Aaron Judge is doing for the home run what Julius Erving once did for the dunk.
He is elevating the act, making you wonder if you have ever seen anything quite like it.
These are more than balls just clearing a fence. They have majesty, but also a touch of mythology; beauty, but also brutality. They go to left, center and right; long arcing pieces of art and fierce liners that all but scream with fury.
We are not only clocking them in total — 21 and counting now — but also in speed and distance. And perhaps best of all, in our imaginations as we wonder if we have ever seen anything like this before.
Judge’s at-bats are not to be missed, the most must-watch event in baseball right now — perhaps all of sports.
Before the Yankees devastated his pitching staff yet again Sunday en route to a 14-3 rout, Baltimore manager Buck Showalter kidded, “If they start letting me shift guys into the bleachers, then maybe I can get Judge out.”
Showalter might have to widen his scope. For Judge’s first of two homers Sunday cleared the left-field bleachers and was calculated by Statcast at 495 feet, which was the farthest a homer has traveled since Giancarlo Stanton’s 504-footer last Aug. 6.
It turned his teammates into Little Leaguers on the bench, their delirium and disbelief palpable. And after the game, it turned them into defense lawyers as they lobbied that the ball was definitely more than 500 feet, that Statcast had to be wrong, not taking into account where the ball would have landed had it not struck a reaching fan beyond the bleachers.
Brett Gardner said more than 500, CC Sabathia the same. At one point, Chris Carter, Chase Headley, Didi Gregorius, Matt Holliday and Austin Romine were collaboratively doing calculations as to the length of the bullpen, the bleachers, etc., to come up with the feet beyond the fence that the ball would have landed.
“If that is not more than 500, then no one is ever registering more than 500,” Holliday said.
Baseball is supposed to be hard, particularly hitting a round ball jetting toward you at high velocity with a round bat. Plus, you bat only every few innings and the other team can avoid throwing strikes. Yet, near daily Judge is making even seen-it-all players gawk and gasp and struggle for the right words to describe it all.
Judge hit the hardest ball of the season Saturday for a homer. He hit the farthest Sunday. He has the three hardest-hit homers this season and five of the six hardest-hit balls overall. His two-run, seventh-inning homer was a liner to right-center that “for most guys is a double in the gap or a one-hopper cut off by the outfielder for a single,” Gardner said. But with Judge’s might, it just kept going 402 feet. “It just comes off his bat differently,” Gardner added.
Judge is the main wrecking ball in a destructive Yankees offense that now has six players with double-digit homers and leads the majors in runs per game. The Yankees swept three games from Baltimore by a combined 38-8 and have scored eight or more runs in five straight games for the first time since July 6-13, 1956. Amazingly, Mickey Mantle did not play the first two games in that tear in a season when he won an MVP and the Triple Crown.
And, right now, Judge is Mantle. He went 4-for-4 Sunday with a walk and leads the AL in the Triple Crown categories, hitting .344 with 21 homers and 47 RBIs. He also has a .450 on-base percentage, .718 slugging percentage and 1.168 OPS. Those are Barry Bonds 2002-04 numbers. Which Holliday finds fitting because the veteran says Judge has the most efficient swing he has seen since Bonds.
And remember. This is a rookie. Who in a 2016 cameo struck out 42 times in 84 at-bats. When asked if he expected this, Judge said, “No, especially when I hit .170 [actually .179] last year.” Then Judge did what he always does, swerved the conversation away from him to teammates or the team. It is why he is so liked in his clubhouse. It is why he has kept perspective through the great start and Judge’s Chamber and growing fame.
“He is leading the league in All-Star votes, and if the MVP were voted on today, he’d win that, too,” Gardner said.
He has dominated 40 percent of a season in a way that no one could have seen coming, not off of last year, and really not even off the best of what he produced in the minors. Aaron Judge has played baseball at a higher level than anyone else in 2017 while taking the home run to the next level.
