In the seventh inning of Game 2 of the American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday night, Aaron Judge saw a 95 mph fastball fly around his chest and hit him for a two-run home run. Afterwards, he said that the spirits of the Yankees legends had pulled the ball through the cold wind over the center field wall to their shrine in Monument Park. The ghosts must have been bothering him for some time. Judge has spent the last few years pursuing her; more recently he seemed to be haunted by them. Before that explosion, he had gone more than twenty at-bats without hitting a home run. He came into the game batting .133 and only had one extra-base hit in the playoffs. His performance up to that point had been dismal, and there were rumors that he wasn't cut out for playoff baseball – that he couldn't make it when it mattered most.

He had one of the best regular offensive seasons in Major League history. During a 100-game stretch this season, he hit a .378 batting average with 45 homers – a pace that would have produced 78 homers over the course of a full season. (He finished with fifty-eight.) Judge led the majors in home runs, runs batted in, on-base percentage, slugging and two different measures WARan advanced metric to measure how many more wins a player is worth than an average player at his position. According to another advanced metric that quantifies a player's offensive value while controlling for his park environment, he had the seventh-best offensive season in history – behind only Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds and Ted Williams – and the best ever by a right-handed hitter.

But he never won a World Series and led the Yankees through an incredibly long stretch without a championship (at least for New York – fifteen years). Any year the Yankees didn't win a championship was considered a failure, according to Judge. “If you don’t win, what’s the point?” he asked a few weeks ago.

Judge has played in seven post-seasons so far – all but one season since 2017. But despite the team's consistency, the stretch has been a disappointment, and Judge's disappearance at the plate hasn't helped, to say the least. This year the Yankees have their best chance. The judge is thirty-two years old. The front office bet on the farm acquiring outfielder Juan Soto on an expiring contract – and so far it's paid off. Giancarlo Stanton, a 34-year-old slugger, suddenly appears to have morphed into Reggie Jackson. There is obviously no ball club that is better. And so the Yankees had won, more or less without Judge. He'd made some spectacular running grabs – he's 5ft 7in, has legs like tree trunks and is out of place in midfield but moves across the grass with gliding grace. But Judge was the best player in baseball this year (with apologies to Shohei Ohtani) because of his bat, not his glove, and it was clear that the Yankees needed his offensive production against the strong lineup of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the likely national team Winner, or even to get past the Guardians. Judge's problems were so severe that the Guardians actually chose to intentionally walk Soto early in the second game and face Judge with the bases loaded rather than face Soto – also one of the game's best batters – with two men . The judge made them pay, but only a little; He hit a sacrifice fly. When Judge hit a home run to win the game for the Yankees (who later won 6-3), the Yankees dugout was overjoyed. The insult of the intentional walk “woke Richter up,” crowed his teammate Gleyber Torres. Perhaps. The day before, Mark Vientos of the New York Mets hit a grand slam after the Dodgers intentionally walked Francisco Lindor to load the bases. Vientos said after the game, “I took it personally.” It doesn't matter that Vientos bounced between the majors and Triple-A at the start of the season while Lindor was one of the league's best hitters. Judge is expected to be named American League MVP, but on Tuesday night he was, as usual, more circumspect and deferential: He would have accompanied Soto, too, he said. Nevertheless, his relief was palpable and around the game it was said that the lull was over. The judge finally became more heated.

Hitting a baseball, like anything that requires a bit of luck, is a game of lucky streaks – some explainable, some inexplicable, some given as reasons after the fact. Coincidentally, Judge had started the season on a low note, hitting just .207 in April. After he suffered four defeats at the end of April, the Yankee Stadium crowd even booed the captain. The judge, as always, said he would have done the same. A few weeks later, Judge, who is obsessively working on the finer points of his swing, narrowed his stance a bit, tilted his left foot more toward the pitcher and stood a little straighter, as The Athletic's Brendan Kuty pointed out. Boom! solo home run; the bad phase is over; the rest was history. And so it was tempting to see the same thing in the second game. A home run, like a win, has to mean something. And no one has made home runs seem more repeatable than Judge. That's the whole idea of ​​a routine, a maintenance. In addition to studying his swing, Judge also does post-game cold dives, fasts and meditates. Pressure has to do something to a player – it could change the way he squeezes the bat or tense his muscles a millisecond too late. And the fans treat the game and the players that way – as if they have power over the outcome.

But in baseball, of all things, it can be harder to see control. On Thursday night, Judge took a huge swing on the first pitch he saw and then struck out. He also hit his second shot. But in the eighth, with the Yankees trailing 3-1 and a runner on second, Judge hit a 99 mph fastball at the edge of the plate and blasted a line drive just high enough for a home run that evening Score. He cheered as he rounded the bases. Stanton followed him with another home run and the Yankees were on top.

If the game had ended there, he would have been the hero. But there's only so much a player can control. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the Yankees leading 5-3, Judge could only watch as the ball sailed high above him into the stands – a two-run home run by pinch-hitter Jhonkensy Noel to tie the game. The Guardians won in the tenth game after the Yankees went scoreless. Judge had led off the inning and struck it out. On Friday night, in another game of wild swings – this time resulting in a win for the Yankees – Judge had one hit to go and two more strikeouts.

What does it mean? No one would have imagined that Judge was under unusual pressure when he collapsed in April. And he was under unusual pressure in the fall of 2022, when networks interrupted college football games to show his batted balls, and he hit his 62nd home run of the season. When Maris broke Ruth's home run record with 61, the stress was said to have been so great that clumps of Mari's hair fell out.

It's clear that through a combination of great effort and luck, Judge will return to form. For a star like Judge, October baseball is baseball. A home run is a home run – and despite his reputation, Judge has hit plenty of home runs in the postseason. (His career total is tied with Ruth for eighteenth.) Games are won and lost in the same manner as in September. But of course Judge is right – we don’t see her that way. We tell stories: streaks, slumps, comebacks, the clutch. If we don't do that, what's the point? ♦