AARON JUDGE LAUGHED when I asked him about nap time. He’s got a four-month-old daughter, Nora, his first child. She has bedtime down like a champ but isn’t so much into the naps. Aaron and his wife, Samantha, don’t have a nanny or a night nurse, which is both admirable and insane.
“It’s just us doing it,” he said.
It’s been a year of dramatic change for their family, some public, some private. He’d arrived a little late at the clubhouse this afternoon and was rushing. He’s living his life at home in eight-hour blocks. I tell him we could not get our first child, Wallace, to rest, no matter how well a feeding went or how exhausted she might be.
“Naps are tough,” he said with a laugh.
We talked about family, about how he is not thinking about hitting .400 or about Ted Williams, because the only safe space in a baseball season is right now. The past and the future can feel like traps. He stood in front of his double locker on the back wall of the Yankees’ clubhouse. The Red Sox were in town for three games. At the moment, Judge ranked second in the American League in home runs, second in runs batted in and first in hitting. The Triple Crown felt possible but a long way away. A repeat World Series appearance and a chance to redeem a fifth-inning collapse against the Dodgers felt possible too, but maybe even further away.
Remarkable as this is to say about a six-time All Star and two-time MVP, Aaron Judge is at a crossroads. Within his grasp is an immortality afforded to only a few men who’ve played this game. Immortality with the Yankees means being judged by history, by titles, and nothing else. Two years ago in spring training, he sat with his friend and former teammate Anthony Rizzo. The topic was the tradition that surrounds, even suffocates, everyone who puts on a Yankees uniform.
“You gotta make sure you sit with the young guys,” Judge told Rizzo, “and tell them about The Yankee Way.”
“The Yankee Way,” Rizzo said, “is you either win a World Series or you’re a failure.”
“You’re damn right,” Judge said.
ON THE NIGHT before the series began, I sat with Stephen Kaminsky in his car at the Riverdale train station. He’s a scientist at Cornell. Twenty-six years ago, he and his wife, Lisa Wilson, bought a falling-down house by the Henry Hudson Parkway. It once belonged to Lou and Eleanor Gehrig. It’s the house where Lou Gehrig died in the summer of 1941.
We were waiting on Lisa, whose train rolled in right on time. It was 67 degrees outside, a perfect New York summer night. Two men walked past the car, one wearing a Derek Jeter road-gray jersey and the other wearing a Judge pinstripe white. Lisa got in and we headed back to their home. She got to work making sandwiches for a picnic that night up at Van Cortlandt Park. The New York Philharmonic was playing Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, with special guest retired Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams on guitar. Stephen told me about their experience curating the strange legend that lives in their home. People still care. The “Today” show came to film. The Daily News printed a double-truck photo of Lisa and the house in the sports section. The Smithsonian filmed a movie here and broadcast Gehrig’s famous speech on the side of the house.
The room where Gehrig lived the last year of his life, which is now Lisa’s home office with two computer screens and a printer, is about five steps across. I can almost touch both walls standing near where Gehrig’s twin bed likely rested against the wall. The sunlight through the trees made the light glow green and birds chirped from the window. Gehrig could almost have seen the church where his funeral was held from here. Kaminsky’s daughter lived in the room growing up. She was comforted to know Gehrig had a reputation as a kind, thoughtful, humble man.
“If you’re going to have a ghost,” Kaminsky said, “he’s a good ghost to have.”
THE NEXT MORNING I took the 6 train to Harlem and the 4 train to 161st Street and River Avenue. I love game days in the Bronx. Seventeen years ago, on the last night of the old stadium, I walked around beneath the bleachers before the first pitch. A security guard waved me down a darkened hallway, asking me not to tell anyone he was letting me in a room where I shouldn’t be. Maybe he just wanted one final witness before the wrecking balls came. This sacred place, he explained, was where Lou Gehrig went to meditate, to think, to hide, after being diagnosed with the disease that now carries his name. The House that Ruth Built was also always the House Where Gehrig Died. The two paths to Yankee stardom, Ruth desperate for fame and Gehrig desperate to avoid it.
It was noon now, and the vendors had begun to set up beneath the faded and chipped green train girders. I walked down to 164th and River to meet an ecologist named Eric Sanderson, who is the world’s expert on what the five boroughs of New York City looked like before the Dutch and the English arrived.
We walked past the new stadium. Sanderson wore a white straw Panama hat.
“People think this is the world that’s always been,” he said. “It was a place for wildlife.”
The climate in the city is changing, and predicting future flooding is helped by knowing where the water moved on its own before the Dutch arrived. These huge cloudburst rainstorms now drop a month’s worth of water on the city in just a few hours.
“When that happens,” he said, “the streams reappear. The old streams.”
His maps show how water moved through New York before people changed the landscape. Vapor trails of the old city are hiding in plain sight everywhere. Yankee Stadium sits on what not so long ago was a wide stream and a salt marsh. Minetta Street in Manhattan is the old Minetta Creek. Broadway follows an old Lenape trail cutting on a diagonal north to south across Manhattan.
“Nothing is forever,” he said.
We crossed a busy avenue and walked into the public park on the site of the old Yankee Stadium.
“Do you know the story about Mickey Mantle?” he asked.
He wanted to look for the drain that tripped Mantle in 1951 and wrecked his knee. It’s a central artifact in Yankees mythology. He leaned down to feel the plants growing wild in the park. They’re sedges — “Carex acutiformis,” he said — which grow in saltwater marshes. He took pictures for his botanist colleagues and pulled up a sample to take back. This could be big news in the tiny corners of New York City where people study how the city is forever changing around them. The creek beneath the old and new Yankee Stadiums, long erased from the land and the maps, might be trying to return.
“Toni Morrison has a great line,” he said. “She says that the water remembers.”
GAME ONE
AARON JUDGE GOT DRESSED quickly and headed to the 3:20 meeting to go over Red Sox pitcher tendencies. He’s been thinking about the future lately. His daughter has unlocked a new part of him. Part of him is excited she’ll get to see him be Aaron Judge — to see him in the full glory of his powers. Danny Mantle was born in 1960 and doesn’t remember when his father strode across the baseball world like a titan. Until Tiger Woods won the Masters in 2019, his kids had never seen him win a major championship, and Tiger said his son, Charlie, thought he was “a YouTube golfer” until those four days in Augusta. So Judge is excited she’ll remember him as a Yankees star, and that she’ll see him dedicate himself fully to his craft. “Hopefully she’ll see that when I’m older, a little slower,” he said.
But he also looks forward to a time when they are his focus and not this. The longer he waits to have other children, the more time he’ll get to devote to them. He’s seen both examples in his baseball career; teammates who had kids young and teammates who waited until their career was done. Aaron Boone grew up with his dad in baseball and rode in the 1980 Phillies championship parade. Derek Jeter waited for his four kids and the dad life until after his time in the Bronx was finished.
“I went back and forth on that,” Judge said.
It was time for batting practice.
The clubhouse was mostly empty as he left to go up. Aaron Boone gripped his fungo bat and grinned as he saw his star emerge onto the field. A fantasy about some future life, or a road not taken, is not a luxury Judge can afford at the moment. Tomorrow is for tomorrow. “Hopefully I’m coaching a softball team,” he said. “I think the biggest thing I look forward to is just getting a chance to spend time with my family and getting to lay low.”
UPSTAIRS IN THE 200 LEVEL, I laid out some maps Sanderson had given me on the press box desk, starting with a British military map given to commanders in the Revolution and moving up to the first aerial photo map ever taken of the city, in 1924, that showed the brand-new baseball field in the Bronx. Yankee Stadium sits atop what used to be Cromwell’s Creek. The Cromwell family lived in their wooden homestead, more cabin than house, for seven generations, and then in the fall of 1854, their farm was broken up and sold off.
Mary Elizabeth Cromwell was 20 years old when it was sold. A new world was being shaped around her. The last living founding father, James Madison, had died when she was two. The year her farm sold Congress passed a law repealing the Missouri Compromise and accelerating a path toward civil war. The Cromwells had farmed the banks of the Harlem River since before the Revolution. Mary Elizabeth’s generation was the last on the family homeplace. When the family first arrived, the creek was central in the lives of the Lenape subtribe who hunted, fished and grew corn and squash in the swamps and hills of what would one day be the South Bronx. Today, River Avenue parallels the path of the old creek. In a world organized according to the rhythms of the natural world, the creek had been lifegiving. But starting around the Civil War and continuing until all the Bronx swamps were drained in the early 20th century, the creek became a danger, an object of fear. Almost immediately after the Cromwell farm sold, bodies started disappearing into the water.
Thomas McManus drowned there. Wensci Brandel, born in Germany, fell off his fishing boat and drowned. Lewis Gleick, 19, drowned. One morning residents found a dead baby, six months old and wrapped in rags, floating on the surface. A fireman, whose last name was Hoburg, fell off a bridge and drowned. John McGovern fell in and drowned. Some of the bodies were recovered and made headlines in the city’s lurid broadsheets, but most stayed lost in the mud, still rotting beneath both the old and new Yankee Stadiums. I stood on the field on Friday afternoon before the game, knowing those remains were buried down there somewhere, and listened to Judge taking batting practice. Each crack of the bat was a report, echoing off the empty seats. A steady unintended salute. Diminishing ripples of sound. He and third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. took turns taking four cuts each. I came to the Bronx in no small part to watch Judge swing — to have watched him swing — like visiting Amsterdam to sit with Van Gogh’s “Bedroom at Arles.” Aaron Judge is making history in a way that demands a pilgrimage. Effort expended, enlightenment attained. While he did his work in the cage, I found myself focusing on the details of his swing, the movement of his arms, the plant of his front foot, the blur of the bat head, then letting that focus loosen, to take in the green of the grass, the tan of the dirt, the white friezes across the rim of the stadium, the Bronx rising quickly in elevation from the former creek bed valley that is now River Avenue, the whole panorama, like I had to see the player and the canvas all at once in order to really see either.
All around him there are glimpses of his future, a fortune teller’s vision of how his life and career might turn out. The crystal ball is made up of all the men, and their families, who have lived the Yankee hero’s life, held its same anxieties, known its same privileges and glories. When Judge finished batting practice, he headed down into a hallway decorated with a painting of him hitting his American League record-breaking 62nd home run. That chase unlocked a secret knowledge for him, because his flight path took him close to a rare kind of Yankees mystique. He’d been let inside the temple. In the hallway painting the artist shaded in the ghosts of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris watching over Judge’s home run swing from the afterlife. There’s space on the wall for future photographs and paintings. Right now, Judge is the doer of deeds, but one day he’ll be the observer of them, an ancestor like Ruth and Maris.
USHERS AT THE STADIUM handed out a Yogi Berra bobblehead with Berra wearing his Navy uniform. It was the 81st anniversary of D-Day. On June 6, 1944, Berra served as a gunner’s mate on a landing craft support vessel. On this day, his family sat with former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s granddaughter. Yogi’s granddaughter, Lindsay, slipped out of the suite to say hello. She and her family recently produced a documentary, “It Ain’t Over,” that evokes the lost worlds of Yankeedom.
“I’m feeling a little nostalgic today,” she said, “thinking about poor Grampa and his pals and all those bullets and bombs.”
I asked her if he’d ever talked about it.
“No,” she said.
His sons took him to see “Saving Private Ryan” and they turned to find him weeping in his seat. Once he told his son about pulling the dead bodies out of the water after the beachhead had been secured.
On Friday night the Yankees played a video about Berra’s military service, and then one about Babe Ruth, and down on the 100 level the team store sold Mickey Mantle bomber jackets, Mantle jerseys, and Ruth jerseys and T-shirts, and Gehrig T-shirts. Sitting in the press box, I texted with Eddie Ford, Whitey Ford’s son, and he asked if I could bring him one of the bobbleheads. Whitey and Yogi roomed together on the road and remained close all their lives.
The stadium organist played “New York, New York.”
Rain delayed the first pitch a half hour. I went to sit in Section 107, in the 10th row, with a Princeton religion professor named Liane Feldman whom I’d invited to the game. She thinks a lot about the nature of the relationship between the pure divine and the impure human. We sat and watched the grounds crew remove and roll the tarp. She talked about how animal sacrifice in the ancient Jewish world was rooted in the idea of the temple being a bridge between the holy and human. A man in a Mickey Mantle jersey walked past. A nearby kid started screaming about Aaron Judge. Feldman said that being in Yankee Stadium, and seeing Monument Park, reminded her of an obscure fact buried in the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament.
“The High Priest is never allowed to leave the temple,” she said.
The High Priest needed to remain pure. The man and the temple became one being eventually.
“You are a cog in the machine,” she said.
IN THE FIRST, Judge batted second and hit a 94 mph sinker to center field for a double. His next time up he hit a single, his average moving closer and closer to .400.
The team seems to respond to him and match his energy. He takes being team captain seriously. When a non-roster invitee ends up in spring training, with no chance to make the big league club, Judge will make sure to welcome him to the Yankees and thank him for his contribution. He learned the code of the game from Brett Gardner and from CC Sabathia. Sabathia is the one who told him he had to be himself. If he wanted to go to dinner with his wife, he could just go. His friend and fellow big leaguer Tyler Wade called him a “sponge” and said he asked a lot of questions when they were coming up together in the Yankees organization. Judge practiced remembering people’s names. I introduced myself, and a few minutes later he came up to tell me he’d be available after his meeting, and he led with my name.
Everyone wants to mirror Judge’s demeanor, and I think they don’t want him to be disappointed in them. In a baseball clubhouse, when you hit the ball as hard as he does as often as he does, you’re afforded certain power. The first rule of being the clubhouse alpha is to do things the other professional ballplayers can’t. For Judge, that is his carefully hewn, efficient swing.
He’s got a monastic approach to his craft. Nowhere is this instinct more on display than in his long relationship with a St. Louis billiards hall owner turned swing guru named Rich Schenck. For the past eight years, Rich and Aaron have met in person about every two weeks, often at a batting cage in Manhattan. His system focuses on launch quickness, the elapsed time between the decision to swing and the start of the swing. Schenck invented an app to measure launch quickness in practice settings. Judge has been timed at .116 of a second. That’s the time it takes to blink. The fastest a human being can identify an image is 100 milliseconds. The slowest is 140 milliseconds. It takes Judge just 116 milliseconds to recognize where a pitch will cross his strike zone and where his bat should be aimed to intersect with it. The superhuman aspect of his batting process is almost underappreciated. Most players, even some All-Stars and Hall of Famers, decide to swing, then load, then swing, which leads to a lot of highly educated guesses. A rare few players — Schenck named Bonds, Judge, A-Rod, Albert Pujols and Ted Williams — are load, then decide, then swing.
Every year at spring training, Rich and Judge make a schedule for the upcoming year. Judge is a rigid creature of habit bordering on ritual. The meetings take two days. Rich flies in on Monday night and they work on Tuesday and Wednesday at the same cage where weekend Wall Street warriors come to take some cuts. “Every now and then some kids walk in,” Schenck says, “and they said, ‘Oh, man, that’s Aaron Judge.'”
Last year, Judge won his second MVP but then played another in a series of subpar playoff series (he’s a career .205 postseason hitter) and immediately turned his focus to 2025. And this year he didn’t sit down to plan time with Schenk. In fact, they haven’t seen each other in person at all this season. Schenck said the swing is automatic now and Judge doesn’t need the tuneups. They’ve texted four or five times but still have not gotten together. After eight years of spartan work, Judge is finished with prelude. It’s a terrifying thought for opponents if Judge, who has authored some of the most historic seasons in the game, feels somehow more confident or more determined right now.
Judge has more money than his grandkids can spend, and will be a Hall of Famer, but his destiny has always seemed bigger than that. He is in position to join Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Derek Jeter. There’s something powerful about this moment in any career, whether it’s writing or banking or baseball. You have done the work and are fully formed, coiled and ready. And you can feel his awareness of the scale he’s working on in his commitment to living in the moment.
Judge came up for the third time in the third inning. Red Sox reliever Zack Kelly started off with a 79 mph sweeper. Swing and a miss. Kelly played D-II baseball and didn’t even get drafted. He fought his way onto a team after being released twice, and originally signed for $500, and clawed this career out of uncooperative clay. A patient Judge took two changeups to get ahead in the count. Kelly threw another sweeper, which Judge swung at and missed, and then a 97 mph sinker past Judge for the third strike. All three pitches he missed would have been called strikes.
ON APRIL 25, 1880, New York financier John Jacob Astor III bought the former Cromwell family farm, along with more than a thousand other lots in the South Bronx, for about $450,000. Astor owned the land, owned the water, and owned the bones of the anonymous dead down in the mud. Yankee Stadium was 43 years from opening. Nine years later, Astor started to build bulkheads and fill in land on the waterfront. Cromwell’s Creek got smaller and smaller. Astor died in 1890 and his son, William Waldorf Astor, took over the property. They reclaimed block after block from the creek and the river. In May of 1901, 10-year-old boy Willie McCormick drowned in Cromwell’s Creek at River and East 161st Street. Two fishermen saw his small body float to the surface. The boy had a penny in his pocket along with an aluminum medal from the World’s Fair. On the day of his funeral, thousands came to the bridge to look down at the water where the body had been found.
Yankee Stadium was 22 years from opening.
In May 1905, the state of New York voted to close Cromwell’s Creek for good. Workers slowly filled in the creek, a load of dirt at a time. They didn’t know but they were building the foundations for two enormous baseball stadiums, each with generations of fragility and ambition on public display. Their descendants, both the families of the dead and of those who covered up their final resting place, would fill that stadium with parochial fervor, never knowing, but surely sensing, that there was always an element of elegy in even the most joyous Yankee Stadium celebrations.
The last Cromwell Creek kid whose death captivated the city was a 13-year-old boy named Alfonso Marandino. His family had been in America for eight months. On the day Alfonso died a crowd gathered for a pickup baseball game at the park beneath what would become Yankee Stadium. A group of cops, including William Hedeman, came to keep people in line. He heard a woman’s screams at the eastern end of the baseball field, which bordered the creek. The woman pointed at a ripple in the otherwise still brown water.
Hedeman, who was born in Ireland, dove in wearing his full uniform. Both he and the boy died. Years later, Alfonso’s brother, Frank, married a woman named Teresa and moved first to Arthur Avenue, where today all the Italian restaurants and bakeries root the neighborhood in the rhythms of the past, and then to New Jersey to work at the Continental Paper factory.
He and Teresa named their first son Alfonso.
The local papers wrote stories about the “most treacherous rivulet” in the city, as they’d done for two generations. For the first time, the cheerleading drumbeat of progress in the New York press found its modern echo: nostalgic hand-wringing over what was being forgotten in this furious march into the future. One story in particular captured this anxiety. The papers covered the outrage in the Bronx about an abandoned, trash-strewn cemetery at the corner of Sedgwick Avenue and West Fordham Road. Broken and toppled headstones lay in the weeds and brush. The most important grave found abandoned belonged to Oliver Cromwell, who died on March 18, 1818, and had been, the paper explained to readers with no institutional memory, a prominent farmer and landowner. He was also Mary Elizabeth Cromwell’s grandfather.
THE YANKEES WON easily on Friday and Judge met with the press corps after the game, which he does almost every night. He wore a Yankees blue muscle tank with his chains out. One is an enormous jewel encrusted gavel — like a judge’s gavel, get it — that was a gift from teammate Giancarlo Stanton. It is the most baroque ballplayer thing I’ve ever seen. He complimented Jazz Chisholm Jr., through the lens of his own deep understanding of how being the center of attention in the Bronx is a physical experience.
“When you step out there at Yankee Stadium, the adrenaline is going to be flowing,” Judge said. “It’s really just slowing everything down and taking a nice, easy approach and a nice, easy swing. That’s what I felt like I saw tonight. Even the homer swing to center field, I was out there at second base, and it looked like he took a nice, easy swing on a tough curveball there and hit it 415 feet out to center field.”
Someone asked him a question about what Jazz brought in energy to the clubhouse. Judge was incredibly polite in his answer, as always, but if you listened closely there was a touch of an edge in it. Chemistry and things like that are like the humanities of baseball culture; the science is what you do out under the lights.
“That’s all the energy you need right there,” he said.
Chisholm peacocked around the clubhouse. He answered questions until the media grew tired of asking them. Sitting in his locker, with a yellow Post-it note naming the date, 6/6/25, was the home run ball he hit dead to Monument Park.
“I got the home run ball!” he said, sounding like nothing so much as a Little Leaguer.
He laughed.
The players showered and went to their cars and drove away, turning onto River Avenue from the Stadium garage, filtering out to mansions and luxury apartments around the city and the boroughs and the surrounding cloistered bedroom towns.
IN 1919 WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR, who’d moved to England, died, and two years later his estate sold ten acres of land to Yankees owner and New York congressman Jacob Ruppert Jr.. Two months later a short obituary revealed that an old woman in Yonkers had died. Her married name was Mrs. John Ward Pawson and she lived two blocks off the Hudson River, on an urban street impossibly distant from her rural Bronx childhood.
She’d been born Mary Elizabeth Cromwell.
Her family had filtered out into the great American darkness, moving, fighting, falling in love, dying. Her grandson, Clifford, lived to see Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. That season Joe lived in a wood-paneled clubby penthouse at 400 West End Avenue. The legend claims that he would walk out on the expansive terrace, the city spread out beneath him, and wave a towel to signal to a nearby teammate that he was ready to carpool to the Bronx. The 19th consecutive game in his streak came on June 2, 1941, when he hit a double off Bob Feller. That’s the same day Lou Gehrig, only 37, died in Stephen Kaminsky’s home in Riverdale.
DiMaggio’s penthouse apartment was virtually the same when a big Wall Street guy named Tucker Andersen bought it in 1995. The rich wood walls, a portal to an older New York City, remained. Nobody with the real estate firm told him about the famous former resident but he figured it out. He and his wife hung a photograph of DiMaggio making contact in his 56th consecutive game, and above the fireplace mantel they hung a signed photograph of DiMaggio in his final season, and Mickey Mantle in his first, one Yankee legend sliding into his silent season, as writer Gay Talese put it, and the other just finding his sea legs in the coming storm. Judge is a student of his Yankees history. The way he talked to me about the old legends reflects his own awareness that he might be walking a difficult, lonely road, but that road has been traveled before.
Tucker moved and the new owners ripped out all the wood and turned Joe DiMaggio’s penthouse into just another sleek Manhattan apartment. The old doorman, James, loves the Yankees and was heartbroken at yet another piece of vanishing baseball history. Two years ago on Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio’s family sat in a box near the field. Next to them sat Aaron Judge’s family.
They didn’t recognize each other.
GAME TWO
ON SATURDAY MORNING I drove to the house Whitey Ford bought for his family in 1958. His son, Eddie, owns it now and five years after Ford died during the pandemic, they’re finally going through the possessions and memories that accumulate when a family lives in a place for seven decades. They were in the midst of wading through the pieces left behind after a Hall of Fame career and a marriage to match its intensity and longevity. They found all of Whitey and Joan’s love letters, and stacks of memorabilia he’d signed, during that last era of his life when signing his name was the only way he could make money off his career. There’s an original LeRoy Neiman. The Cy Young Award, which hangs on the wall in the room where Whitey’s bar, with four seats, looks out over his pool and backyard. You can practically see him behind the bar stirring double stingers or shaking Manhattans.
The home is on a quiet suburban street, on the southern edge of Great Neck on the North Shore of Long Island, the older money half, which is a window into Whitey Ford’s striving in 1958. He’d grown up in Astoria, working class. On the porch there’s a blue statue of a little boy holding a baseball and a glove. Eddie and his wife, Cathi, sit at the little table in his dad’s kitchen, with the modern vent hood and a white Sub-Zero refrigerator flush with the cabinetry. Today is a work day on the house, which means going back through their memories. Whitey and Joan Ford, they say with a warm smile, loved taking their whole family to Cooperstown for the annual induction. All the old stars stayed at the same hotel with comfortable rocking chairs on the porch. Whitey would jump out of the car and gleefully call out to everyone, “Let’s rock!” before leading the charge right to the chairs. Every year they all would listen to Warren Spahn tell stories, and shoot pool with the Mantles. At night the Fords would sit in their room and listen to beautiful harmonica music filtering up from the floor below. It was Stan Musial. He loved to play “Wabash Cannonball.”
At the end of his life, Whitey Ford’s Alzheimer’s stripped him of the memory. The veteran baseball writer Steve Wulf once wrote an essay about him for a book about New York baseball. Later at a party, Wulf met Eddie Ford, who started showing him pictures of Whitey reading the chapter Wulf had written. Whitey Ford woke up every day confused and not himself, and he’d take that book and read about his own life with wonder and awe.
Eddie Ford only understood the cost of being a Yankees legend in the final, difficult years of his father’s career. When he was a young boy, his dad won almost every time he stepped on the mound. Then one day he started to lose. We stood outside by the pool at their house and he jammed his hands in his pockets, then took them out and rubbed them together, then put them back in his pockets. This is the future that Aaron Judge can’t yet imagine, I thought. He talks a lot about these men as examples to follow and surely at Old-Timers’ Day he’s clocked their decline. He might be too ascendant to think about when he’ll reach his own 1967 and 1968. He might not want to speak that thought into existence.
“It was tough at the end,” Eddie said.
He quoted Knicks legend Bill Bradley.
“You have the beginning of your career,” he said, “and then you have the middle where you’re great, and to have a complete career you have to go through those last two years where nothing works.”
Eddie’s mom, Whitey’s widow Joan, never stopped following baseball. Joan loved going to Yankees games. She always recognized those who seemed tapped by destiny for stardom. The first time she saw Aaron Judge she turned to her daughter-in-law and said, “That guy’s gonna be fantastic.”
Joan Ford didn’t know the rookie’s name. She kept calling him 99.
“Ninety-nine is gonna be fantastic.”
JUDGE CAME INTO the clubhouse right around 3:45 on Saturday afternoon, another game in his tenth season. The clubhouse is one big shrine. The retired numbers hang above the lockers. A Joe DiMaggio quote about thanking God for letting him be a Yankee that hung between the old clubhouse and dugout got moved here. Mantle and Maris look down from the postgame interview room, along with DiMaggio and Whitey Ford. There’s an Earl Mayan painting of Yogi Berra. Derek Jeter’s picture is everywhere.
“They’re real people to me,” Judge said, his voice earnest and shadowed with emotion. “I can feel ’em. You can feel ’em in the Stadium when you’re playing.”
He knows they don’t play in the same stadium. But he says, and I think he means it, that whenever a big moment arises, those old numbers hanging on the walls give out a little energy, a little juice. Joe DiMaggio is still sitting in the corner nursing half-cups of coffee and Derek Jeter isn’t down in Florida, where his television doesn’t have the Yankees baseball package, but still in the clubhouse looking each beat writer in the eye after a tough loss, never dodging a question.
“They’re not gone,” Judge said. “They live and breathe.”
One of the tabloids ran a story on this morning about him flirting with .400. There are three and a half months to go, but the watch has begun. Boone talked Saturday about the pressure players feel — “Especially in your prime years,” he said — to protect and maximize the moment. Judge understands. During the season when he hit 62 home runs, he came to identify with Roger Maris and the pressure he felt as he closed in on Babe Ruth. He went 35 plate appearances between 60 and 61 and Maris’ son started following Judge around, at home and on the road, to show support and to feel close to his father. Judge felt some of the stress that plagued Roger, and according to Bryan Hoch’s book, “62,” he felt not joy but relief as the final home run crossed the outfield wall.
As I walked away from his locker, I turned back to ask a final question.
“Have you ever been to Monument Park alone?” I asked.
The question caught him by surprise. He was quiet for almost ten seconds.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
UPSTAIRS IN THE STADIUM I got a text with an attached satellite photo of a brick terrace somewhere in Queens. A retired Yankees fan in Bozeman, Montana, named Harry Kirschenbaum sent it to me. The terrace belonged to Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in their famous summer of 1961.
He’d been telling me the story.
That summer, Kirschenbaum was at summer camp in Pennsylvania.
He saw his family’s Buick wheel into the camp, skip the parking lot and drive right to where he was standing. He was 14 years old. His mother jumped out of the car and ran toward him. His father followed behind. Together they told him the news. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris had moved in one apartment away in their building in Queens.
“Do you want to come home?” his father asked.
“Let me get packing!” Harry replied.
Their apartment building, brand-new, stood between the Van Wyck Expressway and Queens Boulevard. It was on the first floor. Mantle and Maris lived with their teammate Bob Cerv and his wife. Every day about two hours after the Yankee game ended, Harry would watch an Oldsmobile convertible with Oklahoma plates pull up to their building. Mantle’s car. He’d watch Mantle get out and try to go to a bar across Queens Boulevard, while Maris and Cerv wrangled him back into the apartment. Suddenly Harry became popular with his classmates. The doorman spent that magic summer fending off boys and teenagers who tried to sneak inside. The ballplayers entered through a basement door on the side and took the elevator up.
“My father, God bless him, may he rest in peace, would put his ear to the door,” Kirschenbaum said laughing. “When the elevator dinged, he’d take the garbage out. I’d stand there in the hall with my mouth half open. They’d smile at me. I had no idea back then of the emotional pain that Roger Maris was going through. But he was nice enough to always smile when he saw me and my dad. The poor guy was going through hell. Maybe it was nice to see a friendly face.”
The season ended with another Yankees World Series title and with Roger Maris permanently scarred by the intense scrutiny of chasing down an icon like Babe Ruth. His hair fell out from the stress. The next year Mantle moved back to Manhattan. Maris found his own apartment in the same building. In 1962 the Yankees would repeat as champions, the team’s last title until 1977. Kirschenbaum turned 15 and for him, the summer of 1962 is dominated by memories of stickball and the pink rubber Spalding balls they used. Behind the building was the National Cash Register Co., with an enormous L-shaped parking lot perfect for stickball. The kids drew a strike zone on the rolling door and got to playing. These games drew crowds of parents, hauling out lawn chairs and cold drinks. One night, maybe the last day of his childhood, Harry got up to bat. He saw the pink ball collapse under the perfect contact he’d made and then rocket out into the night. Nobody ever found the ball, it went so far. The parents roared and up above he heard slow clapping and when Harry turned he saw Roger Maris hanging out of a sixth-floor window, applauding the long home run. A few days later Harry saw Roger in the lobby.
“Hey, Mr. Maris,” he said.
“Hey, kid,” Maris replied with a smile. “Nice game.”
THE FIRST PITCH of Saturday’s game was a strike. I sat in right field next to a 30-year-old man named Skylar Mercado and his girlfriend, Nicole Franciosa. They’re a serious couple, talking about the next step.
“We have baby fever,” she said with a grin.
Skylar played college baseball, and a few seasons of independent ball, before coming back to the Bronx to work. He lives in the same house where he grew up, which is the same house his father grew up in, too. His grandparents bought it in 1986 and lifted the family out of the projects. His dad, Steve Mercado, is credited around the Bronx with bringing stickball back, transforming a dying sport into a multigenerational Sunday celebration of the neighborhood. Steve Mercado was a legend down on Stickball Boulevard, a short street that runs between Seward and Randall Avenues in the Bronx. His day job was working in a fire department out of the Upper West Side.
Skylar has his father’s badge, No. 11632, tattooed above his heart.
Skylar was six years old on Sept. 11, 2001.
His father and his fellow firefighters at Engine 40 got the call. All hands. Steve was climbing into the south tower trying to save as many people as he could when it collapsed. At first Mercado was just missing. His family and their sprawling interconnected Bronx neighborhood waited for news. The community wrapped this family up in their arms, Italians and Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Christians, Jews, Muslims. His cousin, Sharon, thought about a night Steve fought in a Golden Gloves tournament at Madison Square Garden. Only a minute into the fight, he caught a punch on the chin and went down. Sharon jumped up and started screaming, “STEVIE GET UP! STEVIE GET UP!” Lying on the canvas Steve heard his cousin’s voice. He crawled to one knee, shook off the cobwebs and unleashed a Bronx beating on his opponent. The Garden went nuts. So on Sept. 11, when all they knew was that his entire company was missing in the rubble, Sharon prayed over and over again, begging God: Stevie, please get up.
Skylar Mercado is the president of the Emperors Stickball League, like his father before him. He’s the captain of his own team, called Legacy, in honor of his father and all the other multigenerational connections on the team. His dad loved Thurman Munson. So his younger brother wears 15. His grandfather loved Joe DiMaggio, so Skylar wears 5.
“My guy is Joe,” he tells me as we watch the game.
There are a lot of empty seats across the field from us, even with the Red Sox in town, and we both noticed. Yankee fandom is more of an aesthetic, he said, than a tribal ritual like it was for his father and grandfather. The brand matters more than the games, he thinks. But in his neighborhood, the Yankees remain an essential part of daily life. The Mercados are anchors of the Castle Hill section of the Bronx. They had league play the next day, and he invited me to go over to Stickball Boulevard with him. He said the best part of the game is when you really hit one square. Nothing sounds like dense wood walloping a rubber ball.
“Are you a Star Wars guy?”
I said yes.
“It sounds like the blasters,” he said. “That’s what it sounds like and I love it.”
His voice gets thick with emotion, and it’s clear that the amount of time he puts into stickball, and the nurture he receives in return, is all about trying to spend one more second with the hero father who went to work one morning when he was six and never came back. Sometimes he goes to visit his dad’s old station. It’s been 24 years and the people have changed, but they know who he is and what he means and wrap him up in their embrace, just like the neighborhood did all those years ago.
THE RED SOX jump on starting pitcher Ryan Yarbrough and never let up.
There are days when the Yankees look like the best team in the American League and then there are days when they look like the team that got embarrassed in the World Series a year ago. It’s hard to know which team will be left standing in October. They are closing in on the franchise’s longest drought without a championship. Fifteen years separated Mickey Mantle’s last title in 1962 and Reggie Jackson’s first in 1977. The club went 18 years between Reggie Jackson’s last in 1978 and Derek Jeter’s first in 1996. Derek Jeter’s Yankees last won in 2009, a title that meant the world to Skylar Mercado as he mourned his father.
Judge got booed last season. That’s normal. Even Jeter and Mariano Rivera got booed. He joked afterward that he’d probably be booing him too if the situations were reversed and he was sitting out in the stands.
The window is here now. It will not stay open forever.
Judge is thirty-three years old, well past his statistical baseball prime. Ruth played 22 seasons, DiMaggio played 13, Mantle played 18 and Berra 19, Jeter played 20, Rivera played 19. Judge is currently in season 10. His contract extends through 2032, at the end of his 16th season. He’ll be 40 then. The locker room has turned over enough that his running buddies from his first years in New York have all moved on. He’s in work mode. He goes on vacations after the season with his friend and former teammate Tyler Wade and even on the beach he’s already looking for what he did wrong and could do better. Wade called me from the Padres clubhouse before a game recently and said that after hitting 62 home runs, he started talking about how he’d “left ten homers on the table.”
He went 0-for-4 and struck out three times on Saturday. Like a lot of stars, Judge makes his living by ruthlessly, almost automatically, punishing mistakes. That’s a theory about why he struggles in the postseason: Everyone is focused, grinding, and so the best players are working at peak effort, which limits the mistakes to punish. His career average in the playoffs is .205. His career average in the regular season is .295. He averages a home run every 13.75 at-bats in the playoffs. He averages a home run every 11.31 at-bats in the regular season. The more individual stats he accumulates without winning a title, the more he does himself a disservice in the perverse algebra of being a Yankees superstar. He doesn’t want to get into the greatest to never win a title conversation. That’s a body blow to immortality. Everyone I talked to who knows him said the exact same thing: Judge would trade every one of those individual stats and personal awards to win it all. But right now he’s 0-9. He’s approaching rare air in a good way and a bad way, too. All a season is, really, is a series of at-bats. Judge had 559 last year. Each one requires all of him. He struck out swinging in the first inning. He struck out looking in the third. He struck out swinging in the fifth. In the eighth inning, he took three balls and a called strike on a cutter. Red Sox reliever Justin Wilson threw a slider next. Judge loaded then decided to swing, virtually instantly, his bat blurring through the contact zone. He got under the ball, and behind it, and popped out down the right-field line.
IN 1966, THE YANKEES finished in last place and 1967 began with a hollowed Mantle stuck on 496 career home runs.
“I vividly remember,” Lou DeFilippo told me.
In 1967 he was 18 years old and working a job. He’d stepped into adulthood but held tight to the last pieces of childhood, too. “In the Bronx, everybody wanted to be Mickey Mantle,” he said. “You wanted to wear No. 7. You ran like him with his shoulders up in the air when he rounded the bases. Everything was Mantle to me. I would go to bed and I would have dreams that I went to the ballgame with my two friends and I caught the ball.”
On May 14, 1967, Mother’s Day, he and two friends took the subway to Yankee Stadium and got tickets in the right-field upper deck. It was a dreary, misty, cloudy day. Around the fourth inning they moved down by the right-field bullpen.
“It was a 3-2 pitch,” he said.
The ball rose into the air and landed straight in his hands. He shoved the relic into his pants and Yankees security pulled him and his friends down into the general manager’s office beneath the bleachers. The team offered him $2,000 for the 500th home run ball. He said he didn’t want the money and just wanted the chance to meet Mantle.
He returned the ball and Mantle autographed another as a thank you.
“Your pal, Mickey Mantle,” he signed it.
The Mantle in his imagination was a superhero. The Mantle standing before him in the quiet of the Yankees clubhouse was nervous and tired. He had to ask Lou what year it was before he dated the baseball.
The 1968 season turned into a farewell tour for Mantle, and for a vision of America, and he’d rage in private about his impotence at the plate, slamming bats into his locker in frustration. He mostly stayed in his suite at the St. Moritz on Central Park South and ordered room service. Sometimes on the road he’d put on a disguise and walk around the cities. One night he asked one of his younger teammates a wistful question.
“Did you ever see me run?” he asked.
One day, a young staffer sat in the clubhouse and watched Mantle take an old pair of spikes and throw them perfectly, swish, into a nearby trash can and then slip a new pair on his feet — “This is going to be my last pair of shoes,” he said — as he sat in the stadium that sat atop what had once been a family farm with a creek running through it. Mary Elizabeth Cromwell’s descendants had long ago chased sunset meridians into the industrial Midwest. Her great-great-grandson, Bobby Vinton Jr., went to Vietnam as a medic attached to the 9th Marines in April 1968. He lasted 15 days in country. The day he died, Mickey Mantle played first base and went 1-for-2 and hit a double. Teresa Marandino, whose husband’s brother Alfonso had drowned in the long-gone South Bronx waters, died that same month, too. Mantle went 1-for-4 with a double on the day she died.
Danny Mantle described for me the experience of walking with his father along Central Park, two decades after he last wore pinstripes for real, and having cops and cabbies shout out the windows of moving cars. Only artifacts remain of that world. Harry Kirschenbaum got Maris to sign a notecard after Roger had praised him for his stickball prowess, and he’s still got that autograph in a safe-deposit box. Lou DeFilippo lives in New Jersey and sold the 500th home run ball Mick gave him for $15,000 during a season of life when his family really needed the money. Danny Mantle lives in Texas and misses his father every day. His son, Will, was born two months after his grandfather died in the Baylor University Medical Center. The day Mantle died the Yankees won in the Bronx. Bernie Williams went 0-for-4. Paul O’Neill hit a home run. It was Don Mattingly’s last season with the Yankees but it was Derek Jeter’s first.
Aaron Judge was three years old then.
“Aaron Judge just seems so much like my dad,” Danny told me.
His voice sounded melancholy. Mantle would be 93 now. Danny moved houses about six weeks ago and in the packing he found five old fishing lures that Ted Williams had made for his dad. There’s always something pulling him back. Watching the Yankees always takes him back to 1968, when he was eight and his dad was in his last year. Danny loved hearing that Aaron went into the Yankee Stadium museum and tried on Mantle’s glove not too long ago.
“I wish my dad was here, because he would love Judge,” he said in his thick Texas drawl. “I feel he would see so much of himself in him.”
I LEFT YANKEE STADIUM in the ninth inning, after the Red Sox answered the Yankees’ rally with two more late runs, and walked four or five blocks to the intersection of East 162nd Street and Sheridan Avenue. In his lonely rookie year, Mickey Mantle once got so bored in his hotel room that he went for a walk and came upon a bunch of local kids playing stickball at that intersection. They asked him if he wanted to join. He’d been feeling himself losing touch with the boy in Oklahoma who’d dreamed all those big dreams that were now just on the cusp of coming true. It was an immigrant neighborhood then.
It still is, just with a different Romance language spoken, and I walked down past these sidewalk cafes with beautiful music filtering out under the lights. As the game ended, the noise of the neighborhood quickly drowning out the noise of the Stadium, I turned left on 161st Street and headed toward River Avenue. I saw a Gerrit Cole jersey. A Ruth jersey. A man sat on a bench outside Gate 4 and played a mournful saxophone. It reminded me of how Sonny Liston described a eulogy for an old fighter, which could apply to broken-down old ballplayers, too. Slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell, he said. A man near the McDonald’s sold hats. Another guy a few steps away sold loose joints. One fan wore a Mattingly jersey. Another wore 15 for Thurman Munson. I saw a Jeter dad holding hands with a Judge little girl. Five minutes later, after passing Mantle’s old 1951 hotel, I turned down a dark street lined with cop cars. A bodega on the corner marked the spot where Mantle and the kids played.
Mickey borrowed a narrow bat and one of the neighborhood kids threw the bright pink Spalding ball. This was the first time Mickey had played the city game and he missed, then missed again, and then missed a third time. Finally he got the timing right. The ball rocketed off the bat. The kids wheeled around to follow its path through the sky. Home runs were measured by how many sewer manhole covers they passed in the air. Each one was roughly 250 feet apart. A monster shot, the kind that you’d still be talking about decades later in some third-shift tavern, went three covers. The kids watched Mantle’s ball fly through the air and when it landed past a fourth sewer cover, the news spread throughout the Bronx. Mickey Mantle was a four-sewer man.
I thought about that story on Saturday at the Stadium. Judge’s superpower is maybe how he’s kept some essential part of his inner boy alive, I thought. He wears silly jewelry and smears on enough eye black that the contours are visible up close. Most importantly there’s a visible joy when he’s on the field during batting practice, winking at kids after he signs a baseball, laughing with his arms on the silver metal frame of the cage. He’s now in an adult phase of his life and career, a father, a man who has known great success but has the potential for much more, so much potential in fact that failure to reach it will follow him forever. He needs to win a title, so he can win two (like Munson), so he can win four (like Ruth), so he can win five (like Jeter), six (like Gehrig), seven (like Mantle), nine (like DiMaggio) and ten (like Berra).
Win the World Series or you’re a failure.
You’re damn right.
I left the Bronx under a shrouded moon in a thundercloud sky.
GAME THREE
I GOT TO Skylar’s stoop in the Bronx just before 8 a.m. on Sunday, eleven hours before the first pitch across the borough. He asked me to follow him down into a little basement. A dented silver locker sat against the wall. This was his dad’s locker at the station house.
Skylar opened it and it still smelled like a firehouse, some part of America before Sept. 11 trapped in the stale air. A helmet rested on the top shelf. A jacket hung below. Photographs of his kids, six and two that morning, remained taped inside the locker. They never touched anything in the locker except when Skylar and his brother would steal one of their dad’s fire department T-shirts. Skylar mourned the day he got too big to wear them.
We drove the few blocks to Stickball Boulevard.
Steve Mercado Stickball Boulevard, the green sign says.
Skylar set up the cones to block off the street. His teammates started to arrive.
“My girlfriend is picking up some sandwiches,” he said. “You want anything? A bacon, egg and cheese?”
Cheyenne, wearing 21, is his former Little League teammate and lifelong friend. Cheyenne’s son, Nick, arrived with him, holding hands, wearing a Spiderman shirt.
“Daddy’s going to the field,” he said sweetly.
One day he’ll be out there, too. Vido, from the Emperors team, arrived. He and Skylar embraced.
“We had a little barbecue,” he said.
“Graduation?” Skylar asked.
“Yeah,” Vido said.
A firefighter, Ryan, arrived, looking bleary and hungover. He nursed a BEC. He wears No. 4, Gehrig, and his family runs the powerhouse Castle Hill Little League program. Skylar wore his jersey in what must be the style, unbuttoned low enough for his chains and medallions to hang out the open collar. He’s got tree-trunk thighs and when he starts taking practice swings, he launches them down into the distant avenue. The way they play stickball in Castle Hill is to bounce it yourself and swing. They asked me to take a turn and I did. The first ball I whiffed. The second one I made contact and hit it weakly off to the right. It’s harder than it looks. Defenders camped out near the end of the street — hitting it into the far lane of traffic of Randall Avenue is a homer — catching balls that don’t quite make it. The umpires and statisticians took their job seriously. Families from the other teams arrived and set up tents on the sidewalk, with coolers and three generations of families. Someone hooked up a big speaker cabinet and the Latin music started. People sang along to the hits. A food truck sold burgers and chopped cheese and will make smoothies ready to just add your own “Henny or Tequila,” the sign says.
They were playing the Diamondbacks.
In the first inning, Skylar stepped up with the ball in his hand. He breathed deeply, then looked up to the sky, then exhaled. That’s his ritual. He bounced the ball and laced a line drive that drove in a run. A few batters later he scored, too. The dugout chatter filtered out from the popup tent that is the Legacy home base. In Skylar’s next at-bat, after looking to heaven, he crushed one high into the air, where it caught a little wind and landed in the middle of the far avenue.
“That’s gone,” someone said as soon as he made contact.
Lorenzo kept the book. He wore a 1996 World Series Yankees cap. Fitted, size 7½. His wife gets him a new one every Father’s Day. He’ll wear it for the next year. He pointed with pride down to his left at a young boy on the sideline, not yet old enough to play. Lorenzo smiled. His son wore a Yankees cap, too.
Only a contrarian is a Mets fan in this neighborhood, and these men and women, sanitation workers coming straight from third shift, firemen going straight to the firehouse to sit watch over the city after the game, people speaking Puerto Rican Spanish, and Dominican Spanish, and English with that Bronx umlaut vowel at the end. These are the people who loved the New York Yankees. They grew up with Jeter. Their fathers grew up with Munson and Jackson. Their grandfathers loved Mantle and DiMaggio, and their great-grandfathers loved Ruth and Gehrig. I sat and ate my bacon egg and cheese on a roll, seeing guys take out their homemade bats crafted from grip tape, a Home Depot dowel rod and lots of time. Skylar’s bat is thinner than most, custom made for him by a firefighter in California; it has a tribute to 9/11 carved into the barrel and evokes shades of Roy Hobbs. If Skylar Mercado’s house caught on fire, before the city saw the fastest response time in the history of professional firefighting — every engine and ladder in all of New York City would respond to that call — I bet the thing he grabbed first would be his bat.
Skylar’s team won easily, 11-3, in the seven-inning game. The team huddled afterward. He talked and everyone else listened.
“The mental lapses all year,” he said, “you got to clean it the f— up.”
Everyone put their hands together.
“One-two-three, LEGACY!”
A DRIZZLE FELL that evening as Yankee Stadium filled with fans. Out on the curb, right where Cromwell’s Creek once emptied into the Harlem River, a 78-year-old woman stepped out of a car and I held her arm as we walked into the Legends Suite lounge at Gate 4. Ruth Pollack-Pappas doesn’t get out of the house much since her husband died. Her father, George Pollack, was Eleanor Gehrig’s attorney for decades. An usher showed us through the door to the suite, and on the wall, immediately to the right of the door, was a copy of Lou Gehrig’s original contract. Ruth stopped to look and remember. She was born six years after Lou died and, like her father, Ruth knew Eleanor well and would go visit her small apartment on the Upper East Side. Her furniture was modest, the place was modest. On the fireplace mantel she had a sterling tea set that had been presented to Gehrig and every member of the Yankees had their name engraved on it. Eleanor moved anonymously through her tree-lined blocks. “If they only knew this little old lady going to the grocery store pushing her cart, that’s Eleanor Gehrig,” Ruth said.
I walked Ruth to a table. She looked around at the new stadium in wonder. She’d never been before. Only the old one across the street to the south. In the suite lounge, by a framed DiMaggio contact, and a framed Mickey Mantle contract, and the check used to buy Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, I asked her why the legend of Gehrig had endured. She wheeled around to face me.
“The speech,” she said.
Gehrig didn’t want to talk. He was so weak he couldn’t even hold the award they presented him before the fans coaxed him to the microphone. There were no notes. Nothing prepared. Everyone there knew something was terribly wrong. The next day’s paper would say that never before had a baseball stadium been so utterly silent for such a long stretch of time. Yankee Stadium was consecrated as a temple that day, purified by the pain and sacrifice of its most beloved son. That’s the road between Babe Ruth and Aaron Judge. Gehrig connects them. His death wrote the liturgy that governs the lives of modern stars like Jeter, and like Judge. The Yankee Way requires sacrifice, an offering of your earthly life in exchange for a narrow eternal life, and that all began on the field when Gehrig stepped to the microphone. What is asked of Yankees is an impossible level of soul sacrifice, because Gehrig set records for endurance, and for hitting with power, but his ascent was rooted in suffering and death. The self-awareness earned in his chase for 62 let Judge in on the secret only a few men know. The Yankee Way is winning a title or failure — “You’re damn right” — but that’s just part of the equation. The Yankee Way also requires total devotion. No matter how many home runs Aaron Judge hits, he’ll never pay as heavy a price as Gehrig.
“He was losing everything,” Ruth said with emotion, before describing how even in pain he got up and spoke of gratitude, and all the good luck he’d received. The speech is about choosing to be grateful for what you do have and not bitter over what you do not. Gehrig earned his sainthood for suffering, for enduring more games than anyone until Cal Ripken Jr., and for bearing the most painful, cruel medical diagnosis a person can receive. I had never read the full text and she made me promise I would. So I did. He said he was the luckiest man at the beginning and the end, and in the middle he does nothing but offer flowers to everyone who’d blessed him during his career.
She sat at the table pulling lobster meat from the shell with a tiny fork.
I asked if there was anyone alive who knew Lou Gehrig.
“No,” she said.
She thought for a moment.
“There can’t be,” she said. “I’m the last one who knew Eleanor.”
Eleanor hated to tell people the truth about Gehrig’s last days, the real horror of his disease. She’d take those secrets to the grave. They were a perfectly odd, and perfect, match. Gehrig came from an overprotective, domineering mother. He shrank from his fame and didn’t like to be the center of attention. Eleanor loved to gamble on horses, and dance, and drink and tell jokes. They balanced each other out. He adored her. There was a story Eleanor liked to tell later in life. Lou grew up in a German home and spoke German fluently. Eleanor liked to take him to cultural events, like the ballet where he marveled at the athleticism of the dancers, and the opera. Once they heard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” All the lyrics, of course, are in German. The performance explored the spiritual link between love and death, rooted in the dawning knowledge that loss and suffering are as vital to transcendence as joy and ambition. Lou understood every word. In the dark of the opera house, Eleanor looked over at her stoic, famous husband.
Tears streamed down his face.
THE STARTING PITCHER for the Red Sox, Hunter Dobbins, said all sorts of negative things about the Yankees, which prompted a bemused response from Aaron Boone. Judge came up to bat in the first inning aware of what had been said and was not pleased. After the game he would not deny that he wanted to send a message. The first pitch Dobbins threw was a 98 mph fastball, and Judge launched it 436 feet to right-center. The Red Sox came back in the fifth and sixth innings, scoring seven runs. In the sixth inning the Yankees mounted a comeback. They were down 7-3 when Jazz Chisholm came to bat. For the first time all weekend, playoff energy pinged around Yankee Stadium. Chisholm hit a ball deep enough in the outfield to score Judge. The crowd came alive again, but the Stadium music and sound effects kept interrupting the building energy in the stands. The beauty of baseball is the slow burn to a moment of ecstasy and menace. At Yankee Stadium now, the stereo is preventing the Bronx magic from forming, from taking shape and building speed. Sitting in the press box, you couldn’t hear the Bleacher Creatures’ famous Roll Call over the music. Anthony Volpe banged a grounder off the pitcher’s glove and legged out a hit to load the bases. Trent Grisham came to the plate as the go-ahead run. The Red Sox coaching staff went back to the mound. The Stadium got real loud again, and again the music and sound effects kept breaking the spell and drowning out the fans. The Steinbrenner family owns the stadium, and all the copyrights associated with the Yankees, a multibillion-dollar asset. But they don’t own, or even really understand, the untouchable center of their franchise: In certain moments, when a once-in-a-generation star evokes and reincarnates the spirits of the Bronx kings, the stadium and its history have an agency all their own. The Red Sox walked in a run to bring the Yankees within two. A Yankees chant began, and the place started to shake, building, building, and then the rally ended as fast as it began, leaving the bases loaded.
RUTH POLLACK-PAPPAS and I sat in the Legends Club lounge behind home plate. On the field, Judge came to the plate and some of the people around us turned to watch and some continued to eat their lobster, stone crab and shrimp. Ruth and I both ate ice cream out of miniature batting helmets. Ruth wanted to tell me a story about the secret inside the secret inside the secret, the nesting dolls of fame and what it means, and doesn’t mean. When Lou Gehrig died, and the mourners lined up around the block, turning the corner up the hill onto the street where he died in that tiny room, the priest stood up and said he would not be giving a eulogy because every living person in the civilized world already knew everything about Lou Gehrig. A month after he died Eleanor Gehrig signed the contract that became “The Pride of the Yankees.” She devoted herself to the careful curation of his legend. She hired a sheepdog lawyer, Ruth’s dad George, to watch over her, and over Lou, making sure his name and likeness didn’t get used in something he would not have liked. She appeared at Opening Days and Old-Timers’ Days, often with Claire Ruth. She did this through the fifties into the eighties. She saw both Babe Ruth and Don Mattingly play. Listening to this story made me think a lot about Hannah Jeter and Samantha Judge. The Yankees will always keep the myth. The myth is culturally and financially valuable. But the families of these legends don’t matter as much. Danny Mantle jokes in a serious way that the Red Sox treat the Mantle family better than the Yankees. The truth is that a human being is a complex organism, with personal hopes and dreams, and almost all of that person is erased over time, especially in the myth-making business. There’s only room for a few dozen words on the statue in Monument Park. Everything else eventually goes away, as stars winter and die, then their spouses die, then their children and grandchildren, until no living person knows another living person who actually knew them. That happened to Eleanor Gehrig. She never remarried. She never dated. In private she drank a lot. Ruth’s dad worked to keep food in the refrigerator.
“In the end she was horribly lonely,” Ruth told me.
On March 6, 1984, Eleanor Gehrig died. Her last request was to be buried with her husband, finally together again. Few names still mattered in New York like the name Gehrig. The New York Times published a lengthy obituary. The cemetery set up a big tent with chairs. George Pollack and his wife, Ruth’s mom, arrived at the appointed hour and thought at first there must be a mistake. They were alone. It was not a mistake. The only two people who came to Eleanor Gehrig’s funeral were her lawyer and her lawyer’s wife.
AARON JUDGE TRIED to bring his team back with his second home run of the night in the ninth inning Sunday. That kept 60 home runs still within reach. The Yankee Stadium press box announcer came on with a statistical announcement on the tinny intercom system. It happens all game every game and is part of the rhythm of the baseball writer’s life. This announcement, though, felt different. For a night Lou Gehrig was a ballplayer again and not just a name in the stars. The announcer said it was Judge’s 43rd career game with multiple home runs. Then with clipped efficiency he said that put Judge in a tie for third place in Yankees history.
“Tied with Lou Gehrig,” he said in a detached monotone.
“Trailing only Ruth at 68 and Mantle at 46,” he said.
The game ended with much of the crowd already on the subway headed home. Aaron Boone looked at a stat sheet and said, “They got us tonight,” and in the clubhouse the players packed for the next day’s flight to Kansas City. The schedule said the bus would leave for the airport at 7 a.m., and the players should dress like “big leaguers,” which just means nice. Judge, as always, came out in his shower shoes to explain the loss. His voice got an edge to it when he answered a question about whether Hunter Dobbins’ comment made him a little extra motivated in his first at-bat. A reporter asked him what his message was to the team after the game.
“The message is to keep going,” Judge said. “It’s just another series. That’s baseball: Just go back to work.”
The room felt still and quiet. Guys slipped out the door. Judge got one more question, about tying Gehrig and trailing only Mantle and Ruth.
“I try not to think about it,” he said.
#Aaron #Judge #Pride #Yankees
