Baby Bombers Page 18

  Judge planned to clear them all, and if possible, he would take aim at the garish seventy-three-foot tall sculpture standing beyond the wall in left-center field—a $2.5 million animatronic monstrosity that celebrated each Marlins homer with flashing lasers, leaping fish and soaring birds.

  Mariners first baseman Yonder Alonso had been in the clubhouse while the American League players were trying to rest in advance of their rounds, some taking practice swings in the batting cage, as Judge had. Alonso had some National League history, having played the first six years of his career with the Reds and Padres, and some of the participants asked him about how the ball tended to fly in Miami.

  “I don’t think it mattered for Judge,” Alonso said afterward. “He was hitting balls to right field, center field, left field. They definitely need a bigger-sized stadium for him. It’s not fair. That’s just crazy. I looked at him and I’m like, ‘The fact you only have thirty homers, you should already have fifty by now.’ He started laughing, of course.”

  Judge’s raw power notched some homers early in his turn at the plate, but it wasn’t yet translating to a scoreboard onslaught. Many of his first swings succeeded only in sending a group of Little Leaguers scrambling across the outfield grass in pursuit. Judge called for a time out with two minutes and sixteen seconds left, trailing Bour, 22–9.

  This was the second Home Run Derby that Judge had ever participated in, having tried his luck in one during the 2012 College World Series. Though Judge’s physique stood out, he had not yet learned how to convert his muscle into the production he would show in the first half of the 2017 season.

  “I saw the guys I was going up against,” said Judge, recalling that competition during his sophomore year at Fresno State. “I think I had four home runs that year. The guys I was going up against had twenty, twenty-five. I’m like, ‘You guys sure you want me out there?’”

  Yes, they did, and Judge won the whole thing. Down to his final out and trailing by a homer that night in Omaha, Judge had whipped a borrowed Easton aluminum bat through the strike zone to swat four long balls on four pitches, thrilling a crowd of 22,403 that included former two-sport standout Bo Jackson. At the time, it was the largest crowd that Judge had performed in front of.

  Aaron Judge has performed in two Home Run Derby competitions, and he won them both. In 2012, Judge was the champion of the TD Ameritrade College Baseball Home Run Derby in Omaha, Nebraska. (Courtesy of Fresno State Athletics)

  Back in Miami, Betances, twenty-nine years young and somehow the old man of the Yankees’ All-Star group, made his way to home plate and offered Judge a frosty bottle of Gatorade. While Judge gulped down the electrolytes, Betances tried to deliver his best impassioned pep talk over the roar of the crowd, nearly losing his voice in the process.

  Judge had suspected that he might need his teammates’ help to remember—in the heat of the contest—that he had a time-out available to him.

  “I had told them, if you see me get out of control, wave your arms and yell at me to calm me down so I can call time,” Judge said. “When you’re in the box, you forget about the time-out. I was lucky I had those guys on the sidelines to help me out a little bit.”

  Judge stepped into the batter’s box and made eye contact with Danilo Valiente. A relatively anonymous member of the Yankees’ coaching staff, the graying fifty-one-year-old typically throws 400 to 500 pitches prior to every game. His taxed right arm had served up most of Judge’s batting practice homers that season, including one that destroyed a television screen in a far-off concessions area at Yankee Stadium on May 2.

  “He always hits my barrel in BP, so I’ve just got to keep that going,” Judge said. “Good speed, he’s got a good tempo, and like I said, he doesn’t miss my barrel. Even the days I don’t feel good in the cages or in my swing, he somehow finds a way to make me feel good during BP. He finds my sweet spot.”

  A 2014 profile in The New York Times detailed Valiente’s unlikely path into the clubhouse. Born in Rincón, Cuba, Valiente played in the Cuban equivalent of Triple-A baseball, where players often had to toss BP to each other. Shortly after emigrating to the United States in 2006, Valiente had been heartbroken after losing his wife, Isabel, to pancreatic cancer. He approached Mark Newman, then the Yanks’ senior vice president of baseball operations, interrupting one of the executive’s morning walks near the team’s facility in Tampa, Florida. Rattling off his credentials, Valiente asked for an opportunity to coach. The confidence impressed Newman, who agreed to permit Valiente to observe workouts at the complex.

  Hired full-time in 2007, the team’s minor leaguers took a liking to Valiente, and seven years later some of them asked Brian Cashman to find a place for him on the big league staff. So now Valiente was here, digging his right hand into a bucket of baseballs, plucking out two at a time and aiming to hit a spot that would invite Judge to mash a 60-mph meatball to oblivion. The ensuing display would not soon be forgotten in Derby lore.

  Crushing fourteen homers after that time-out, including a 501-foot blast that cleared the home run sculpture, Judge toppled the seventh-seeded Bour and quickly won over the crowd of 37,027, turning their jeers into cheers. As he had in batting practice, Judge clipped the roof with one of his drives, a feat that had been deemed to be nearly impossible by the stadium’s engineers, who utilized NASA equations when plotting out the dimensions.

  The highest point of the ceiling is 216 feet above second base and as such, a ground rule was added that any ball that struck the roof would be considered “in play.” No player had struck the roof in the stadium’s first 5½ years of service, and now Judge had hit it twice in a single day. Judge initially believed that the roof ball had been a homer, but since it landed in the outfield grass, the ground rule determined that it did not count. With five seconds remaining, Judge was told he had only tied Bour, so he jumped into the box and easily cleared the center-field wall with his final swing of the first round.

  Aaron Judge’s 47 total home runs (in 76 swings) during the 2017 Home Run Derby were the most ever by a Yankee and the second-most in Derby history, behind only Giancarlo Stanton’s 61 bombs in 2016. (© Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports)

  “My adrenaline was pumping a little bit,” Judge said. “I tried to use the whole field and square up every ball I could. Since there was a clock on there, you can’t really take pitches and pick one out. If it’s away, I try to drive it to right. If it’s middle in, I tried to hit the glass out there.”

  In the second round, Sanchez hit ten homers but appeared to be fatigued by the exhibition, then was eliminated when Miguel Sano connected for number eleven. The battle between Sanchez and Sano was years in the making; the Yankees had scouted both as teenagers in the Dominican Republic, debating which power-hitting phenom would constitute the better investment.

  Watching on television at home, director of international scouting Donny Rowland turned to his family and reminded them, “We were very close to having both these guys.”

  Gary Sanchez hit 17 home runs in the opening round of the 2017 Home Run Derby, stunning defending champion Giancarlo Stanton (16). Sanchez was eliminated by Miguel Sano in the semi-finals. (© Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports)

  Though Sanchez retreated to Judge’s cheering section, he took pride in his respectable showing, especially because Sanchez had been placed in the impossible position of defending his presence in the Derby. Rays first baseman Logan Morrison had publicly complained that he—and not Sanchez, who had hit thirteen homers after missing most of the season’s first month with a right biceps strain—should be participating. Sanchez deflected the controversy.

  “It’s an honor to participate in the event,” Sanchez said. “It’s not my fault that he didn’t get selected.”

  While Morrison stewed, Judge trounced Bellinger with a baker’s dozen of homers—including blasts of 501, 504, and 513 feet—before knocking out the son of the former Yankees utility infielder with a 507-foot drive to left field. The 507 and 513-foot drives wer
e the longest home runs ever tracked by MLB’s Statcast system; no other Derby participant cleared 500 feet in the 2017 event.

  “If he had a full round, he’d probably hit another twenty,” said the twenty-two-year-old Bellinger, who had handicapped his chances of winning a mano-a-mano showdown against Judge at “negative twelve.”

  Watching from a seat in front of the dugout, Betances stood up and placed both hands upon his backward cap, screaming with disbelief. The Yankees’ players knew that Judge was capable of putting on a show like this, but he was actually living up to the hype.

  “He’s a kid at heart, man,” Betances said. “He’s a good dude. He’s very deserving and I’m very happy for him. It’s hard when you’ve got to come through with all that pressure. He handled it very well. Judge came through and he did it. It’s unbelievable.”

  The final round seemed anticlimactic, and Judge tried to cheer on Sano, who seemed to be gassed. Judge slammed eleven homers to win it, ending his barrage with a minute and fifty-three seconds still on the clock.

  Aaron Judge celebrates his Home Run Derby title with teammates Starlin Castro, Dellin Betances, and Luis Severino. “I just think of myself as a little kid from Linden, California, getting to live a dream right now,” Judge said. (© Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports)

  “He’s an animal,” Sano said. “The first time I saw Aaron Judge hit BP, I could tell he was a monster.”

  Charlie Blackmon had hung around to watch after Bellinger knocked him out in the first round, and the Rockies star marveled at how quiet and simple Judge’s approach seemed to be, remarking, “He looks like a contact hitter trapped in an ogre’s body.”

  Stacked end-to-end, Judge’s homers traveled a total distance of 3.9 miles and would have reached from home plate into nearby Biscayne Bay. In all, Judge had taken seventy-six swings and cranked forty-seven homers, the second-highest total in Derby history.

  “The biggest thing is how long my barrel stays in the zone,” Judge said. “The last couple of years, the path of my barrel has been in and out of the zone. This offseason, I worked on basically trying to lengthen my swing. I wanted to get the bat in the zone early and keep it in there for a long time. If I do that, my room for error is pretty large.”

  The first rookie to win the Derby outright (Wally Joyner of the Angels was a co-champion in 1986), Judge hit sixteen homers with exit velocities of 115 mph or harder. The performance wowed Judge’s peers, including the Mariners’ Robinson Cano, who won the Derby while representing the Yankees in 2011 at Arizona’s Chase Field.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Cano said. “Not only the home runs, but to go opposite field so many times. He made this ballpark look like nothing. I thought I’d seen it all before, but he’s something else. He didn’t even look tired.”

  A grin spilled across Judge’s face as he and Valiente stood in front of home plate, greeted by Joe Torre—seven years removed from filling out his final big-league lineup card and now spending his days serving as MLB’s chief baseball officer. Torre handed Judge a silver trophy that depicted two bats forming an off-center X.

  “I’ll tell you, Aaron, that’s quite a show,” Torre said. “You used every bit of the ballpark. Congratulations, and a well-earned honor right here. Nice going.”

  Judge shook Torre’s hand and offered a wink before he and Valiente posed for photographs, with Judge chomping on a wad of gum and using his left biceps to again mop excess moisture from his forehead.

  He made his way to a tiny interview room in the bowels of the stadium, where his parents proudly watched their adopted son patiently answer questions in a measured cadence that had already earned comparisons to Derek Jeter—arguably the highest praise that can be lavished upon any young Yankee.

  As Judge thanked the press and stepped away from the podium, he intended to disappear into the night, celebrating his victory with Mom and Dad as though it had been a Little League game or American Legion contest in his sleepy hometown. It seemed too good to be true.

  “I just think of myself as a little kid from Linden, California, getting to live a dream right now,” Judge said.

  CHAPTER 11.

  Aces High

  At first blush, Pedro Martinez and the Yankees should mix like water and oil, but they are inextricably linked on the sides of baseball’s greatest rivalry. It was during a bench-clearing fracas in Game 3 of the 2003 American League Championship Series that Martinez instantly drew the ire of every Yankees fan in the tri-state area, sidestepping a charge by Don Zimmer before tossing the seventy-two-year-old bench coach to the infield grass at Fenway Park.

  One year later, Martinez was in the bowels of the old Yankee Stadium when he uttered a phrase that would trail him for the rest of his life. Having been crushed by the Yankees for a second consecutive start, Martinez glumly remarked, “What can I say? Just tip my cap and call the Yankees my daddy.” He’d also colorfully left no doubt about how he would have handled a hypothetical encounter with Babe Ruth.

  “Wake up the damn Bambino. Maybe I’ll drill him in the ass,” Martinez had said.

  Martinez’s Red Sox got the last laugh in 2004, coming back from a 3–0 deficit in the American League Championship Series, but the Yankees prevailed when they faced a fading thirty-seven-year-old Martinez pitching for the Phillies in the decisive Game 6 of the 2009 World Series. Martinez would later claim that some of his Yankee-baiting had been for show; as a member of the Expos in the mid-1990s, he had hoped for a trade that would send him to the Bronx. Instead, Martinez settled for the role of visiting villain, and he played it well.

  “The Yankees’ fans are really good at that, trying to intimidate you as a Red Sox [player] when you came over,” Martinez said. “They wanted to intimidate you as an opposition. But deep in their heart they appreciate baseball, they appreciate everything you do. They recognize greatness.”

  Given the trajectory of his career arc, the Hall of Famer never would have anticipated that he would be assigned a pivotal role in the development of the Yankees’ next ace. Like most young pitchers in the Dominican Republic, Luis Severino had marveled at Martinez’s tempo, his fearlessness, his willingness to pitch inside. Now, as Severino faced a career crossroads in the winter of 2016–2017, he was about to call upon his idol for help.

  Through a mutual friend, Severino was able to score a working telephone number for Martinez. He dialed the digits, nervously shifting his weight as the line rang, and was thrilled when Martinez agreed to clear his calendar. The first time that they met in Santo Domingo, Martinez told Severino to meet at 2:00 p.m.; Severino was on the field at Estadio Quisqueya by noon, not wanting to miss his window.

  “Pedro is a really nice guy, [being] available to work with me,” Severino said. “That’s very cool, very nice. I called him and he said, ‘Yes, of course, I can help you.’”

  Martinez had an advanced student on his hands. After Severino accepted the Yankees’ $225,000 contract offer, turning down previous bids from the Marlins and Rockies, the whip-armed right-hander rewarded the investment by rocketing through the lower levels of the farm system, making his name in the organization quickly.

  Debuting with the Yankees’ Dominican Summer League affiliate at age eighteen, Severino recorded an unremarkable 6.3 strikeouts per nine innings against similarly inexperienced talent, but he showed good command of the strike zone by walking 2.7 per nine innings. The Yankees worked on refining Severino’s game, with increased weight training and a clean delivery helping to bump his fastball to 95 mph the next spring.

  They assigned Gil Patterson, then the team’s minor league pitching coordinator, to instruct Severino how to throw a changeup that would keep hitters off balance at the higher levels. Donny Rowland, who hammered out the deal that made Severino a Yankee—a pact agreed upon in the dugout of the team’s Dominican Republic facility—said that they’d signed the hurler based upon his fastball and slider.

  “He didn’t really have a change,” Rowland said. “We asked him to
throw it a couple of times and he had action to it, but his arm speed was still too firm. Our player development people have done a great job with changeups, so I wasn’t concerned about that.”

  In the final days of spring training 2012, Will Kuntz—then the Yankees’ director of pro scouting—made the forty-five-mile trek from Tampa to the Pirate City complex in Bradenton, Florida, intending to perform some internal evaluations as the Yankees sent out some of their youngest prospects against the Pirates’ lower level minor leaguers. What Kuntz saw that afternoon had seemed largely unremarkable, and he once told the New York Post that he braced for more of the same when Severino walked to the mound.

  Dutifully raising his radar gun, Kuntz peered at the diminutive pitcher’s motion, then expressed surprise as Severino fired a fastball across the outside corner of home plate. Strike one registered at 95 mph. Kuntz turned to the person next to him, a Pirates minor leaguer charting pitches, and asked for confirmation. The prospect nodded. Kuntz rebooted his radar gun, trained it upon the field again and was rewarded with a 94 mph reading.

  Severino hit 95 mph with his third pitch, then snapped off a hard slider that left the batter flailing weakly for strike three. Kuntz’s eyes widened. This was a special combination of arm strength, a smooth delivery and two plus pitches with command. Even better, he was already a Yankee. Kuntz watched some more, then hustled to the privacy of his car to alert Cashman and Billy Eppler.

  “I just saw our best pitching prospect,” Kuntz told Cashman.

  Cashman was pleased, but not completely surprised. He’d received a call from Rockies GM Dan O’Dowd about Severino earlier that spring; Colorado had pursued Severino with fervor and he was still on the organization’s mind. The Yankees weren’t tempted to discuss a trade, but the Rockies’ interest spoke to the value that opponents saw in Severino.