Aaron Judge Hits 60th Home Run for History’s Jury

On a Tuesday night at the Bronx, today’s best Yankee, Aaron Judge, tied the home run record of the greatest of them all, George Herman “Babe” Ruth. With his 60th dinger of the season, Mr. Judge planted his flag on baseball’s Mount Olympus. Just moments later, slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who once hit 59 home runs in a season and is signed for $325 million, hit a game-winning grand slam to ensure that Mr. Judge’s blast would go down as part of a winning effort, a 9-8 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates. ESPN’s Marly Rivera reported that the fan who caught the ball, Michael Kessler, decided to return the memento to Mr. Judge in exchange for autographed bats and balls for him and his friends. When the 20-year-old was asked why he yielded up such a lucrative object, which betting site Action Network speculates could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, he explained that Mr. Judge has “given so much to this organization.” Beside a sheepish curtain call to propitiate a raucous crowd, not much about this one was different from the previous 59. Mr. Judge stood crouched and still at the plate, then unleashed his smooth stroke against a changeup from Pirates hurler William Crow, whose great-uncle Charles Herbert “Red” Ruffing was a Hall of Fame player for the Yankees in the 1930s and 1940s, winning six championships.The ninth inning heroics rewarded the insomniacs who stayed up late to see the end of the nearly four-hour contest, which previous to the concluding fireworks was shaping up to be another lackluster affair for the Yankees, who have slumped after a scorching start. Mr. Judge’s blast to left field, measured at 430 feet, puts him one shy of Roger Maris’s total from 1961, which is the Yankee standard. Two of Maris’s sons, Kevin and Roger Jr., watched from a luxury box at Yankee Stadium as Mr. Judge pulled within a solitary long ball of their father. The spread of performance enhancing drugs in the 1990s contributed to inflated batting totals that rendered numbers once thought to be impregnable mere footnotes. That has led to renewed appreciation for what Maris did, despite his having played in a season eight games longer than Ruth’s.Mr. Judge’s first chance to pull even with Maris will come today, against the Pirates and pitcher Roansy Contreras. Mr. Judge will enter that game leading the American League in not only home runs but also batting average and runs batted in, putting him in pole position for the hallowed Triple Crown. In a postgame press conference, Mr. Judge confessed that he “never imagined as a kid being mentioned with Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and other Yankee legends.” The consummate team player added that he wished he had hit his landmark home run “with the bases loaded,” to tally more runs for his club.

Aaron Judge Hits 60th Home Run for History’s Jury

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