How Aaron Judge became a Yankee: From small-town California kid to Bombers superstar

NEW YORK — Mike Batesole records every Yankee game. He prefers to watch each at-bat by his former player, Aaron Judge, live and in the moment, but Batesole’s pretty busy as the head baseball coach at Judge’s alma mater, Fresno State.

“I can always rewind,” Batesole says, laughing.

As a result, he’s seen all of Judge’s home runs this magnificent season. In fact, he probably hasn’t missed a Judge at-bat over the last few years. And if he happens to be at practice, like he was when Judge launched homer No. 55, he still gets plenty of notice, thanks to a group text chain of friends. “When I came back from the field with our guys, I don’t know how many ‘55′ messages I had,” Batesole says.

The group used to text each other “Big Ass Bomb” every time Judge homered — Judge, who is 6-7 and 282 pounds, was known as “Big Ass Judge” at Fresno State, Batsole says. “Now we just do the number of homers,” the coach adds.

Judge has captured the attention of the baseball world this season with his assault on Roger Maris’ American League record of 61 home runs, set back in 1961. The folks back home are watching, too, from Linden, Calif., Judge’s hometown, to Fresno State, where he cemented himself as a major Major League prospect.

It’s not just the big swings that are captivating for the people from Judge’s past, either. Batesole, for one, watches or reads when Judge does interviews and marvels that he’s still the same humble guy.

“It’s pulling teeth to get him to say ‘I,’ the coach says. “It’s always, ‘Gleyber made this play, someone else made that one.’ I love that. That comes from Mom and Dad. That’s already in him. We tried to put him in a place where that kind of character can flourish, but that was all Mom and Dad, and I think fans gravitate to him because he’s one of us.

“Big boy hits a home run, he just runs around the bases. I love it.”

Judge grew up in Linden, Calif., a rural town of about 1,800 that is 100 miles or so east of San Francisco. It has a popular Cherry Festival each spring that celebrates the local cherry crop and features a parade and a cherry pie-eating contest. Judge and his older brother were adopted by Wayne and Patty Judge, two now-retired educators, and Judge played baseball, basketball and football for the Linden High Lions. Judge, the first Major Leaguer from Linden High, even pitched for the baseball team.

He was an interesting-enough prospect for the A’s to draft him in the 31st round in 2010, the year he graduated high school. But several scouts interviewed for this story made it clear that most thought college was the right choice for Judge.

“Here’s how this goes down,” Batesole says of Judge’s path to Fresno State. “It’s kind of crazy. His mom and dad are both Fresno State graduates. Linden is a really small town. It’s tiny. He’s in high school, he comes to our camp and we get ready to take batting practice, as the hitting coach and head coach, that’s why I came. The big boy walks into the cage. Holy crap, this is a Dave Winfield-looking kid. He takes like three swings. Son, are your Mom and Dad here? Forget the rest of the camp, we need to talk to Mom and Dad. We offered him a scholarship right then and there.”

At Fresno State, Judge kept soaring and he grew close to Batesole there. When the Yankees were in Anaheim at the end of August, Batesole visited him and sat with Judge’s parents. “Any time he goes into a funk, I send him pictures of what he was doing when he was going good,” Batesole says. “I gotta coach. He doesn’t need it. It’s therapy for me.”

Batesole says he knew he might have a special player during fall conditioning. To change up from the regular routine of players running foul pole to foul pole for cardio, Batesole has them play 6-on-6 touch football. It’s a gas. “We’ve got plays, stats, uniforms,” Batesole says. “We get into it and it’s great conditioning.”

Everyone was eager to see what Judge, who played wide receiver in high school, could do, so one of the first plays was a short pass to him. “Now, these are Division-I athletes,” Batesole says. “Dude, they couldn’t touch him. It was like Barry Sanders. He was 6-7, probably 240 then. Such nimble quickness and agility. Right there, I said, he’s not going to just get to the big leagues, he’s going to play as long as he wants.”

Judge batted .358 as a freshman, though he only hit two homers. The next year, he hit .309 with four homers and went to play that summer for Brewster in the Cape Cod League, a circuit jammed with the nation’s best college players.

“That’s where we did a full-service job on him,” says Damon Oppenheimer, the Yankees’ VP for Domestic Amateur Scouting. “It’s wood bats. It’s every day. He had a really nice summer there and we identified him as a first-round guy.

“The Cape League has a workout with all the teams at Fenway Park and he put on a nice exhibition there with some lengthy home runs. But all summer, he hit, used the field well and was not just this big guy who is a slugger. He played good defense, ran well. He did things with some ease.”

One day at Brewster, Brian Barber, a former national crosschecker for the Yankees who is now the Phillies director of scouting, showed up and, as Barber puts it, “Some days as a scout, you go on the right day.” Judge hit a line drive that the shortstop leapt up to try to snare. The ball landed over the fence.

“You just don’t see that, how hard he hit the ball, in an amateur player at 20 years old,” Barber says.

Many scouts have their own Judge story. Oppenheimer mused about the game he saw Judge go 5-for-5. “He hit two home runs, just Aaron Judge-type line drives. Missiles,” Oppenheimer says. “You could hear it and see it, that it was harder than anybody else was hitting it.”

Don Lyle, a former Cleveland scout, recalled a tepid batting practice session at Cal-Berkeley for Judge. “But in the game, he hit a laser at chest level that hit the left-field fence and made a noise that everyone in the stadium could hear,” Lyle recalls. “Another scout walked over to me and said, ‘Man, I’ve never seen that.’ I said, ‘I told you.’

Lyle loved Judge’s potential so much one of his reports read, in part: “This guy excites me as much as any player I have ever seen, scouted or played against.”

Occasionally, Judge would have trouble with breaking balls, waving meekly at nasty sliders. The possibility of rampant strikeouts led some scouts to rate Judge below the first round. But the Yankees knew they wanted him by the time he cracked 12 home runs and batted .369 as a junior, when he was again draft-eligible.

To gain further intel on Judge, they asked him to meet with Chad Bohling, the Yankees’ director of mental conditioning, Oppenheimer says. “The maturity level, the compete level — Chad was just blown away by him,” Oppenheimer says. “The value I put into Chad’s meetings is big. When he talks about a guy having a star-type makeup, you don’t have to go too much deeper.”

The Yankees had three first-round picks in the 2013 MLB First-Year Player Draft — 26th, 32nd and 33rd. They liked Notre Dame third baseman Eric Jagielo and Judge. They felt the Reds, who picked 27th, would take Jagielo, so they took him first and then selected Judge 32nd. Jagielo, whose career was impacted by injury, later was traded to the Reds in the 2015 Aroldis Chapman deal.

“It wasn’t like everybody was saying, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta take this guy, he’s the next coming,’” Oppenheimer says. “Some people said he might swing and miss. How many guys are this big? But, generally, our group just liked him. It wasn’t that hard for us.”

“Don’t get me wrong, if I was real smart, I would’ve taken him (Judge) first.”

Judge, who got a $1.8-million signing bonus, raced through the Yankees’ minor-league system and debuted on Aug. 13, 2016. In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t be surprised by this, but he homered in his first game. Then he homered in the next one, too. A year later, he was the AL Rookie of the Year, should’ve been the AL MVP and set a (now broken by Pete Alonso) rookie record of 52 home runs.

The people who helped the AL home run king along the way cede the credit to Judge. “It’s all him,” Oppenheimer says. “His dedication. His desire. His focus. It’s the kind of stuff you run into one out of 100 players. That focus, those tools. He’s special. And the scouting department feels so fortunate we can be tagged with being part of it, getting Aaron Judge into professional baseball. He’s just crushed it. We’re just lucky he represents us the way he does.”

Even with all the attention that a celebrated home run chase and the record will bring, Batesole knows Judge can handle it, in part because of his parents. “Some of those superstars aren’t listening to Mom and Dad anymore, but he is,” Batesole says.

Batesole’s got a story to illustrate Judge’s bond with his folks, from after Judge won AL Rookie of the Year: “We were having a Sunday scrimmage at the field and I look up and he’s standing there. He walks over to me and our players jaws are on the floor. His Mom and Dad brought some super cool memorabilia that would be worth thousands of dollars if you put it on eBay – I won’t be putting it on eBay.

“When he leaves, he walks off with his Mom and Dad and gets in the back seat of Mom and Dad’s car and they drive away. He didn’t have some entourage, with a Lamborghini. He drove away, like one of us. That’s who he is.

“It’s real, not an act.”