New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge crushes 60th home run

NEW YORK — In the middle of the trot for the most noteworthy and historic home run in more than a decade, one that took Aaron Judge to a level graced by baseball royalty, the Yankees slugger chose not to revel or exult or luxuriate in the moment. And about an hour later, the Yankees’ slugger celebrated the occasion of the 60th home run in his magnificent 2022 season Tuesday night by lamenting the fact that he had not hit it earlier in the game, when the bases were loaded, as opposed to when he did, in the bottom of the ninth inning with them empty and New York trailing the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“I was kind of kicking myself while I was running around the bases,” Judge said. “Like, man, you idiot, you should have done this a little earlier.”

Eventually, goaded by his teammates and manager, Judge had offered those who had stuck around at Yankee Stadium and been treated to more of his magic a half-hearted curtain call. It was more out of duty than desire. All season, as he has chased ghosts and the numbers with which they’re associated, the sorts of things that matter greatly in the baseball world but very little in Judge’s, he has been numbingly steadfast in his insistence that the team supersedes the individual. To him, this all felt weird, disappointing, wrong — another round number reached, but with his team still down three runs and just three outs away from another loss, just like when he hit 50.

Only something happened. Anthony Rizzo reached base, and then Gleyber Torres, and then Josh Donaldson, and up stepped Giancarlo Stanton, and Wil Crowe left a changeup too high, and Stanton sent it over the left-field wall on a line. This time, it seemed Judge was the first one out of the dugout, there to greet his teammates at home plate, to celebrate an improbable 9-8 victory that took a night important to the rest of the world and imbued it with consequence for him, too.

As wild as it is to believe Judge thinks this way — that he’s so team-focused, so tunnel-visioned, that he doesn’t allow himself the grace to enjoy this moment unless his teammates have something to celebrate, too — everyone around him swears it’s true. That he really is machinelike in his conviction, the personality inverse for the person whose one-time record he tied Tuesday.

When Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run to break his own mark in 1927, he said after the game: “Sixty! Count ’em, 60! Let’s see some other son of a b—- match that!” It was pure Babe: a little arrogant and a lot bombastic, appreciative even in the moment of his place in history, perhaps because he’d become so accustomed to writing it. Baseball’s early record books featured Ruth’s name so much they felt biographical. He was the game in the 1920s, and that he continues to play such a prominent role a century later…