Culture
Could Yankees’ Aaron Judge hit 73 home runs someday? Teammates weigh in
NEW YORK — Colorado Rockies manager Bud Black knew what he was talking about. Black played with all-time home run leader Barry Bonds in 1993 and 1994 in San Francisco.
“I saw Barry in his prime,” Black said.
Then he turned the conversation toward Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani and New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, who hammered his 50th and 51st home runs of the season against Black’s club Sunday as the Yankees went on to a 10-3 victory at Yankee Stadium.
“They’re probably not quite to that level of performance” of Bonds, Black said, “but Ohtani and Judge are sort of right there.”
Minutes later, on the other side of the stadium in the Yankees’ clubhouse, the talk of Judge and Bonds revved up again.
Bonds’ single-season home run record of 73 has stood since 2001.
Could Judge surpass it at some point in his career?
“If there’s any guy in the league who can do it,” right fielder Juan Soto said, “it’s going to be him.”
When asked the same question, Giancarlo Stanton offered a flat answer: “Yeah.”
“I’m not going to put a limit on what Aaron Judge can do,” manager Aaron Boone said.
After Sunday’s game, Judge was on pace to hit 63 home runs — one more than the American League single-season record he set in 2022. Back then, he snapped the record of 61 that Yankees great Roger Maris set in 1961.
Captain Curtain Call 🫡 pic.twitter.com/qRyYCFWOqI
— YES Network (@YESNetwork) August 25, 2024
Judge hit No. 50 in the first inning off Rockies starting pitcher Austin Gomber and No. 51 in the seventh as part of back-to-back-to-back shots with Soto and Stanton off rookie Jeff Criswell, who was pitching in just his second MLB game and had never given up a single home run in the majors before Sunday.
Judge has been on a tear. He’s crushed seven home runs in his last six games, nine in his last 10 games and 19 in his last 36 games. He’s also reached base in each of his last 15 games.
“One of the best players in the game,” Black said.
In 2022, Judge hit his 51st home run Aug. 30. This year, he did it Aug. 25 and the Yankees had 31 games remaining after Sunday.
Judge became the fifth player in MLB history to hit at least 50 homers in three separate seasons, joining Babe Ruth, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Alex Rodriguez. He’s also vying to be the third hitter to record multiple seasons with at least 60 home runs, joining Sosa and McGwire. He’d be the only player in that category who hadn’t been tied to performance-enhancing drugs.
Judge hit just six home runs through April while posting a .207 batting average. Then he changed his swing and went on a tear that hasn’t stopped.
“That tells you it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” Soto said. “Everybody was worrying about him in the beginning. I didn’t worry about (him), not one bit. Knowing how great he is and it’s like you say, it’s crazy to see a guy hit a homer day after day. It’s incredible. I think I never see somebody hit so many homers so consistent. It’s great to have him behind (me).”
“It’s unreal,” Stanton said. “Like I said, he does something special every day, and you almost take for granted how good he’s been, what a staple he’s been for our offense and our team in general.”
This season, Judge has hit a home run every nine at-bats. In Bonds’ historic season, he clubbed a homer every 6.5 at-bats. With just a month remaining, Judge would have to seriously pick up the pace if he wanted to break the MLB single-season record.
“Times change,” said Stanton, who hit a majors-best 59 homers in his MVP 2017 season. “The game changes. It’s such a far-reaching number. But before that, so was 60. Then 70. It can be done. At the pace he’s going, he’s able to do it for sure. It’s just a matter of putting it together.”
“Seven-three is such a massive number,” Boone said. “I don’t know. But then again, records are made to be broken. That’s one of the great things about our sport.”
Judge’s 62 bombs in 2022 ranked as just the seventh-highest total of all time. McGwire hit 70 in 1998 and 65 in 1999. Sosa hit 66 in 1998, 64 in 2001 and 63 in 1999.
But Judge hasn’t been a one-trick pony. He also leads MLB in OPS (1.201), RBIs (122) and on-base percentage (.465). His .333 batting average was second in the majors behind the Kansas City Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. at .347.
But resetting the AL record might well be within reach for Judge. In 2022, he finished August with 51 home runs and hit 11 in September.
When lightheartedly pressed for a number on how many homers Judge could hit, Boone said, “A lot.”
“I know that’s not necessarily his focus or his goal,” the manager said. “He’s trying to have the best at-bats and help us win the championship.”
Judge said he tries not to think about how many home runs he’s hit. His 308 career home runs are the most of any player through their first 964 career games in MLB history, with Philadelphia Phillies great Ryan Howard second at 274.
“I don’t think that really helps anybody if I’m going up there and trying to hit a homer,” he said. “I got to this point trying to be a good hitter and be a good teammate. So that’s what I’m going to try to do. If I do that, we’re going to look up at the end of the year and I think the numbers will be where they’re supposed to be.”
Where are the numbers supposed to be?
“We’ll see,” he said.
(Photo: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Business3 minutes agoThe Google Insider Trading Case Hits Polymarket
-
Health15 minutes agoHow Author Mary Kay Andrews, 71, Lost 65 Lbs. Microdosing GLP-1 Meds
-
Culture27 minutes agoFinding Wisdom in a Poem by Wendy Cope
-
Lifestyle33 minutes ago‘Look to your elders’: Alfre Woodard shares her secret to Hollywood longevity
-
Technology45 minutes agoNintendo’s newest WarioWare is a weirdo smartphone app
-
World51 minutes agoPutin lands $16.5B nuclear win on Russia’s doorstep in massive Kazakhstan pact: reports
-
Politics57 minutes agoPolice rush to SCOTUS justice’s home amid rising threats against conservatives — but report quickly unravels
-
Health1 hour agoWhat to know about thyroid cancer prognosis following Pam Bondi’s diagnosis
