Baseball, Aaron Judge’s record: 62 home runs in one season

NEW YORK – When Aaron Judge let go of his arm and threw the ball away like a bullet, the entire home crowd began to cheer. Yet he was the home run of an opposing player. In those one hundred and twenty meters traveled by the ball thrown by the New York Yankees champion at the Texas Rangers stadium in Arlington, the fastest history of the slowest American sport was written: baseball.

Judge became the player to have scored the most home runs of all, 62, in a single season. Two more than Babe Ruth’s record, set in 1927, one more than Roger Maris, set in 1961. Sixty-two times the Yankees ace hit the ball on the serve, throwing it into the stands and then comfortably conquer the point awarded for the tour of the bases. “He’s a clean one, he’s a Yankee, he played the right way,” Maris’s son said Wednesday, after Judge equaled his father’s record, also a Yankees player. Now Aaron is alone at the top, he is the player with the most home runs in the history of the American League among non-doped players. The clarification is necessary, because the other three had arrived at 62 – Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa – but all linked to the era in which steroids were widespread. This feat restores a bit of pride in a sport in slow decline, weakened by the scandals of anabolics and by an increasingly less viable television game, due to the fast times of the hour and the reduced patience of younger fans, but still valid for many Americans. , because it offers plenty of time to get up from the chair, go to the kitchen and stock up on beer and burgers, without fear of missing something.

Judge is the right character to re-establish the sport priorities of the adult generation of Americans, because he is a clean, gigantic champion, more than two meters tall, 127 pounds, super hero sculptural physique, face cut with a hatchet, so different from many of his colleagues strong in arms, legs but not always impeccably square on the hips. Born on April 26, 1992 in Linden, a village of two thousand people in California, he was adopted after just one day by Wayne and Patty Judge, two school teachers close to retirement, who had also adopted another child, named John, who had become a brother. Aaron’s eldest and teacher in South Korea. The Yankees champion never met his biological parents. In the stands, in Texas, for the game of records, there were the adoptive ones. As the ball crossed the baseline, Dad Wayne hugged Patty, who in the meantime had breathed a sigh of relief. His mother wore jersey number 99. Ever since he was a child, Judge seemed predestined: a champion in basketball, football and, of course, baseball, but also a model student. In 2010 the entry into real baseball, chosen by the Oakland Athletics, called on the 31st round in the Major League Draft. Three years later, the Yankees call. In 2016 the real start as a professional with New York. His number, 99, was chosen in honor of a former great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, who wore that double nine.

The record ball was grabbed by a fan, who was on the left side of the pitch. He was identified as Corey Youmans, from Dallas, and escorted out of security for the ball to be authenticated by Major League baseball and become an original piece. As the record approached, each ball destined for Judge had a characteristic of him, a writing, a sign, a brand, to mark its uniqueness. This will be more than all. Almost six months after the first home run of the season, scored on April 13, against the Toronto Blue Jays.