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  “I really feel like, in the last month or the last two months, it’s starting to click,” Gray said at the time of the trade. “You’ll see it. I’m starting to feel the baseball again and make it do the things that I’ve always been able to make it do. The baseball feels good in my hand again.”

  Though they have been friends for years, Cashman and A’s executive vice president Billy Beane had matched up in only four trades. The last one of significance delivered Jeff Weaver to the Bronx in July 2002, one year before the release of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball made Beane a celebrity GM and forever changed the way MLB front offices did business. Cashman was skeptical that they could find common ground concerning Gray, a former All-Star who was pitching like an ace, but there was motivation to push forward through the tough talks.

  “We just have not matched up, despite being close,” Cashman said. “I think we’ve liked the same players. We think probably very similarly, and that doesn’t create an atmosphere of matches as easy. I think opponents attract when you’re trying to do business with others. So, if you’re an analytical organization, you can match up easier with an old-school organization. But if you’re kind of like-minded, I think you probably repel more than anything else.”

  Shortly after he received the official word from Beane, Gray presented a factory-fresh Yankees cap to his 2½ year old son, Gunnar, and tried to explain the situation.

  “The first thing I said was, ‘Gunnar, I’m not going to be playing for the A’s anymore. I’m going to be playing for the Yankees,’” Gray said. “And he just says, ‘Why, Dad? Why?’ He doesn’t know, but I know he’s going to love it here.”

  Acquired from the Athletics on July 31, 2017, Sonny Gray compiled a 2.84 ERA over his final 17 regular season starts of the 2017 season, the seventh-lowest in the majors over that span. (© Keith Allison)

  The move fired up several of the Yankees, including CC Sabathia, who remarked that they were “back to our same old Yankees—the goal is to win the World Series. We’re here now.”

  Grinding through bone-on-bone arthritis that necessitated a bulky right knee brace to pitch and will eventually require replacement surgery, Sabathia had been one of the more vocal veterans panning the 2016 sell-off, recognizing that his own window to win another title was closing. Now, Sabathia believed that he was once again on the ground floor of something special.

  “It’s still the same attitude. It’s still the same Yankee way,” Sabathia said. “There has been turnover with a lot of us, but the guys that have come in with the rebuild—Sanchez and Judge—those guys have carried us. It’s been a lot of fun to watch Severino emerge as one of the best pitchers in baseball. It’s been fun to be the old guy and sit back and watch these guys do their thing.”

  CHAPTER 13.

  Playoff Push

  “All Rise” had turned into “All Sit,” and the Yankees needed some answers.

  There have been numerous studies performed over the years to investigate the existence of a so-called “Home Run Derby Curse,” attempting to prove that the intensity of the homer-hitting competition impacts a player’s swing and influences a performance dip in the second half of the season.

  While sparing you a detailed dive into an ocean of numbers (though that is only a Google search away, should you so desire), suffice it to say that there is no definitive link, and that the expected regression of players after their above-average first halves seems to be a reasonable explanation.

  Still, Bobby Abreu (2005), Chris Davis (2013), and David Wright (2006) have been among the more notable examples of a player whose second-half performance tanked after participating in the Derby, and Aaron Judge was quickly becoming the newest “Exhibit A” for those who’d prefer to see their sluggers sit out. For what it was worth, Judge consistently rejected the suggestion that there had been any connection between the Derby and his slump.

  “People talk. That’s baseball,” Judge said. “You’re eventually going to go through those times where you’re 1-for-10, 1-for-20, 2-for-10. It’s just part of it.”

  In 84 games prior to the All-Star break, Judge had been incredible, batting .329 while hitting thirty homers and driving in 66 runs. Though he struck out often (109 times in 301 at-bats), that was offset by his .448 on-base percentage (sixty-six walks) and .691 slugging percentage. But as the Yankees returned to action following the Derby-winning performance, Judge went into a six-week tailspin that prompted some fans to wonder if the amazing first half had been a mirage.

  No one in the organization believed that Judge would turn out to be the second coming of early 1990s power hitter Kevin Maas, the go-to example of a Yankees rookie whose performance dipped after a promising debut. Still, in his next forty-four games, Judge replicated the performance that he had shown in his first tour of the majors, right down to the batting average—.179, those same numbers he’d tapped into his iPhone as fuel for his winter workouts.

  From July 14 to August 31, Judge managed 27 hits, striking out an alarming 67 times in 151 at-bats to land on the wrong side of history. Though Judge repeatedly said that he was not concerned by the spate of strikeouts, he did so at least once in thirty-seven consecutive games, tying a major league record set by Bill Stoneman—a Montreal Expos pitcher—across the 1971–1972 seasons.

  Big-swinging Adam Dunn of the Reds had set the single-season record of 32 straight games with a strikeout in 2002, and Indians manager Terry Francona said that it looked like the league had caught up to Judge.

  “There’s not a lot of secrets when guys get extensive at-bats or pitcher innings,” Francona said. “It’s like the player bursts onto the scene, then the league makes their adjustments, and then you see what the player does. It’s always been that way and it’s fun to watch, because the really good ones, they then make their adjustments.”

  That was easy for Francona to say. The Yankees relied on Judge’s thunder, and his outage was coming at a time in which the lineup was lacking notable pieces in Starlin Castro, Aaron Hicks, and Matt Holliday, all of whom had played key roles in the first half. Holliday in particular had been a sizable influence on Judge over the first few months of the season, taking over the role of trusted veteran counselor that Carlos Beltran had filled in the spring of 2016.

  During his extended stays on the disabled list, first with a viral infection and then with a left lumbar strain, Holliday said that he often swapped friendly text messages with Judge but little more. There was advice coming from all corners, and Holliday said that he had no desire to join the many voices who were likely trying to help Judge break out of the slump.

  “I’ve been through what he’s been through, and there’s no need to panic,” Holliday said. “When you look at the body of work, he’s had a great season. And sure, it’s been a little bit rough and it’s not the production that he had in the first half, but I just know who he is as a person and I know the talent and I know that these things come and go.

  “There’s only one way to deal with it. You get in there and you keep grinding and you do your drills and practice. That’s the mystery of hitting a round ball with round bats.”

  While at Fresno State, Judge had adopted a superstition in which he started each game chomping on two pieces of bubble gum, then kept working the same chaw until he made an out. The ideal outcome was for Judge to finish nine innings with a stale, unflavored piece of Dubble Bubble in his mouth. This strikeout streak meant that Judge had spent completely too much time digging into the dugout snack stash for his liking.

  Too many discarded wads of gum called for a temporary switch to sunflower seeds, and Judge tried that too, hoping to snap out of his slump. He also tried swapping out his gear; Judge began to frequently wear an elbow guard with letters of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, reading ‘슈퍼 신인 재판관.’ It had been sent to him by first baseman Ji-Man Choi, who was now in Triple-A after a six-game cameo in the majors. Judge did not know what the characters meant, and was pleased to learn that it translated to “Super Rookie Judge.�
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  “That’s great,” Judge said. “I didn’t think Ji-Man would run me out there with something that was bad language or a bad word or something, so I kind of trusted him.”

  Reggie Jackson, who’d compared Judge to luminaries like Dave Winfield, Willie McCovey, and Willie Stargell over the last year-plus, recounted how he himself had hit thirty-seven homers for the Athletics prior to the All-Star break in 1969, then managed ten the rest of the way. Jackson believed that Judge was going through a similar “course correction,” those periods of time where bat handles are too thick, the spikes of your shoes are too long, and nothing seems to feel right.

  “That’s what baseball is,” Jackson said. “It hits you, it grabs you, it sits you a little bit. It gets you to wake up, gets you to pay attention. It lets you know who is boss, but you figure it out. You get it worked out. They figure you out, and then you figure them out. That’s how that works. You have your turn and then all of a sudden, they start planning for you, taking a little more time, going over you in their meetings. You get it figured out, get it turned around, and you get on a roll again until you go into another slump.”

  If the skid shook Judge’s confidence, he never acknowledged it publicly, but Jackson would not have been surprised if some doubts began to appear in Judge’s mind.

  “Yeah, but if you let them creep in, you’ve got to get them out of there,” Jackson said. “You’ve got to keep going. You can’t go home. You’ve got to come in again tomorrow. The game starts at seven o’ clock, you’ve got to hit at 7:20. You’ve got to hit again at twenty after eight.”

  Judge repeatedly maintained that his left shoulder was not affecting him, but the Yankees did not accept that at face value. The team discussed sending Judge for a cortisone injection (though Cashman and Judge both declined to confirm if one had actually been administered) and Girardi said that he asked Judge about the shoulder a number of times. The answer was always the same—Judge wanted to play.

  “You come to the ballpark, your swing doesn’t feel 100 percent every day,” Judge said. “Your body doesn’t feel 100 percent. That’s why only a few people can play this game. It’s tough, it’s a grind and we’ve just got to keep working and battling. The days you don’t feel 100 percent, if you’ve got eighty percent, you’ve got to give it all eighty.”

  That reminded Girardi of Jeter, but his rookie right fielder didn’t push back as forcefully as the more established captain had. Left out of the starting lineup for three games in late August, Judge said that he had gone “stir-crazy” during a benching that was meant to serve both as a mental and physical respite.

  “He never wants to sit,” Girardi said. “He’s got some of those character traits of No. 2. You ask him how he is and it’s always, ‘Good.’ Those are things that you have to read through. Maybe being around ‘2’ so often, I learned something.”

  The shoulder wasn’t Judge’s only physical issue of note. While celebrating Brett Gardner’s 11th-inning, walk-off home run to defeat the Rays on July 27, Judge was hit in the mouth by Gardner’s errant batting helmet, chipping his front left tooth. The Yankees jumped at home plate, reveling in their sixth win in seven games. Judge covered his mouth with his left hand and disappeared down the dugout steps.

  Later, while a member of the team’s security team searched in vain for the fragment of Judge’s tooth, several of the veterans examined videos of the celebration as though it had been the Zapruder film. Freeze-framing the moment of impact, Todd Frazier quickly identified Clint Frazier as a suspect in the whodunit, shouting the outfielder’s name from across the clubhouse: “It was Frazier!”

  The rookie darted over to see the video on a reporter’s iPhone and pleaded his case, saying, “Listen, there is someone else. Austin Romine is in there.” The elder Frazier dismissed the comment, warning the rookie not to point fingers.

  “You just pointed [your finger] from across the distance,” Frazier the younger shot back.

  The thirty-one-year-old veteran settled the matter with his seniority card: “Well, I can do that. You can’t.”

  For the record, Judge said it was no one’s fault but his own; he’d spotted Gardner’s helmet rolling in the middle of the pile and picked it up, fearing that a teammate could twist an ankle if they jumped on it. When Judge retrieved the helmet, it struck Gardner’s back and slammed into his mouth. After an emergency dental procedure, Judge played the next night. He said that he’d snapped a pic of the ugly aftermath but opted to keep that for himself.

  Despite the growing whiff totals, Judge was getting comfortable. It seemed unlikely that he would be returning to the minors anytime soon, so Judge sought recommendations from teammates about finding a more permanent place to live. After saying goodbye to the hotel staff, many of whom Judge now knew on a first-name basis, Judge found a high-rise apartment building in midtown Manhattan to his liking.

  “I just kind of wanted a place that I could unpack my bags and hang up my clothes,” Judge said. “Living out of a suitcase, I already do that on the road. The hotel had been where they put me when I got called up, and it was kind of the only hotel I knew, so I just kind of stayed there. It was a great fit for me at the time.”

  There was another big change that summer, as fans had started recognizing Judge more regularly, especially in the wake of the Home Run Derby. He’d grown used to strangers walking up to him on the street and saying things along the lines of, “Hey, you’re tall, what do you play?” Now, curious bystanders were stopping him more frequently and saying, “Hey, you look like Aaron Judge.” Judge said that he’d usually smile, shake a hand or two and be on his way.

  “That’s the cool thing about New York. Everyone’s on a tight schedule,” Judge said. “They don’t have time to sit around and talk, and ask for this or that. They say hi, and then it’s, ‘All right, see ya. I’ve got to get going.’ They’ve been great.”

  • • •

  The go-for-it sheen of the July trades wore off as the team stumbled into August, falling out of first place in the AL East as they dropped six of nine on a road trip to Detroit, Cleveland, and Toronto before returning home. Gary Sanchez seemed to be in the middle of everything. Girardi seldom spoke critically of his players in public, but he raised eyebrows by openly challenging Sanchez to step up his defense on August 4 in Cleveland, after watching Sanchez’s league-leading twelfth passed ball sail between his legs.

  “He needs to improve. Bottom line. He needs to improve,” Girardi said in the cramped visiting manager’s office at Progressive Field, minutes after absorbing a 7–2 loss to the Indians. “He’s late getting down. That’s what I see sometimes. It’s something we’ve been working on. We need to continue to work on it.”

  The tone of Girardi’s words was different than they had been after a June 28 game against the White Sox in Chicago, when television cameras spotted Girardi lecturing Sanchez during the fourth inning of a 12–3 win. Sanchez had failed to snare a Masahiro Tanaka splitter that was recorded as a wild pitch. Girardi said then that the conversation had been about helping Sanchez shift his weight better, but insisted that it “had nothing to do with scolding him.”

  Five weeks later, Sanchez seemed uncomfortable as a pack of reporters and television cameras circled his locker in Cleveland, where bilingual media relations coordinator Marlon Abreu patiently translated questions from English to Spanish and back again. Sanchez explained that some of the passed balls had been related to cross-ups with pitchers, but in the case that pushed Girardi over the edge, Roberto Perez flashed bunt at a Jaime Garcia fastball that Sanchez lost sight of, with the pitch rolling to the screen behind home plate.

  “I feel good behind the plate, but there’s definitely been a couple of situations there where I haven’t been able to catch the ball,” Sanchez said. “It has cost us runs. Blocking is a matter of reacting quickly to the ball. I’m not going to be able to block them all, but if I set myself well, I have a good chance of blocking them.”

  Cashman said that he
considered ball-blocking a smaller part of the game and pointed out that the other aspects of Sanchez’s defense, particularly his game-calling and throwing arm, had been consistently rated as above average.

  “Have there been balls that he’s botched every now and then? Yeah, it’s happened,” Cashman said. “We were led to many championships by a player with the same kinds of questions around him in Jorge Posada, who was a great offensive catcher that had a lot of ability, but at times defensively it wasn’t his calling card. We won quite a bit.”

  Sanchez wouldn’t be the first elite offensive catcher to improve after struggling to block balls; beginning his Hall of Fame career with the Reds, Johnny Bench permitted thirty-two passed balls and saw 118 wild pitches on his watch over his first two full seasons, leading the majors with eighteen passed balls in 1968. By 1970, Bench had trimmed that number to nine, and would never permit more than twelve in another single season.

  Girardi said that he had not necessarily been sending a message of tough love to Sanchez; he was trying to be honest about a way in which his catcher’s game could improve.

  “I think there’s a ton of talent,” Girardi said. “I think this is a kid who has a chance to be a perennial All-Star. I think it’s a kid who has a chance to be an MVP. You don’t say that about a catcher very often because of the demands on their bodies and how physical the position is. Usually, you don’t put up the offensive numbers that he’s put up, but I think he has a chance to be really special.”

  Hicks, the team’s other Aaron, returned from the disabled list in mid-August to pick up where he had left off in his breakout campaign. He had carried a .398 on-base percentage, ninth-best in the majors, when he was shelved by a right oblique strain in mid-June. Hicks reminded the Yanks what they had been missing in an August 11 win over the Red Sox, crushing a two-run homer and uncorking a terrific ninth-inning throw in that cut down Eduardo Nunez at third base.