Aaron Judge is doing superlative things this year, as he usually does when he isn’t hurt. Such as launching the ball to places where “normal” hitters just can’t reach on a change-up. I’m not saying that Aaron Judge is abnormal. What I am saying is that he is made for his time.
When you think of someone who is 6’7″ and looks and plays like a linebacker, along with having excellent vision, he is something that will cause baseball to change the game in small pieces, as they did when Bob Gibson made fools of anyone who thought they could get a bat around on his fastball and decided to change the height of the pitching mound. Think about that for more than ten seconds.
Judge has traction that he is going to end up near Ruth and Williams in the pantheon of players that people love to hate, or hate to love, or just get scrutinized. If he can stay healthy.
The interesting thing to me is that if you read the box scores and stats of Ruth and Williams and Bonds, you see that they were players that played at an elevated level for decades. Because I bleed pinstripe blue, I want to feel exalted that when Aaron Judge is having a great season, but I know there is always going to be a stigma because doubt and denial of statistics seems to be the course of baseball analyses.
Put Barry in the hall, and Pete, and Roger, and Sammy, and just get over the incredibly horrible past that baseball wrote all on its own. Money grab with one eye closed to that present day mockery that people weren’t in on the gaming of the system, while comfortably forgetting that the same industry was denying the best players from making a living wage. Heck, even the Supreme Court of the United States got in on the act. AND, denying so many players from joining or staying in the game in the first place because of the color of their skin or the fact that players were legally chattel.
In the mean time, enjoy the Greatest Game Ever Invented.
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