Happy Birthday, 99! Judge should be celebrated among Yankees greats

Aaron Judge turns 34 today and shows no signs of slowing down, having already hit nine home runs this season before his birthday, which works out to one every three games the Yankees have played, and go ahead and game out the slugging pace he’s on once again. He continues to be, in his prime -- and it has turned into some prime -- the Babe Ruth of this Yankee generation, without question.

Ruth hit 50 home runs in a season four different times with the Yankees. Judge has now done the same. Ruth made 60 a magic number in baseball, but Judge finally came along to hit 62. There is no reason to believe, if he continues to be blessed with good health, that he won’t hit 60 again.

But Judge remains, a decade into his career, the greatest Yankee to still have never played on a World Series winner. His Yankees have won a lot, just not won it all. Not his fault. He’s played on much better teams than Don Mattingly, another great Yankee who never even played in a World Series. But when you’re a Yankee, that is still an essential part of the story, fair or not.

It is still fair to say, and not just because it’s his birthday, that Judge’s name already has to go in with the greatest position players the Yankees have ever had. This is a team, of course, that already needs more than four spots on the team’s personal Mount Rushmore, and that’s before we throw in -- like a nasty cutter -- Mariano Rivera.

You start with Babe Ruth, who retired with 714 home runs and a lifetime batting average of .342. There is Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle. And there has to be space for Yogi Berra, who absolutely belongs in this conversation. All Yogi did in his own storied Yankee career was win three MVPs -- one in the last season of DiMaggio’s career and two later when Mantle was entering his own prime -- and knock in more than 100 runs five times. And, oh by the way, he played on 10 Yankee teams that won the World Series, one more than DiMaggio did. In so many ways, Yogi was the most underrated great Yankee of them all.

Gehrig had more than 100 RBIs 11 times, hit 40-plus homers five times. His Yankee teams won six World Series. Mantle would show up at the Stadium in 1951, and even in a star-crossed career sabotaged by injury, he had two 50-home run seasons of his own, knocked in 100 four times, and is still is the only Yankee other than Gehrig to win the Triple Crown.

DiMaggio? All he did was have nine 100-RBI seasons, win nine World Series, have a 56-game hitting streak, strike out just 369 times while hitting 361 home runs, and retire with a lifetime batting average of .325 And without question, there has to be another place on the team’s Mount Rushmore for Derek Jeter, who had a lifetime batting average of .310, was around for 20 years and won five World Series, later came within a single vote of being a unanimous selection to the Hall of Fame.

Now it is Judge who’s the face of the Yankees the way Jeter was, with three MVPs himself, the same four 100-RBI seasons that Mantle had, despite having seasons of his own shortened by injury, and once by COVID. But he has never been fortunate enough -- even as towering a figure as he’s become -- to play on the kind of legendary teams on which the other Yankee legends played. But again: Even things out of his control, in a team sport as wonderfully complicated as baseball, can detract from his brilliance with a bat in his hands.

I asked my friend Pete, as informed and passionate a Yankee fan as I know, where he ranks Judge with his team’s other legends. Pete, by the way, is in his early 50s. It means the first Yankee World Series winners he really saw were Joe Torre’s Yankees, starting in 1996.

“I love Derek Jeter,” Pete said, “and I loved Don Mattingly before him. But Judge at his best has become the greatest Yankee of my lifetime.”

There are other Yankee fans who will say it is Jeter for the past 30 years of Yankee history, and good for them. But even at Jeter’s Hall of Fame best -- and with some of the unforgettable moments he gave Yankee fans with flip plays against the A’s and his Mr. November home run in the 2001 World Series – there hasn’t been a Yankee since Mantle who has been as compelling and dramatic an at-bat as Judge has been over time. Not even Reggie Jackson, who hit those three homers in Game 6 of the ’77 Series, but was only around the Yankees for five years and only hit 40 home runs for them once.

Ruth really brought the home run to baseball. But it is Judge, five inches taller at 6-foot-7 than Ruth was, who now looks to be bigger than life the way Ruth did, nine home runs so far after 210 the previous four seasons (one of which saw him missing 56 games with a foot injury).

The best news for All Rise Judge on his birthday is that he keeps hitting balls out of sight. Not just slugging his way to the Yankees’ Mount Rushmore. Already there.