It was the fifth inning of the fifth game of the World Series. With the Yankees up 5-0, one Dodger runner on, and no outs, L.A.’s Tommy Edman lofted a soft fly ball directly at Aaron Judge, the Yankees center-fielder and one of the best baseball players in the last half-century. It was the kind of fly ball that middling high-school outfielders across America catch with ease. It was the kind of fly ball that Judge, who had not committed a single error all season, has likely corralled thousands of times across a lifetime of playing baseball.
The ball had been thrown by Gerrit Cole, the Yankees’ ace and one of the most accomplished pitchers of his generation. At the time of the ball’s transit through the curiously warm October air, Cole had surrendered a single hit to the Dodgers, baseball’s most prolific offense. Standing in the press box, I didn’t give the fly ball a second thought. The runner on first was already retreating. There it was, one easy ou—
Except Judge dropped it. The ball clanged, somehow, off his glove. There was no sunlight in his eyes, no wind currents ripping it one way or the next. He simply dropped it.
And so began, arguably, the most hellish single inning in the 121-year history of the New York Yankees. There are arguments to be made for game seven of the 2001 World Series, game four of the 2004 ALCS, and game seven of the 1960 World Series. But none of them knew such a swift, mind-crushing collapse, or so many absurd failures layered on top of each other. None of them contained something like Judge’s drop, or shortstop Anthony Volpe throwing a ball into the ground, or Cole and his first baseman, Anthony Rizzo, failing to record an out on a slowly hit grounder. None of them saw a 5-0 lead disappear because a team was given three extra outs. After the Dodgers stormed to victory to close out the series in five games, bouncing up and down at Yankee Stadium, as Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” dumbly rang out over the loudspeakers, fan recriminations started flowing quickly. They centered around the Cole-Rizzo debacle (“Cole needs to cover first!” “Rizzo needs to run there and step on the bag!”) and how the Yankees need to fire manager Aaron Boone or teach themselves the fundamentals they never bothered to learn in spring training.
Some of it — but probably not enough — has been about Judge, the wondrous behemoth who now owns one of the most fraught legacies of any Yankee great of the last century.
There are franchise icons who have never won World Series rings. Don Mattingly is beloved despite appearing in only one playoff series, a 1995 ALDS loss to the Seattle Mariners. Rickey Henderson and Dave Winfield were celebrated Yankees who won their rings elsewhere. Bobby Murcer and Mel Stottlemyre, two stars of the 1960s and 1970s, were popular with the fan base even though neither reached the promised land. Yankee fans, for all their hubris and entitlement, have a long, happy history of embracing those who don’t ever capture a title.
And yet there is no Yankee like Judge, who has been so good for so long and failed, largely, to perform when it mattered. Judge has now played in 58 career postseason games and come to the plate 262 times. That is a little more than one-third of a baseball season. His OPS in that span is .768, which is 242 points lower than his career mark during the regular season. Batting average matters far less than it once did, but he is hitting an abysmal .205. He has struck out a stunning 86 times.
Mattingly never got all those chances to fail. Neither did Murcer, nor Winfield. The closest analogue might be Alex Rodriguez, who was, at his peak, a superstar of Judge’s caliber and struggled mightily across several postseason series. A-Rod’s relationship with the fans was always more strained, owing to his enormous contract, his endless string of media controversies, and his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Unlike Judge, he will probably never enter the Hall of Fame. Where Judge is unfailingly polite and upright, a muscular Christian of the first order, A-Rod was punchy and louche, the sort of man who’d gleefully suntan shirtless in Central Park and keep paintings of himself as a centaur. When he failed, fans could revel in it.
Yet Rodriguez found redemption. In 2009, he was miraculous and carried the Yankees to their last championship. Over his career, he was a good postseason player, the choke-artist narrative that stuck to him belied by the numbers. His OPS was a respectable .822 in 330 plate appearances. He struck out less than Judge. Judge was hunting for defining playoff moments this October. He almost got one in the ALCS, hitting a game-tying homer off the best closer in baseball. During that same series, he hit a long home run at Yankee Stadium, one that could have sparked a turnaround. And he made a marvelous, wall-crashing catch in game five, just one inning before the drop that unraveled everything.
For Judge, the tragedy of the World Series is that he seemed to have figured himself out just before it ended. In the first inning of game five, he smashed a two-run homer to right field and the Yankee Stadium crowd, riven with anxiety, erupted. Later in the game, he cracked a double. At the plate, he began to resemble the colossus who hit 58 home runs and produced more offensive value than any Yankee in a single season since Babe Ruth. The Dodgers undoubtedly feared matching up against a resurgent Judge at Dodger Stadium for a Friday-night game six — a game that seemed, for about an hour, inevitable. It wasn’t to be, though, because Judge dropped a fly ball. A fly ball that, if caught, would have preceded a pair of Cole strikeouts, which would have ended the fifth inning and maintained the Yankees’ comfortable lead.
There is no serious way to compare Judge’s drop to the ground ball that rolled between Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, but permit me this Judge-unfriendly distinction: One error triggered a collapse that the other, in retrospect, did not. At the time of Buckner’s historic error, the Mets had already tied the game, storming back from a two-run deficit that the Red Sox had blown with two outs in the bottom of the tenth. If Buckner had fielded the ball and stepped on first, the game merely would have proceeded to the 11th inning, when the Mets, the home team, could have won anyway. Buckner didn’t cause the Red Sox to surrender three straight singles with two outs, or throw a wild pitch to score a run.
Judge will have to think hard this winter about what his dropped fly ball meant: the relinquishment of a secure lead in game five, and ultimately the surrender of what might have been — a game six in Los Angeles with the Yankees down 3-2 but building momentum for a plausible upset. If Judge wants to be especially hard on himself, he can dwell on the rest of this Dodgers series, what it meant to only have one hit in a game that reached extra innings, or none in the next two. For three games of a five-game World Series, he was an albatross. This failure came as his teammate, Giancarlo Stanton, imitated Reggie Jackson on the biggest stage, and Juan Soto, chasing a $700 million contract, brought his regular-season talents to October.
In April, Judge will turn 33, and he still has brilliance ahead of him. If the Yankees win a World Series next year, no one will remember the horrors of October 30. When Rodriguez lifted the Yankees to a championship in 2009, fans stopped talking about 2004, 2005, and 2006. Redemption is still possible for a future Hall of Famer.
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