In the seventh inning of Game Two of the American League Championship Series, between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Guardians, on Tuesday night, Aaron Judge spotted a 95-mile-per-hour fastball around his chest and hit a two-run home run. Afterwards, he said the ghosts of Yankees legends had pulled the ball through the cold wind to their sanctuary in Monument Park, over the center field wall. The ghosts must have been on his mind for a while. Judge has been chasing them for the past few years; lately it seemed like he was haunted by it. Before that explosion, he had gone more than 20 at-bats without hitting a home run. He came into the game hitting .133, with just one extra base hit in the playoffs. His performance to that point had been dismal, with growing murmurs that he wasn’t built for playoff baseball — that he couldn’t do it when it counted.

He was coming off one of the best offensive regular seasons in Major League history. During a one-hundred-game stretch this season, he hit .378 at the plate with forty-five home runs—a pace that would have yielded seventy-eight home runs over the course of a full season. (He finished with fifty-eight.) Judge led the majors in home runs, runs batted in, on-base percentage, slugging and two different measures. WARan advanced metric to measure how many more wins a player is worth than an average player at his position. According to another advanced metric, which quantifies a player’s offensive value while taking into account his park environment, he would have had the seventh-best offensive season in history – behind Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds and Ted Williams – and the best ever for a right-handed.

But he has never won a World Series and led the Yankees through an incredibly long stretch without a championship (at least for New York: fifteen years). Every year the Yankees didn’t win a championship was considered a failure, according to Judge. “What’s the point if you don’t win?” he asked a few weeks ago.

Judge has played in seven postseasons to date – all but one season since 2017. But despite the team’s consistency, it has been a disappointment, and Judge’s disappearance at the plate hasn’t helped, to say the least. This year the Yankees have their best chance. Judge is thirty-two years old. The front office has bet the farm on acquiring outfielder Juan Soto on an expiring contract – and so far it has paid off. Giancarlo Stanton, a thirty-four-year-old design hitter, seems to have suddenly transformed into Reggie Jackson. There is no ball club that is clearly better. And so the Yankees would have won, more or less, without Judge. He had made some spectacular running grabs – he is six-seven, with legs like tree trunks, and out of place in midfield, but moves across the grass with a gliding grace. But Judge had been the best player in baseball this year (with apologies to Shohei Ohtani) based on his bat, not his glove, and it was clear that the Yankees needed his offensive production against the high-powered lineup of the Los Angeles Dodgers. , the likely national winner, or even get past the Guardians. Judge’s struggles were so severe that the Guardians actually opted to intentionally walk Soto earlier in Game Two and face Judge with the bases loaded, rather than face Soto – also one of the best hitters in the game – with two men on. The judge made them pay, but only a little; he hit a sacrifice fly. So when Judge homered to put the game away for the Yankees (who ultimately won 6-3), the Yankees dugout was overjoyed. The insult of the intentional walk had ‘woken Judge up’, crowed his teammate Gleyber Torres. Maybe. The day before, Mark Vientos of the New York Mets hit a grand slam after the Dodgers intentionally walked Francisco Lindor to load the bases. Vientos said after the match: “I took it personally.” Never mind that Vientos started the season shuttling between the majors and Triple-A, while Lindor was one of the best hitters in the league. Judge is expected to be named American League MVP, but Tuesday night he was, as usual, more circumspect and deferential: He also would have walked Soto, he said. Still, his relief was palpable, and the reports around the game were that the slump was over. Judge finally got excited.

Hitting a baseball, like anything involving a bit of luck, is a game of streaks – some explainable, some inexplicable, some retrospectively assigned reasons. Coincidentally, Judge had started the season on a slump, hitting just .207 in April. After striking out four times in defeat in late April, the crowd at Yankee Stadium had even booed the captain. The judge, as usual, said he would have done the same. A few weeks later, Judge, who obsessively works on the finer details of his swing, closed his stance a bit, pointed his left foot more toward the pitcher and stood slightly straighter, as The Athletic’s Brendan Kuty noted. Tree! Solo home run; the bad streak is over; the rest was history. And so it was tempting to see the same thing happen in Game Two. A home run, like a win, has to mean something. And no one has made home runs seem more repeatable than Judge. That’s the whole idea of ​​routine, of maintenance. In addition to studying his swing, Judge does cold jumps after games, fasts and meditates. Pressure has to do something to a player; it can change the way he squeezes the bat and flexes his muscles a millisecond too late. And fans treat the game, and players, that way too – as if they have power over the outcome.

But in baseball, control is harder to recognize in all sports. Thursday night, Judge took a huge swing on the first pitch he saw and then struck out swinging. He also struck out his second at bat. But in the eighth, with the Yankees trailing 3-1 and a runner on second, Judge swung a 99-mile-per-hour fastball at the edge of the plate and lasered a line drive just high enough for a home run. running, tying the score. He screamed as he walked around the bases. Stanton followed with another home run and the Yankees were on top.

If the game had ended there, he would have been the hero. But there’s only so much a player can control. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and the Yankees up 5-3, Judge could only watch as the ball sailed high above him into the stands – a two-run home run by pinch-hitter Jhonkensy Noel to tie the score . The Guardians then won in the tenth after the Yankees went scoreless. Judge had started the inning and struckout. On Friday night, in another game full of wild swings – this time leading to a win for the Yankees – Judge had one more hit to go with two more strikeouts.

What does it mean? No one thought Judge was under unusual pressure in April when he collapsed. And he was definitely under unusual pressure in the fall of 2022, when networks cut out of college football games to broadcast his at-bats, and he hit his sixty-second home run of the season. When Maris broke Ruth’s home run record with sixty-one, it was said that the stress was so intense that clumps of hair fell out.

It stands to reason that Judge will return to form through a combination of hard work and luck. For a star like Judge, October baseball is baseball. A home run is a home run – and despite his reputation, Judge has also hit a lot of home runs in the postseason. (His career total is 18th, tied with Ruth.) Matches are won and lost in the same way as in September. But of course Judge is right; we don’t see them that way. We tell stories: streaks, slumps, comebacks, the clutch. If we don’t do that, what’s the point? ♦