Yankees didn't mis-Judge this pick

The 32nd choice in the 2013 draft now drives baseballs into history.

Imagine a music executive in the early 60s, walking into the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Yeah, that lefthanded bass player with the floppy hair knows all the notes. But are you sure he can sing?

Picking the wrong person is commonplace. That’s why divorce lawyers drive Teslas. But failing to pick the right person can be infamous. No one knows how many decision-makers passed on Paul McCartney and the Beatles, but we do know 31 draft picks went by before the Yankees scooped Aaron Judge.

Even then, the Yankees risked remorse. They had the 26th, 32nd, and 33rd picks in that 2013 draft. They used the first of those choices on Eric Jagielo, a third baseman from Notre Dame. With the 32nd, they took Judge, an outfielder from Fresno State. Scouting director Damon Oppenheimer believed in Judge, but realistically the pick carried little risk. It was compensation for losing a free agent, in this case Nick Swisher, who signed with Cleveland.

Swisher’s final game was in 2015, but he didn’t have a bad career. He helped the Yankees win their last World Series, in 2009, and he hit 245 home runs all told. However, Judge slammed his 300th on Wednesday night. He got to that number in 955 games. Until then, Ralph Kiner had needed the fewest games — 1,087 — to reach 300.

Judge put a little irritation into that swing, because the White Sox had just walked Juan Soto intentionally to get to him. Soto had homered three times the night before. Sox manager Grady Sizemore said something about “picking your poison,” but this was the difference between swigging a little Drano and affixing a king cobra to your carotid artery.

Judge now has 43 home runs and 110 RBIs in 120 games, with a 1.174 OPS, a .707 slugging percentage and a .467 on-base percentage. All of those numbers, except the games played, lead everyone else in baseball, as does his 224 OPS-plus, which is a measurement of how he stands against his peers. A score of 100 would put him in the middle. In nine seasons Judge’s OPS-plus is 171 and his raw OPS is 1.006.

His 43-110 would have ranked second, in both categories, for the entire 2023 American League season. Injuries held Judge to 37 homers last year, but he produced 62 the year before. He is 32 and has seven more years on his Yankee contract. Averaging 40 homers a season would give him 580.

Scouts and scouting directors aren’t stupid. Few things are more complex than projecting a high school or college draftee. But if it weren’t so easy to second-guess a draft, sportswriters would waste little time doing it.

Only 11 players that were chosen ahead of Judge are playing big-league baseball, and only former MVP Kris Bryant, picked second by the Cubs, has come anywhere close to Judge’s impact. The first pick was Stanford pitcher Mark Appel, who never started a big league game and made only six appearances. Oppenheimer was there when Judge homered off Appel in college.

There were distinguished players taken after Judge, like Cody Bellinger and Devin Williams. But Judge was as obvious as Mount Whitney, which isn’t too far from his hometown of Linden, Ca. He was 6-foot-7 and could run. So what happened?

Well, this is where you get back to McCartney, and how the obvious can become elusive. The scouts weren’t sure that Judge would….have…enough….power. That’s right. They saw the missiles he propelled in batting practice, but there were other BP sessions where Judge never cleared the fence at all. He hit four home runs as a freshman at Fresno State, which played in a cozy park, and then eight as a junior.

Baseball wasn’t always the magnet for athletes that it is now, and tall hitters weren’t always desirable. Big strike zones, lots of moving parts, and the potential for 100 strikeouts a season. That number, of course, is no longer blasphemous. Troy Afenir, the Yankees’ area scout, didn’t see awkwardness in Judge. He saw Dave Winfield instead.

Red flags are always there if you search for them. Some scouts thought Judge was too passive because, in basketball, he would help up an opponent he’d knocked down. Some didn’t pay attention to his injuries during his sophomore year at Fresno State. But transcendent power is a golden ticket. Judge had won a college home run derby in Omaha, at the site of the College World Series. In a pre-draft workout in Oakland, he parked baseballs into the suite level.

What scouts didn’t know, and what Judge didn’t initially realize, was that the college aluminum bat was his enemy. He could never find one long enough for his frame. “It felt like a toothpick,” he said.

That problem became clear during the summer before Judge’s junior year, when he played in the Cape Cod League, with a wood bat. He slammed five home runs in 32 games for Brewster, against some of the top collegiate pitchers, and John Altobelli, his coach, told MLB.com about a drive that brought the leftfielder in, but had so much backspin that it sailed over the fence. “People would stop and watch when he took batting practice,” said Altobelli, the Orange Coast College coach who later died in the same helicopter crash that claimed Kobe Bryant.

There were a couple of other secrets. The reason Judge didn’t bother, at times, with BP homers is that he was concentrating on the whole field. That’s why he has a .288 lifetime batting average today. Some of his baseball skills also lagged because Judge played football and basketball in high school, and thus avoided travel-ball burnout.

Buoyed by the way he made Cape Cod look like Cape Canaveral, Judge damaged baseballs throughout his junior year at Fresno State. He hit .369 with 12 home runs and a 1.117 OPS. Then he hit 37 home runs in his first two minor league seasons. When he got a callup in 2016 he homered off Tampa Bay’s Matt Andriese in his first big-league plate appearance. Still, Baseball Prospectus only ranked Judge the 63rd best prospect in MLB going into his rookie year of 2017. Judge responded with 52 home runs and the Rookie of the Year Award. He also struck out 30.7 percent of the time in 2017. That figure is 24.4 percent today.

Along the way Judge has become the quintessential Yankee. Tunneling his way through the tentacles of New York and accepting the fame without surrendering to it — those are tools in themselves. He also has become an object lesson for scouts who shortchange their own imaginations, who only see things as they are and ask why. Twenty-nine organizations saw Aaron Judge standing there. Only one sensed what would happen if it watched him come together.