When Aaron Judge stood in the Yankee Stadium batter’s box in late September, he couldn’t quite shake the silence. Some 45,000 voices hushed, as if they were at a basilica, not a ball field. As fans anticipated a landmark moment in sports—the breaking of a revered home-run record—they refused to peep as the pitcher wound up.
“I never noticed the crowd until they stopped cheering, which was one of the craziest things in my career,” says Judge, 30, sitting in the leafy courtyard of his luxury New York City apartment building, about a week after the end of a monumental campaign in which he set a new American League home-run mark, with 62. “That’s when I started to kind of realize, ‘Oh boy, there’s something special going on here.’”
Judge—who at 6 ft. 7 in. and 282 lb. checks in as one of the most massive players in baseball history—slugged his 60th home run for the New York Yankees, tying Babe Ruth’s 1927 milestone, on Sept. 20, launching a 95-m.p.h. sinker deep into the left-center
