Aaron Judge, 30, is one of baseball’s biggest stars, and this fall he became a new home run hero for a new era.
Judge will make $130 million more in this deal than he would have had he accepted the $230 million the Yankees would have paid him from 2022 to 2028 via the extension they offered him in April. He hit 62 homers and was in striking distance of the AL batting title until the last few weeks of the regular season. He was the backbone of the Yankees offense — and sometimes all the other bones, too. And he ensured he got a historic deal as a result.
And the deal does not signal the end of the offseason for the Yankees but rather a prerequisite: They were not good enough to catch the Houston Astros with Judge last season. Re-signing him was the baseline from which they needed to start reshaping their roster this winter. Losing him would have been destabilizing.
But Judge will return to the Yankees clubhouse as the closest thing it has seen to Derek Jeter in a generation and does so following in Jeter’s carefully calculated footsteps as he tiptoes around the public pitfalls New York always seems to elicit from its superstars. Many of Judge’s teammates have said they support Judge being named captain of their storied franchise, an honor more meaningful there than just about anywhere else given the others who were given that title.
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