Judge is the face of the Yankees now. He is the captain of the Yankees now. He embraces both truths.
The Year After is a fascinating study. The Year After Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, he hit 54 more. The Year After Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, he hit only 33 — and he never hit as many as 27 again for the rest of his career.
And that’s actually exactly as it should have been. Ruth was one of the great hitters of his era, and he was still very much in his prime. Maris was an excellent player, and 1962 was a terrific year for him, as he knocked in 100 runs for the third — and last — time of his career. But his 1962 was every bit as representative of his career as Ruth’s 1928 was of his.
“What I want more than anything else is to be on the field when the Yankees celebrate their next championship,” Judge said a few weeks ago, on the night when he received his MVP award at the Baseball Writers’ Association of America dinner in Manhattan. “And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be in that conversation every year. But especially this year.
So few teams have had the fragmented year the Yankees did. They spent three full months looking like they were going to run away and hide from the rest of the American League. They spent too much of the next three months looking like they just wanted to find a place to hide while the other elite teams in the AL caught up to them.
They won back-to-back elimination games in the AL Division Series, proving they had a strength of character that only a handful of teams possess in any given year; then proceeded directly to a four-game sweep in the ALCS to their most bitter rival, leading for only a handful of innings the entire series, looking for all the world like the reluctant owners of a glass jaw.
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