I was a little upset that the numbers came out. I understand it’s a negotiation tactic. Put pressure on me. Turn the fans against me; turn the media on me. That part of it, I didn’t like.”
* * *
Most of the 46,097 fans filtering through Yankee Stadium’s maze of metal detectors were blissfully unaware of the contract developments. Only cheers were heard when public address announcer Paul Olden gleefully announced Judge’s name and position in the starting lineup, an octave or two higher than he had rattled off the identities of the Boston Red Sox.
The Yankees were again staring across the field at the Red Sox, a rematch of the Wild Card Game that saw Cole’s first “normal” season in New York end on a sour note. An intensely serious student of the art of pitching, one who could leave teammates mystified after detailed dugout conversations, Cole also had a goofy side. Southern California born and bred, Cole was passionate about fine wine and Italian cuisine.
He had fully embraced life as a not-quite-so-cool dad in the two years since he and his wife, Amy, welcomed a son, Caden, during the lockdown days of the pandemic. In describing the Red Sox as a formidable opponent, Cole said that he saw the historic rivals as “two stags locking up in the forest; somebody’s going to break an antler every once in a while, but nobody’s certainly going to back down.”
And it was a good show; this one decided in the eleventh inning as Donaldson stroked a bouncing ball past two diving Red Sox defenders, leaving Boston second baseman Trevor Story rolling gloveless on the outfield grass. Isiah Kiner-Falefa slid home with the winning run as the Yankees celebrated a gritty 6–5 win over their archrivals.
“The energy in the stadium, the atmosphere was pretty electric,” Donaldson said. “It doesn’t get any bigger than this.”
There were plenty of firsts, including pinstriped debuts for Donaldson and Kiner-Falefa, among others. After two pandemic-affected Opening Days, it marked a return to normalcy in the Bronx—perhaps with too much pomp and circumstance for Cole, who barked, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” as pregame ceremonies (including actor and comedian Billy Crystal’s first pitch, low and outside) ran four minutes long.
Cole called the micro-delay “an unforeseen challenge,” as was Boston’s loud contact in the first inning, an unwelcome flashback to the Wild Card Game. Cole heard boos as J. D. Martinez doubled home Xander Bogaerts with the third Red Sox run, then righted himself to offer four innings and sixty-eight pitches—close to his limit, given the abbreviated spring.
The Yankees powered back, flexing their muscle. Anthony Rizzo launched a two-run homer in his first at-bat of the season, then Giancarlo Stanton awed the crowd with a 116.3 mph rocket that left the playing field in 3.5 seconds. DJ LeMahieu homered in the eighth, and the normally stoic infielder felt the moment, screaming as he rounded the bases. Gleyber Torres rode the bench as the odd man out in a crowded infield mix, then was summoned for a crucial opportunity in the tenth inning, battling encroaching shadows to lift a key sacrifice fly.
“That,” Judge said, “was one of the best Opening Days I’ve been to here at Yankee Stadium. The place was rocking. It almost felt like kind of a playoff game. Hats off to the fans. I think they’d been missing some Yankees baseball.”
’61 FLASHBACK: THE MVP
Roger Maris wore a polo shirt, corduroy jeans, and white buckskin shoes as he stepped off the airplane at New York’s LaGuardia Airport early in 1960, collecting his bags and readying to begin a new chapter with the Yankees. Entire rosters of athletes have grown up lusting for an opportunity to wear the storied pinstripes, honing their skills with aspirations to play under the brightest of lights.
Maris was not one of them. After breaking into the majors with the Cleveland Indians early in the 1957 season, Maris had been enjoying his time with the Kansas City Athletics, making his first All-Star team the previous summer. He, his wife, Pat, and a growing family would have been just fine continuing to live in their comfortable and spacious Raytown, Missouri, home.
That changed on December 11, 1959, when the Yankees and A’s consummated a seven-player trade—yet another installment of a lopsided transaction list between the clubs, prompting many of the era to view Kansas City as just another Yankees farm team. The A’s received outfielder Hank Bauer, pitcher Don Larsen, first baseman Marv Throneberry, and outfielder Norm Siebern in exchange for Maris, first baseman Kent Hadley, and infielder Joe DeMaestri.
Maris got the news while greeting customers in an Independence, Missouri, supermarket, part of an offseason gig with a Kansas City meatpacking firm.
“A customer walks up to me and tells me how nice he thinks it is I’m getting a break with the Yankees,” Maris said. “I thought the fellow was kidding and I phoned my wife to find out if she had heard anything. She told me she had just heard it on radio and she was so surprised she could barely talk.”
Assigned uniform No. 9 by Pete Sheehy, who’d overseen the clubhouse since Ruth’s days, Maris scored no points for tact when he arrived for spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida, and told the press that he was “not all that happy” coming to the Yankees. “I liked Kansas City,” he said. “I expected to play out my career there.” Mickey Mantle was the golden boy in New York, the superstar center fielder and the latest in a four-decade line of succession that could be traced from Babe Ruth to Lou Gehrig to Joe DiMaggio.
Despite his down-home Oklahoman drawl, Mantle played the part. A fair-haired superman, the Mick flashed thick wads of cash and dressed in a tailored wardrobe he stashed at Yankee Stadium. Fueled by black coffee and Camel cigarettes, Maris preferred seersucker jackets from Sears Roebuck and a flattop crew cut—New York’s barbers gave out a “glamour boy” look that Maris couldn’t stand.
In short, Roger Eugene Maris—born in Hibbing, Minnesota, and raised in Grand Forks and Fargo, North Dakota—was a ballplayer, through and through. “Big Julie” Isaacson was a friend of several players and writers, a heavyset six-foot-three Brooklynite who had volunteered to drive Maris from the airport to a hotel at 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue. This was the 1960 of Don Draper’s Mad Men. Gentlemen wore jackets, hats, and ties, especially in New York City.
Eyeing Maris’s white shoes, Isaacson remarked, “Listen, kid. Yankee players don’t dress like you. You’ve got these Pat Boone shoes. They’ve got to go.”
As they arrived at the hotel, Maris asked Isaacson if a Thom McAn shoe store was nearby—a moderately priced chain that enjoyed its heyday with back-to-school shoppers in the 1960s and 1970s. Over Isaacson’s objections, Maris bought two more pairs of the Pat Boones, just to prove his point.
“The hell with them,” Maris said. “If they don’t like the way I look, they can send me back to Kansas City.”
New York was still very much Mantle’s town as Maris stood near Yankee Stadium’s home plate on a raw and windy Tuesday afternoon, Opening Day of the 1961 baseball season. A meager crowd of 14,607 filed in, with many potential patrons scared off by an ugly forecast. It was the first game for the Minnesota Twins, who stood in the visiting dugout wearing crisp red, navy, and gray. The American League had expanded from eight teams to ten, and the Twins and Los Angeles Angels were the new uniforms on the scene.
The Twins were just the rebranded Washington Senators, who had moved from the nation’s capital. The expansion team was a different Senators outfit, one that would eventually become the Texas Rangers. To maintain a balanced schedule, the regular season was extended by eight games, from 154 to 162. Some two dozen pitchers who wouldn’t have cracked a 1960 roster were now big leaguers, an appetizing recipe for increased offensive production.
Not that Maris was aiming for Ruth’s record. He’d been asked about it during a January appearance in Rochester, New York, speaking at a local Press and Radio Club dinner.
“Nobody will touch it,” Maris said. “Look up the records and you’ll see it’s a rare year when anybody hits 50 homers, let alone 60 as Ruth hit in 1927.”
Maris was deeply uncomfortable in front of audiences and came to detest the banquet circuit; he vowed not to accept any such engagements after the 1961 season.
Seated in a box next to home plate were the “first ladies of baseball.” Mrs. Babe Ruth, Mrs. Lou Gehrig, and Mrs. John McGraw looked on as Maris prepared to receive the 1960 American League Most Valuable Player Award. It had been a razor-sharp vote the previous November, with Maris edging Mantle, 225 points to 222. Maris hit .283 with 39 home runs and 112 runs batted in during the 1960 season, leading the American League in RBIs and slugging percentage (.581), while winning a Gold Glove in right field.
“The pitching is so tough and the defense is so good that you are doing pretty good if you hit .280 and get your share of home runs,” Maris said. “Fellows who have been around a long time like Ted Williams, Yogi Berra and Mantle will tell you the same thing. You don’t see any .400 hitters any more.”
“I think Mickey helped him a lot,” Tony Kubek said. “Mickey took him under his wing in New York; Roger was MVP the year before, so there were a lot of expectations for Roger going into ’61.”
But Maris couldn’t understand why it had to be so black and white, with someone always having to be the bad guy. As he’d later tell Mike Shannon, a teammate with the St. Louis Cardinals, Maris had resolved to take his frustration out on the American League’s pitchers.
When Maris arrived for spring training in ’61, there was a new face in the manager’s office. Casey Stengel was out, the ever-quotable “Old Pfessor” deemed too long in the tooth after his Yankees lost a crushing World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates in seven games. The Yankees had attempted to spin Stengel’s exit as a retirement, but Stengel revealed the truth almost immediately.
“I’ll never make the mistake,” Stengel said, “of being seventy again.”
Ralph Houk held the reins now, promising more stability than Stengel, whose constant lineup shuffling, platoons, and love of pinch-hitting had upset the veterans. Nicknamed “the Major” for his army service during World War II, when he received the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and the Silver Star, the cigar-chomping Houk was a former backup catcher who would be no pushover. There would be hell to pay, Houk promised, if any of his players were found on a golf course the day of a night game. He disliked his men playing poker, dice, or consuming hard liquor in public. But Houk promised to pick a lineup, stick with it, and speak to his players face-to-face. Previously, most Yanks had to read a newspaper to know how Stengel felt about them.
The addition of Los Angeles thrust the Yankees into the jet age; they had been the last team in the American League to adopt air travel, still traveling by rail as far west as Kansas City. Now they were flying high in more ways than one. Houk knew the clearest path to a championship was to have Maris and Mantle healthy, hitting back-to-back in the lineup.
Keeping Mantle on the field was no simple task. He played almost all of his eighteen-year career with a torn anterior cruciate ligament, sustained when his spikes got caught in a storm drain while chasing a Willie Mays fly ball during the 1951 World Series. DiMaggio had called Mantle off, and the rookie dutifully ceded to the graceful legend.
“I was running as hard as I could to get over to it, because Casey had told me before the game how Joe had slowed up a little bit, he thought,” Mantle once said. “Well, anyway, when I get there, Joe is already standing under the ball. He said, ‘I got it.’ And you don’t want to run into Joe DiMaggio. So when I tried to stop—I was going as fast as I could—my back cleat in my spike stuck in a rubber drain, and when it did, my knee went right out through the front of my leg, and I just folded up on the field.”
Mantle had said that his right knee was “destroyed” by the injury; the outfielder underwent several operations to repair the ACL, medial collateral ligament, and meniscus injuries that essentially went undiagnosed and unrepaired by surgical methods of the era.
Oh, what Mantle would have given to play his career with today’s medical advances: when forty-two-year-old Mariano Rivera sustained a similar injury in May 2012, he’d returned as good as ever, posting a 2.11 ERA in his final season before tearfully handing the baseball to Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte on the Yankee Stadium mound.
Alas, the swaggering Mantle limp, practiced lovingly by scores of schoolboys like Billy Crystal of Long Beach, New York, was no act. The uniform pants hid Mantle’s mummified tape job, wrapped in rubber from the thigh to the ankle. It was not uncommon for Mantle to be reduced to helplessness on days when his achy legs flared up; a teammate might have to grab Mantle’s wrist and pull him out of a taxicab, for example.
“There are a lot of things I wish I could do over,” Mantle said in 1986. “Hey, if I knew I was still going to be alive now, I’d have taken care of myself. When I had knee surgery in 1951, I never did the exercises. Maybe if I had, my legs would have lasted longer. I don’t know. I was young. I figured it was never going to end.”
Early in 1961, Houk was asked how the expanded schedule might affect his star.
“I hope he plays 162 games, and if he hits 60 homers and Maris hits 59, they’ll make me a hell of a manager,” Houk said.
That was telling. Even in Houk’s wildest fantasies, Ruth’s record could only be tied, not eclipsed.
4
SWINGING BIG
The season was less than a week old, and Aaron Judge feared he had made a mistake.
As he stood in right field at Yankee Stadium on the evening of April 12, five games and twenty at-bats into the season, his home run total rested at zero. He’d hit a few balls hard, including an eighth-inning double that helped the Yankees to their third win of the year. Still, as he kicked at a freshly sodded patch of Kentucky bluegrass, Judge could hear a selection of unfiltered comments from the Bleacher Creatures behind him, second-guessing his decision to turn down the cash.
“It was tough in the beginning, definitely in April,” Judge said. “There is a little doubt that creeps in your mind about it. You’re sitting there in the outfield, thinking, ‘Man, I should have taken that deal.’ I’m hitting .240, and I’ve got no homers. I’m like, ‘Oh man, I think they’re right.’ ”
Anthony Rizzo, Giancarlo Stanton, and DJ LeMahieu all slugged homers in the extra-inning Opening Day win over the Red Sox, followed by Rizzo and Stanton again the next night, then Aaron Hicks in a win over Toronto. Judge was being left out of the fun.
He paused, reminding himself why he and agent Page Odle had chosen this path. He’d personally spent long hours weighing the package with his parents, Patty and Wayne, and even more time discussing the future with his wife, Samantha. He’d prayed often, then leaned upon trusted teammates like Rizzo, LeMahieu, Cole, and Stanton, each of whom sprinkled their opinions and past experiences into the mixture.
Trust the process, Judge told himself, and it would work out.
“After a couple of weeks of talking with my teammates, talking with my family, you say, ‘Hey, clear all that. Go out there and play and just be yourself, and everything’s going to work out the way it’s supposed to,’ ” Judge said. “It’s all out of your hands, out of your control. Just have the faith to go out there and play your game.”
It was the fifth inning, and as Cole zipped a fastball past the Blue Jays’ George Springer for a strikeout, Judge pounded his glove and jogged toward the first-base dugout. Due up third that half-inning, Judge watched intently from the on-deck circle as Rizzo looked at a curveball out of the zone from right-hander José Berríos. That was the norm for Berríos, a twenty-seven-year-old from Puerto Rico who’d been around a while, relying primarily on his curveball, four-seam fastball, and sinker to navigate seven previous seasons, mostly with the Minnesota Twins.
Catcher Alejandro Kirk flashed his right index finger, suggesting a four-seam fastball, and Berríos nodded. Kirk dropped to a knee, placing his glove below Rizzo’s kneecaps. Berríos missed the target badly, pumping a 93 mph offering at the top of the strike zone. It might as well have been on a tee. Rizzo launched the drive into the bleachers beyond the right-field wall, no cheap shot. Now the Yankees trailed Toronto, 3–1, and Judge wanted to keep the line moving.
The crowd was still buzzing as Rizzo placed his helmet into a cubbyhole above the bat rack. Digging his size 17 spikes into the right-handed batter’s box, Judge heard a few beats of his walk-up song, Pop Smoke’s “Hello.” Judge craved a fat pitch, the kind of hit-me offerings that prompted him to remark that most homers are “thrown, not hit.” Those had proven to be in short supply, but that was about to change. Berríos went into a windup and delivered his next pitch, a 91.9 mph sinker. Judge was ready.
HOMER #1: April 13 vs. Toronto Blue Jays’ José Berríos (5th inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 108.4 mph. Distance: 413 feet. Launch angle: 27 degrees. HR in 30 of 30 MLB parks.
Like the previous pitch to Rizzo, Berríos’s offering had missed its location, sailing toward the middle of the strike zone on the inside corner. Judge took a mighty cut and sent a drive toward the bleachers; Raimel Tapia, patrolling left field for Toronto, merely kicked his spikes at the dirt of the warning track. The Yankees had gone back-to-back (and, as longtime radio announcer John Sterling would say, “belly to belly”). More important, Judge was on the board, rounding the bases as the LED stadium lights twinkled above Yankee Stadium’s white frieze.
