New York Yankees star Aaron Judge hit his 62nd home run of the year against the Texas Rangers on Tuesday night, passing Roger Maris for the single-season mark by a player in the American League and marking a final stretch of impressive drama that only once-in-a-generation activities can create.
The home run record has long been hallowed, measuring baseball’s simplest feats of strength that even the sport’s unpredictable bounces and unforeseen variables can’t disrupt. Tuesday’s homer gave Judge a tricky, unofficial and awkward title: the most prolific single-season home run hitter not playing during the game’s steroid era.
Only record holders Barry Bonds (73), Mark McGwire (70 and 65) and Sammy Sosa (66, 64 and 63) have hit more than 62 homers in a season. All three played at a time when MLB didn’t test for performance-enhancing drugs as rigorously as it does now.
So Judge, wearing his iconic number 99, has emerged as a new modern prototype, a new home run hero for a new era, the latest in a long line of Yankee legends. Like every Yankees legend before him, Judge proved capable of withstanding everything New York throws at its most prized sports stars. But even the stoic 30-year-old, known for a first-team demeanor that doesn’t wax and wane with his performance, had begun to show the strain of his pursuit by the time the final series of the season began Yankees.
Cameras usually have no problem catching Judge with a smile. But with each passing beat, the smiles grew fewer and further away, his brow a little more wrinkled. For so long he seemed to have so much time. Suddenly, he didn’t.
“It’s a huge relief,” Judge told reporters Tuesday night. “Now everybody can probably sit down and watch the game.”
When Judge hit his 60th home run on Sept. 20, he had plenty of at-bats left to catch and pass Maris, whose family began following him from town to town. For days, fans fell silent every time a pitcher delivered a ball to Judge, who went seven games between Nos. 60 and 61, a drought that must have felt like eons for the slugger before it was ended by last week.
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The Yankees played their final home series of the regular season, with their division title already sealed, in rain and cold this past weekend. Fans packed the stands anyway, but the Baltimore Orioles walked Judge five times in three games and struck him out six times.
So Judge stayed to take his pursuit to Texas. The Maris family went home. Judge was 1-for-4 in Monday night’s game and 1-for-5 in the first game of Tuesday’s doubleheader. Manager Aaron Boone told reporters earlier in the day that Judge, who normally could play only one doubleheader for a team with a first-round bye locked in on the penultimate day of the season, would play both if not he hit home runs the first.
He didn’t, and the largest paid crowd in Globe Life Field’s short history filled the stands for the night game. The 38,832 in attendance for Texas’ 3-2 victory weren’t there to say goodbye to another disappointing Rangers season. They were there to see the judge.
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He led off Game 2 with No. 62, a blast to left-center with a 1-1 slider off right-hander Jesus Tinoco, a classic Judge swing that looked more comfortable than many of the in-between hacks he’s made since to arrive. 61. He flashed a smile rounding first base before restoring the businesslike look that has become his. And as his teammates rushed to meet him at home, Judge made sure to hug each one of them.
“At home, if I look up, I look right into our dugout so I can see all the guys sitting on the top step waiting for this to happen,” Judge said. “Here on the road, they were behind me, so I didn’t see the 40-plus people sitting there in the dugout. I think to finally see them run on the field, to have the opportunity to hug them all and congratulate – them, that’s what it’s all about for me.”
After getting a second at bat in the second inning, he struck out, Judge returned to the field for the bottom half. Boone then stepped up to replace him, earning a standing ovation from the Texas crowd.
Judge entered Tuesday leading the AL in home runs and RBIs, with a batting average that surpassed that of only one AL player, Minnesota’s Luis Arraez. Not only is he having one of the greatest offensive seasons in baseball history, he’s hitting for power at a rate unprecedented for anyone in the sport. Judge has 62 home runs. The next closest player entered Tuesday with 46. Not since the days of Babe Ruth has the gap between No. 1 and No. 2 been this wide. Judge even has a chance to become the first winner of the AL Triple Crown since Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers in 2012, and only the second since Boston Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski in 1967.
“To have the opportunity to have my name next to somebody as great as Roger Maris, Babe Ruth, those guys,” Judge said, “is amazing.”
But Ruth, Maris, Yastrzemski and the rest didn’t have to face pitches like the ones Judge usually sees. He’s putting up those numbers at a time when offense, at least as measured by batting average, is at an all-time low, at a time when pitchers have never thrown harder and in a city where his every move is scrutinized.
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He’s bringing them together months after turning down a contract offer worth more than $200 million and weeks before becoming a free agent for the first time. And he’s doing it all for a Yankees team so riddled with injuries that Judge held the offense together as they clung to the lead in the AL East. They recently clinched the division title in Toronto, a late-September celebration that did nothing to ease the tension of a superstar and a fan base hoping for something much rarer.
Unlike Maris and Ruth, Judge is making history a generation after the widespread use of banned drugs since then complicated the home run record. McGwire later admitted to using steroids when he broke Maris’ record of 70 home runs in 1998. Bonds, whose murky legacy has kept him out of the Hall of Fame, followed with 73 in 2001 to set the single-season record.
Maris’ son, Roger Jr., had been present to watch Judge’s pursuit. After Judge tied Maris for No. 61, Roger Jr. told reporters that he believes Judge should be “revered for being the true one-season champion.”
“That’s really who he is if he makes it to 62,” he said. “And I think this is what has to happen. I think baseball needs to look at the records, and I think baseball should do something.”
Judge is compiling his numbers not only at the highest rate in MLB history, but with the strictest drug testing policy the sport has ever had. He has said he thinks Bonds’ 73 is the record, meaning 62 is something, but not everything. But that he’s surpassed the number that no one else did for more than 30 years until the steroid era means he’s now an inextricable part of the conversation about the greatest single-season performances of all time, just in time to get to the first one. free agent market.
“Congrats @TheJudge44 on 62!” tweeted Derek Jeter, the latest Yankee to write his name in history so emphatically. “The next postseason!!!”
After all, in the Bronx, careers are measured in championships. Ruth and Maris have them. The judge will have another chance to win his first.