In the seventh inning of Game Two of the American League Championship Series, between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Guardians, on Tuesday night, Aaron Judge saw a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball, up around his chest, and smacked a two-run home run. Afterward, he said that the ghosts of Yankees legends had pulled the ball through the chilly wind, out toward their shrine in Monument Park, over the center-field wall. The ghosts must have been on his mind for a while now. Judge has spent the past couple of years chasing them; more recently, he’d seemed haunted by them. Before that blast, he had gone more than twenty at-bats without hitting a home run. He came into the game batting .133, with only one extra-base hit in the playoffs. His performance up to that point had been dismal, swelling murmurs that he wasn’t built for playoff baseball—that he couldn’t do it when it counted.
He’d had one of the greatest offensive regular seasons in major-league history. During a hundred-game stretch this season, he hit .378 at the plate with forty-five home runs—a pace that would have produced seventy-eight homers in the course of a full season. (He finished with fifty-eight.) Judge led the majors in home runs, runs batted in, on-base percentage, slugging, and two different measures of WAR, an advanced metric to gauge how many more wins a player is worth than an average-level player at his position. According to another advanced metric, one that quantifies a player’s offensive value while controlling for his park environment, he’d had the seventh-best offensive season in history—behind only Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, and Ted Williams—and the best ever for a right-hander.
But he has never won a World Series, and has led the Yankees through much of an incredibly long spell without a championship (for New York, at least—fifteen years). Every year that the Yankees did not win a championship was considered a failure, according to Judge. “If you don’t win, what’s the point?” he asked, a few weeks ago…