Well, it was a nice thought.
That Giants could sign Aaron Judge, people whispered for a while. Then they started saying it louder. The Giants will be in the Aaron Judge market, they said, and they’re looking to make a splash. Then it was the Giants are making a serious offer for Aaron Judge, and they might just lure him away. Then Susan Slusser said she was hearing a lot more serious talk that the Giants would get Judge, and Jon Heyman said that the deal was close and he would be a Giant! Carlos Baerga, fresh off reporting the Justin Verlander deal with the Mets, said the Giants were getting Judge and Carlos Correa.
It was happening! It was all happening! Finally, for the first time in 30 years, the Giants identified the best hitter on the market and si-
Then it didn’t happen.
Heyman retracted his tweet almost immediately, and nothing happened for the rest of Tuesday evening, and then at around 5 AM Pacific time on Wednesday, Judge had officially re-signed with the Yankees for a lot of years and an awful lot of money. The Giants had not found their big, strong dinger man, and could only talk about how nice their consolation Mitch Haniger was. In 2021, he hit 39 homers, you know. That’s a lot!
In a way, it was good that the Giants didn’t sign Judge. I mean, that kind of financial commitment could hamstring them for years to come. What if, a couple years down the line, they didn’t have the money for an Aaron Judge-type player? Boy, would that be embarrassing.
The Giants, as previously discussed in this space, don’t sign big name free agents. They try, and they fail, and that’s that. I mean, at this point none of us are going to be fooled by this:
Yeah, yeah, they’ll have meetings, and then what happens? They’ll make a good offer, an offer that’s only kind of financially silly, and then Correa will sign with a team that makes him a great offer that’s very financially silly. The best chance the Giants have at getting Correa is that maybe, just maybe, baseball’s run out of teams that would do that?
It hasn’t, though, and we all know that. And as much as the Judge pursuit was kind of fun because there was just enough smoke for Giants fans to delude ourselves into thinking that Lucy would hold the football this time, well, you’ll never guess what she did instead. And now she’s got it ready to be kicked again, like we didn’t just fall for that eight seconds ago. I mean, I know we’re stupid gullible morons with no common sense, but give us a little credit here. I like to think that, as a fanbase, Giants fans have at least the memory of one goldfish.
Because what it comes back to is that we wanted Aaron Judge. We were promised Aaron Judge. We were told that he grew up a Giants fan, and he loved Rich Aurilia, and he flew into SFO around Thanksgiving, and he had multiple face-to-face meetings with Giants ownership, and Steph Curry helped recruit him, and he didn’t like the Yankees releasing details of their contract offer to him, and maybe he didn’t like being booed in the playoffs?
None of that mattered, though. We were told that any of those things could make a difference, that the same bonds that draw us to the Giants would also draw him back. If I was a free agent, I thought to myself, and my favorite team from childhood offered me a lot of money, I would take it and play for them and it would be great!
And yet, as Judge has reminded us, that’s not how it works in the real world. Once you get to the majors and start playing, there are a lot of other considerations that take priority. The Yankees are a famously top-notch organization, for example. He has a lot of friends there. He’s presumably comfortable there. He’ll get far more opportunities for national exposure, which will help him in the short term with things like endorsements, and in the long term with things like building a legacy.
Rightly or wrongly, for a long time, the absolute pinnacle of baseball has been seen as Being A Successful Yankee Forever. Aaron Judge has a chance at doing that, and the rewards in money and fame and acclaim would be massive. In a strictly rational sense, if the money was anywhere close (and it clearly was), he’d be a fool not to go for that.
Our collective disappointment at Aaron Judge signing with the Yankees is what happens when the romantic, fun, fan side of baseball runs into reality. Because of course Rich Aurilia falls to the wayside when compared with Derek Jeter. Of course $360 million to stay in a place where you’re already comfortable is more enticing than whatever the Giants offered. It had to be.
As Giants fans, we are used to doom-and-glooming whenever the team doesn’t sign a big free agent, and we’ve earned that. But Aaron Judge didn’t do anything wrong. He thought hard about his decision, then made the decision that most people would make. I couldn’t say if it was the right one or the wrong one. It’s not the one I hoped he’d make, but I understand it and I don’t even know if it reflects that poorly on the Giants. It’s sad. It happens. It’s okay.
They’re still not getting Correa though.
Wishing only the best for the 6'7" nearing 300 lbs literal Giant, but...bullet dodged.