Not us.

 

Back in the day—before my day—there was a particularly vicious sports columnist for something called the Boston Record, who made it his business to bring down the great Beantown idol who was Ted Williams.

Dave Egan headed an entire pack of Boston writers who took to doing the same, and you know, Dave Egan had two degrees from Harvard so he had to be right. Egan wanted desperately to prove that Teddy Ballgame was not clutch, and he kept a whole list of big games in which The Splendid Splinter had supposedly choked.

Egan's attacks grew so unhinged that, even on the verge of Williams heading off to war for the second time in his career, he ran a column saying that Teddy was actually a bad example to America's youth. 

Why?

Because Ted Williams never liked to wear a necktie, "even when the occasion clearly called for it." (I'm not making this up.)

A little later, the abominable Horace Stoneham, a stone drunk, moved the New York Giants from East Harlem to San Francisco because he didn't like how many Black people were coming to Giants' games, and he was afraid "all the good cities would be taken."

Like a barbarian looting a sacred temple, he took the incomparable Willie Mays with him, to a place that would prove to be where, as Frank Coniff would write, "They cheer Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays."

They did this in good part because of another pack of rabid hyenas posing as sportswriters, led by an unbearable blowhard named Glenn Dickey.

No matter how well he played, Dickey lambasted Mays for "lack of preparation and knowledge...indolence...uncertain intelligence and petulant personality."

Close as these insults came to outright racism, Dickey, a white man, nonetheless also had the temerity to castigate Mays for supposedly refusing to "speak out against racial inequality."

The charge that they are chokers has been leveled against the very greatest of ballplayers, and if you narrow your eyes and squint very hard at just the right statistics, there might seem to be some validity to it.

Teddy Ballgame, after all, hit only .200, with no extra-base hits and just one RBI, in his only World Series. Sure, he was said to be hurting after injuring his arm in a ridiculous, "warm up" game his manager had arranged before the Series. But never mind. Aren't the true greats supposed to rise above the hurts that fell mere mortals?

Willie Mays, for that matter, never hit a home run in the 20 World Series games he played, and had just 1 in the postseason. His teams went a combined 2-5 in October, and he hit all of .247, and just .239 in the Series. What a choker! Oh, yeah, there was the greatest catch ever made. But still!

It barely needs saying that Aaron Judge's postseason record had been erratic, at best. But we seem to bury the big games he has had, while anointing others as "clutch."

In 2017, for instance, Judge hit only .250 against Houston in the ALCS, but had 2 doubles, 3 homers, and 7 ribbies. In the 2018 ALDS, he had 2 homers and hit .375 in four games against Boston—while Mr. Clutch, Giancarlo Stanton, had 4 singles, 0 RBI, and 6 strikeouts, including a crucial K in the very last inning of the series, when Craig Kimbrel could not put the ball over the plate.

Then there was 2019, in the ALCS against Houston, when Judge had only one homer and hit .240...but Mr. Clutch begged out after homering in Game One. Aaron Hicks—Aaron Hicks!!—also played hurt in that one, but managed to hit a game-winning homer.

Then there was last fall when, after batting .364 against Boston, Judge went 9-15 with 4 walks—yes, he was on base 13 times in 4 games—and drove in 6 runs against Toronto, while hitting absolutely the most impossible fucking home run I have ever seen, and going .600/.684/.933/1.618. 

(Giancarlo did a little less well, batting .091 against Boston, then hitting .267 with no homers against Toronto.)

I write all this not to blame Stanton for the Yanks' many awful failures in the postseason in recent years, but just to point out how once somebody gets a reputation for "clutch" or "not clutch," it is very hard to shake it, no matter how deserving he may or may not be. (And I do blame Stanton for being unable to take the field so often in his Yankees' career, something—let's face it—that is almost certainly due in part to his usage of illegal steroids through the years.)

It is, of course, unlikely that Aaron Judge will ever get over his infamous drop in the 5th inning of Game Five of the 2024 World Series.

I choose to think that if the Yankees had won that game they might have gone back to L.A. and run the table. But of course the odds were much more likely that they would have been shut down again by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a better pitcher than anyone the Yanks had on staff.

And it's worthwhile to remember that even in that terrible Game Five, Aaron Judge also made a terrific leaping catch in deep center, and homered and doubled in the run that gave the Yankees back the lead. And that his drop would've been just a footnote, if the Yankees' braintrust of Brian Cashman and his human sock puppet, Aaron Boone, had not insisted on keeping an injured player at first, a man who couldn't play the position at third—and at short—and a catcher who actually got the Dodgers' winning rally going by managing to grab Ohtani's bat.

All of which is to say that there have been many reasons for why your New York Yankees have not gone all the way in recent years—and almost all of them begin and end with the sheer incompetence and greed of their front office, and the nepo baby who inherited the team. 

Aaron Judge, by contrast, is almost the only player who has given us much joy over the last decade or so. He is almost the only one who has been able to rise above the career-crushing idiocy of Cashman's coaching staffs; the only one who has been able to come back from injury after injury and play better than ever. He is, more than any other player, the man who did easily the most to get us into the postseason to start with.

It has been easy to call him a choker, and I admit, to my great shame, that I have joined in such behavior at times. We all do, in our frustration. But I'll be damned if I'm going to hurl insults at him for not winning a meaningless exhibition game in which Team USA's pitchers managed to give up eight runs to Italy(!).

I think that, despite our frustrations, we generally keep a pretty good perspective on the game. There's no reason for us to ape the Dave Egans and the Glenn Dickeys of the past. That's not us. It just makes us look small—while Aaron Judge will always look big.