On a summer Saturday in the Bronx, Aaron Judge took the field for batting practice two hours before first pitch in a game against the Red Sox.
By the time Judge stepped out of the tunnel and carried his bat to the cage, the daily crowd of VIPs and guests invited by the team had gathered behind the stanchions on the warning track by home plate. Among Yankees fans, there is now a generational sartorial divide: The adults who show up to the ballpark in pinstriped jerseys typically sport a No. 2 on the back. Their children, some of whom are now preteens with no recollection of the Yankees’ most recent World Series victory, are usually repping number No. 99.
The physical attributes that separate Judge from his peers are obvious: He has size, strength, and can drive just about any pitch over the wall. But Judge doesn’t settle for the baseline success his skills would seem to give him: He is a meticulous preparer who is consistent in his work to try to get more out of his bat and body. He’s an overall better hitter now than he was in his wildly successful 2017 breakout season, and most around the Yankees attribute his development to his conscious application of the lessons of experience to his routines and training.
Judge is the homegrown superstar who seems to do nothing on a normal scale, a supersized ballplayer who hits towering home runs while playing for the most revered and reviled franchise in North American professional sports. Yet Mister Larger-Than-Life has managed to live only where the spotlight of the sport finds him, rather than seeking it out. He is a quiet, guarded, deeply private man, yet his name and likeness decorate nearly every corner of Yankee Stadium — and this after less than six full years on the major-league roster.
The Yankees made an extension offer to Judge shortly before Opening Day, his self-declared deadline for contract negotiations ahead of his walk year. The total offer, which general manager Brian Cashman announced at an unusual press conference hours before the first pitch of the regular season, came out to $230 million over eight seasons, including 2022. Judge turned it down, and will hit the open market at age 30. He has earned just over $36 million in salary for the Yankees so far, a remarkably disproportionate figure in juxtaposition to the value he has provided on the field and in marketing and publicity to the team and to Major League Baseball as a whole.
In the three months since turning down his offer, Judge has hit .281/.360/.618 with 33 home runs. He is an All-Star for the fourth time in six years and is on track to contend for the American League MVP award for the second time in his career.
Turning down $230 million as an over-30 outfielder whose most recognizable skill is hitting for power — and then putting up the type of walk year numbers that may make the biggest-money franchise in the sport look frugal — requires a remarkable level of self-possession and steadiness, which have become the hallmarks of Judge’s demeanor on and off the field.
Over the course of nearly five major-league seasons, Judge has played in almost 500 games under manager Aaron Boone, a man who has been immersed in the game from the minute he was born.
“He’s got it,” Boone says of Judge.
Aaron Judge on Opening Day at Yankee Stadium (Billie Weiss / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images)
Ask Judge’s coaches and teammates how to find the separation factor for Judge’s diligence, you’ll get a common response: Watch his batting practice.
The fans who show up to the ballpark early to watch BP — whether at Yankee Stadium or on the road — probably expect to be treated to a half hour of Judge getting in the cage and airing it out. This was anticipated to be a fun benefit of Giancarlo Stanton coming to New York in 2018: Two massive sluggers driving batting practice balls deep into the stands every afternoon.
Now, Stanton almost exclusively takes batting practice in the cages, away from public viewing. Judge, though he can still send a few souvenirs into the bleachers on any given afternoon, spends most of his on-field work training an all-fields approach.
“My routine has kind of been the same, even since the minor leagues,” Judge said. “My main objective is to try to drill a line drive at the second baseman’s head every single time I get a pitch to hit. That’s usually what I focus on the first couple of rounds, but there’s always a round or two where you see where the power is at and let it eat.”
The daily preparation program for a hitter can be complex. They are training themselves for what is an inherently reactive position. There are swing mechanics to tweak or drill down further into their muscle memory; ocular components and reaction time training to make them better prepared to make conscious choices about their approach while facing high-velocity and high-break each night; and then there is “letting it eat,” building or sustaining confidence in the most instinctual version of themselves.
“In traditional batting practice, you basically see the same pitch over and over,” Judge says. “For most of my rounds, I like seeing the types of pitches we may face that night in the game. I want like three rounds of just facing sliders, curveballs, and changeups. That way, I can already kind of picture those pitches in my head before I step into the box for a game. The more chances to replicate what’s going to happen on the field — either in batting practice or in the cage — the better success you have when it matters.”
Where Judge leads, his teammates tend to follow. Yankees hitting coach Dillon Lawson says that Judge’s focus on purposeful, game-like work during batting practice has led to the other members of his BP group adopting a similar approach.
“When your best hitter practices like that, every other hitter who is around when it happens is just more likely to follow suit,” Lawson said. “It opens the door for everyone to be a bit more deliberate, a bit more specific with their BP.”
Yankees first base coach Travis Chapman has taken to throwing batting practice to Judge’s group, and throws whatever pitch type Judge and the other hitters ask of him, hiding the ball behind him in some cases to better replicate a pitcher’s delivery and ability to create deception. Chapman played as an infielder in professional baseball and admits he stopped pitching in high school, but he’s on the portable mound each day throwing sliders and riding fastballs as Judge trains his body to react.
“I would say he wants it to be tougher than the typical batting practice,” Chapman says. “More times than not, it’s a lot of sliders. He wants balls just off the plate, or just down. He wants it to be like it would be in a game, and sometimes I’ll throw a pretty good slider off the plate and he’ll just nod his head like ‘yeah, good pitch.’ It’s a ball, but he still wants to see that. It’s really interesting, and a testament to his focus and his work ethic.”
The prime of Judge’s career is taking place at a time when many clubs — especially amongst his competition in the AL East — have come to take a different approach to game-planning against a lineup each night. A team like the Rays, who Judge faces 19 times per regular season, has assembled a collection of pitchers who throw at high velocity, but also tend to throw one pitch exceptionally well. Technology and data research for pitching are far ahead of what is available on the hitting side for now, and smart clubs and players have effectively used those resources to make pitchers throw harder and throw with more break, taking what used to be an exceptional skill — throwing 98 mph with a nasty slider — into the expected baseline for a middle reliever on any given night.
That advantage for pitchers means that for some teams, game planning can focus more on their own execution of their best pitches, instead of giving into the hitter’s strengths and trying to exploit their weaknesses. Judge is the type of hitter who still needs to get pitched carefully. His daily preparation includes facing the worst version of the style of pitching he expects to be facing that night.
In the cages, he and his teammates face machines that can throw at extremely high velocities and with extreme movement and break, which Judge says he uses to almost inure himself to the quality of competition he faces in the AL East.
“When there’s an actual pitcher throwing with a windup and delivery, it’s a bit easier to time up what’s coming at you,” Judge says. “With the BP machine it’s just ‘Whoosh, 90 miles an hour’ with no lead-up, so it’s a little more difficult. I’d rather face this type of thing in the cage though, so that when I get into the batter’s box I feel like ‘Oh, this is a little lighter. I can handle this.’”
Judge may be overstating to an extent the “lightness” of his competition, especially given the way he is pitched at this point in his career.
Only one hitter has seen a higher rate of sliders than Judge has since his full regular season in 2017 (minimum 10,000 total pitches faced). Tigers shortstop Javier Báez, a free-swinger of the highest order, has seen sliders at a 25.8 percent rate to Judge’s 23.8 percent rate. The two sit on opposite ends of the pitching approach spectrum, however: This year, no major-league hitter has been worse against sliders than Báez, per Statcast’s run values metric. No hitter has been better against sliders this season than Judge.
There’s an additional value to Judge preparing this way each day in the regular season: Postseason pitchers don’t often throw junk.
Judge now has five postseason runs under his belt, and he’s seen the difference in difficulty that occurs when the calendar flips from Game 162 of the regular season to Game 1 of a postseason matchup. There are no stretches against sub-.500 teams in October, and at this point, hardly any fifth starters at all. Judge is still looking for his first Fall Classic opportunity. The pursuit of a championship is where he says his focus lies, and the desire grows each time the Yankees’ postseason run ends early.
“It’s cut and dry for me, maybe not for other people, not for other players, but this is why I’m here,” said Judge after the Yankees lost the 2021 AL wild card game. “I’m here to help bring a championship to New York.”
The game changes in the postseason, and at this point Judge — who once called the Yankees’ 103-win 2019 season a “failure” because their season ended in Game 6 of the ALCS — understands how to use the marathon of the regular season to condition himself for October.
A seasoned major-leaguer now, Judge is preparing for the playoffs through the work that he’s doing in May.
“Homework goes to your grade, right? It always goes to the final grade, but it may only be 20 percent of it,” Judge says. “The final is probably bout 50 percent of your grade. So you want to make sure you’re doing well on the homework that’s going to set you up to be in a better spot going into that final. But you really want to ace that final, because that’s where it all counts. Do the homework, but it’s all about the final grade.”
Judge is the son of retired teachers, and he takes his responsibility as a role model to young fans seriously. So, ever cautious of how his audience — and in this case, his mother, Patti — may perceive his comments, he wants to be clear: Homework is important.
Aaron Judge after hitting a home run in May (Elsa / Getty Images)
Judge’s goals in his preparation are two-fold: He wants to create the most consistent version of himself as a hitter, able to produce a good outcome on whatever variety of pitch is coming his way, and he wants to do so without swinging for swinging’s sake.
If there is one piece of advice that Judge would give his younger self, he says he would help him establish daily routines that help him reach his goals for preparation without putting extraneous wear-and-tear on his body each day.
“Less is more,” Judge says. “When you’re younger and you feel good, you feel like you can run through a wall and it’s fine to take a million swings a day.”
Physical maintenance is the one aspect of his game that Judge is open about changing. He missed significant playing time in 2018, 2019, and 2020 due to a variety of injuries, though the 45 games he missed in the middle of 2018 were due to being hit by a pitch in his wrist, which he sees as categorically different from the soft tissue injuries he dealt with in 2019 and 2020.
In late 2019, Judge dove for a ball in September in a game against the Anaheim Angels, sprawling out to make a play against a sub-.500 team when the Yankees were two days away from clinching the AL East with a little over a week left in the regular season. He ultimately suffered a collapsed lung, and an upper rib fracture that wasn’t diagnosed until spring training of the next year. Focused on performing well when the season began, Judge had been trying to train through the discomfort that offseason.
“How will Aaron Judge’s body hold up in his 30s” is a question that looms over his pending free agency campaign. Judge seems cognizant of this concern, and is more eager to discuss his evolved perspective on managing his body than he is most things regarding his career. The message is clear: Judge feels that past outcomes should not be seen as indicative of how his body will hold up in the coming seasons.
Judge says he has a better understanding of what is needed to survive a 162-game season now, noting that he has learned from the veteran players around him.
“You know how many swings is the right amount of swings for you,” Judge says. “Sometimes, you go hit BP, then have a cage session, then have a pregame session, and then play in a game. That’s a lot of wear and tear on your body, and now I try to gauge my swings and after 15-20, I understand what I need to do if something feels off, but I’ve got the muscle memory down and it’s time to go out and play.”
Lawson, the Yankees’ hitting coach, was promoted to the major-league staff this season, and has only seen Judge’s daily approach to his work this year, but the purposefulness of his training is what stands out to him.
“Very few of the swings on a daily basis — and in a 162-game season, it would be easy to set some days aside — lack full focus,” Lawson said. “He’s locked in, and he does a good job of gauging when he needs more reps or when he needs fewer reps. What he wants to accomplish in a game, he translates to a step-by-step progression from training, to BP if he’s taking it for the day, to cage work, to pregame sessions. He doesn’t waste his efforts.”
The first thing that stood out to new Yankees utility man Matt Carpenter upon joining the team in late May was the way Judge was able to set his timing and use both sides of the field depending on the pitch he was thrown.
“People see him as a guy who just has power,” Carpenter said. “But when you see what he’s doing up close, he’s a hitter’s hitter.”
Judge’s spray charts for the season indicate that he is capable of taking different approaches against offspeed and breaking pitches versus fastballs, without changing his timing too much to react to either pitch type. The high velocity of fastballs means he has to react quickly, but if he can get the end of the bat to the ball, he can hit it to the opposite field. As breaking pitches and offspeed pitches take slightly longer to cross the plate, he can square those up and pull them to left field. It allows him to be as consistent as possible with his timing on swings, and this is where Judge’s raw strength can create better outcomes for him: If he gets to a pitch, he has a higher likelihood of sending it into the gap for a base hit or over the outfield wall for a home run.
The greatest indicator of Judge’s success this season might be in what MLB’s Statcast calls “Barrel Rate,” or the percentage of batted balls in which the hitter, essentially, got all of it. Of Judge’s 293 batted balls, 60 have been barreled up — a 25 percent rate, highest in MLB this season. His rate of barrels per plate appearance is also the highest in MLB at 15.6 percent, 2.4 percent higher than the second-highest rate this season, held by Stanton.
“Normal hitters generally have to give up a lot in order to take ownership of something, and he’s probably giving up less to take over ownership of more,” Lawson said.
While his work and approach focus on using the whole field to create good outcomes at the plate, the reality is that for Judge, who has 33 home runs in mid-July, the most fertile field he can find is often in the seats.
“His floor is so high given what he established early in his career,” Lawson said. “I think one of the tricks with Judge is that he didn’t lose his strength to gain more consistency.”
Aaron Judge jogging to the dugout at Yankee Stadium in 2021 (Adam Hunger / Getty Images)
As Judge zaps line drives and the occasional longball in batting practice, before lighting up the field later that night when the batted balls really count, his positioning within the Yankees empire is clear: He is the heir, he is the draw, he is the face of perennial championship expectations. Yet he sees himself as owing his fans and his teammates more than what his career has already delivered.
After about a half hour of taking swings in the cage with his teammates, Judge greets the children on the field who are wearing his name and number, condensing his 6’7” frame to meet them at eye level. He understands that to a child who is 2-3 feet shorter than him, and knows who he is because he hits home runs on their TV every third night, he seems like something mythical. Judge is just another human — albeit a tall and talented one — but who could blame a child for seeing him as a superhuman?
As his teammates and coaches head into the clubhouse to prepare for that night’s game, Judge sits in the dugout with a family the Yankees have arranged for him to meet before this rivalry game. He then gets an hour of privacy before becoming the center of attention for 48,000 fans.
As he runs onto the field to finish warming up his body, the Yankee Stadium PA begins blasting “And Your Bird Can Sing” by The Beatles, a filler track that has to compete with a cheering crowd that has noticed that the Judge has emerged from his chambers.
“Tell me that you’ve got everything you want,” blares through the ballpark as he takes his daily moment of prayer and reflection in the outfield.
Judge has worked his way to living millions of children’s dreams. But he remains unsatisfied. He is unwavering in his assertion that what he wants — a championship victory with the Yankees — is not yet what he’s got.
He soon assumes his defensive position in front of the retired numbers in Monument Park and faces the decorative banners commemorating the Yankees’ World Series victories. He waits to react to each pitch. That night, he goes 3-for-3 against the Red Sox with a walk. He hits two balls into the stands, bringing his season total to 33 home runs in 89 games played. In the fifth inning, he faces a slider, and pulls it 400 feet to left field. The next inning, he gets another slider, and drives it 444 feet to left center.
He didn’t spend his afternoon hitting session mashing home runs for fun. Instead, he waits for his pitch, and drives it when it counts.
(Top image: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photos: Adam Hunger / Getty Images; Diamond Images / Getty Images; Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images)