62

Auteur

Bryan Hoch has covered New York baseball for the past two decades, working the New York Yankees clubhouse as an MLB.com beat reporter since 2007. Bryan is the author and coauthor of several books, including 62, The Baby Bombers, Mission 27, and The Bronx Zoom. Find out more at Bryan-Hoch.com and follow him on Twitter @BryanHoch.

Texte du rabat

An inside look at Yankees slugger Aaron Judge's wild, record-breaking run to break Roger Maris' famed home run record.

Résumé
“The definitive story” (Tyler Kepner, The New York Times baseball columnist) of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge’s incredible, unparalleled run to break Roger Maris’s home run record and the franchise both men called home.

Aaron Judge, the hulking superman who carried an easy aw-shucks demeanor from small-town California to stardom in the Big Apple, had long established his place as one of baseball’s most intimidating power hitters. Baseballs frequently rocketed off his bat like cannon fire, dispatching heat-seeking missiles toward the “Judge’s Chambers” seating area in right field, sending delirious fans scattering for souvenirs.

But even in a high-tech universe where computers measure each swing to the nth degree, Roger Maris’s American League mark of sixty-one home runs seemed largely out of reach. It had been more than a decade since baseball wiped clean the stains of its performance-enhanced era, in which cartoonish sluggers Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds made a mockery of the record book.

Given a more level playing field against pitchers sporting hellacious arsenals unlike anything Babe Ruth or Maris could have imagined, only an exceptional talent could even consider making a run at sixty-one homers. Judge, who placed the bet of his life by turning down a $213.5 million extension on the eve of the regular season, promised to rise to the challenge.

“In the most thorough telling yet of an all-time-great Yankees performance” (Jeff Passan, New York Times bestselling author), veteran Yankees beat reporter Bryan Hoch unravels the remarkable journey of Judge’s run to shatter Maris’s beloved sixty-one-year-old record. In-depth, inspiring, and with an expert’s insight, 62 also investigates the more significant questions raised in a season unlike any other, including how—and where—Judge will deliver his encore.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1: “OK, Can I Go Out and Play?” 1 “OK, CAN I GO OUT AND PLAY?”
Heads up!”

The fastball hovered over the heart of home plate, spinning at a comfortable 65 mph, and Aaron Judge’s body responded just as he’d trained it for most of the previous twenty-nine years. The ball kissed the barrel of the slugger’s wood bat, producing a loud echo throughout the grandstands and dispatching an impressive rocket out toward left-center field, where a gaggle of onlookers peered through a chain-link fence.

One shouted to alert the others of the incoming missile, and the ball came to rest near a row of cabbage palms that lined a quiet two-lane roadway, prompting a foot race to pocket a souvenir. This intimate gathering was burning an hour or two of midweek daylight with free looks at big-league ballplayers dressed in nondescript mesh apparel, moving through the paces of a February 2022 workout behind the shuttered gates of Red McEwen Field, home of the University of South Florida Bulls.

The calendar indicated that Judge, nine years removed from his most recent collegiate at-bat with the Fresno State Bulldogs, should have been taking these hacks some ten miles away. A pristine diamond was waiting for him at George M. Steinbrenner Field, the chilly and formidable battleship of concrete and steel that had served as the Yankees’ spring home since Derek Jeter’s rookie campaign in 1996.

Yet Judge, arguably the most recognizable player on the present-day New York Yankees roster, bizarrely found himself persona non grata at Steinbrenner Field. A contentious and increasingly ugly Major League Baseball lockout was bleeding on, with owners and players unable to finalize a collective bargaining agreement to open spring camps on time. The owners had voted to lock out all active Major League Baseball Players Association members, effectively confirming the sport’s third consecutive spring of tumult.

Judge and his teammates had been in the thick of their preseason preparation on March 12, 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic halted play and scattered players across the country. There had been orders to shelter in place, but a skeleton crew of ballplayers, including Judge, had voted to continue working out at Steinbrenner Field. Soon after, it became evident that the regular season would not be delayed by only two weeks, as league officials had initially suggested. Initial discussions of health and safety protocols between the players and the league devolved into a money grab, producing distasteful optics during a pre-vaccination period when hospitals were overburdened and even routine trips to the grocery store carried an element of danger for many Americans.

Rob Manfred, baseball’s commissioner, eventually imposed an abbreviated sixty-game schedule that green-lit the most bizarre “Made for TV” season imaginable, with players receiving pro-rated salaries to play in empty ballparks and most postseason games scheduled for warm-weather or domed neutral sites. It mattered little where the games were played; there could be no home-field advantage without fans in the seats. Gerrit Cole made the first start of a fresh nine-year, $324 million contract opposite the Washington Nationals’ Max Scherzer on July 23, at an eerily silent Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. One of the few observers not in uniform was Dr. Anthony Fauci, taking a moment from his duties as a lead member of the White House’s coronavirus task force to toss the season’s ceremonial first pitch.

The fans were back in the spring of 2021, albeit in smaller numbers, under orders to maintain social distancing in seating pods roped off by plastic zip ties. Ushers roamed the grandstands, repeatedly barking masking instructions that never seemed enforceable, considering the teams were also trying to make up for the financial fallout of a shuttered season by slinging popcorn, sodas, and beer. The players engaged in their “new normal,” even as President Joe Biden’s administration lobbied the league to delay Opening Day to address safety concerns. The games went on as scheduled, most players received vaccinations, and MLB entered 2022 expecting a much smoother ride from a health and safety perspective.

Now it was just about the money, with the league and union haggling over compensation for young players and limitations on clubs tanking to receive higher selections in the amateur draft. It was baseball’s first work stoppage since the 1994–95 strike that dashed the World Series, and the first player lockout since 1990. With Judge and his teammates barred from communicating with team personnel (the league set up a tip line to report infractions like phone calls or text messages), the players trained independently, as most did during those first dark months of the pandemic. Judge opted to use the University of South Florida’s facilities, a short drive from his apartment on Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard, part of a workout group that included big leaguers Tim Beckham, Mike Ford, Richie Martin, and Luke Voit.

With each batting practice lick, Judge exorcised lingering angst from an embarrassing defeat in the previous autumn’s American League Wild Card Game. An injured Cole attempted to gut his way through a hamstring injury and recorded ju…