By now you’ve heard. The entire baseball world has heard. After missing all of June, July, and August, the best hitter you’ve ever seen has been reinstated from the 60-day injured list and inserted directly into the Yankees’ starting lineup. We can’t know if he’ll be worth an extra four games over the next nineteen as the Yankees try to track down the Rays and win the American League East, but we can be sure Aaron Judge’s presence in the lineup will at the very least boost the spirits of everyone in Yankees Universe.

On Sunday afternoon my son and I took the train down to San Diego to watch the Yankees and the Padres, and I was struck by a number of things. First, of course, there was Gerrit Cole. I was shocked when he gave up a leadoff home run, but I explained it away easily. Even at his best Cole gives up home runs from time to time, and Fernando Tatis, Jr., has been one of the best hitters in baseball in the second half. Nothing to worry about. But when Jake Cronenworth hit an opposite field line drive for another home run a few pitches later, it was news. An older Yankee fan in front of me turned around and looked at me slack-jawed. “This,” I said to him, “is not what I was expecting to see today.”

A minute or two later it was Manny Machado launching a bomb to straightaway center field, the third consecutive home run to start the game. My friend turned around again, and this time neither of us said a word. We just exchanged a blank stare, two strangers united in despair. When the next batter, Ty France, hit a ball remarkably similar to Machado’s, I braced for the world to slip from its axis, but Spencer Jones caught the first out of the inning with his back against the wall.

More important than any of that, at least in the grand scheme of the season, was Aaron Judge. We had entered the park (which is gorgeous by the way, a close second to San Francisco’s Oracle Park) as soon as the gates opened. Out beyond the protective netting the left field line was already thick with Yankee fans watching Cam Schlittler and Will Warren working through their side sessions. Most along the rail held Sharpies and baseballs, and occasionally one of the more optimistic would shout an invitation to a whichever player wandered by. Schlittler was all business, Warren was largely anonymous, and José Caballero barely acknowledged the fans as he took groundballs at short.

But then Judge walked up the dugout steps and onto the field. He was about a hundred feet away, but fans noticed and began calling to him immediately. As he and a trainer made their way to a set of cones in short left field, the buzz along the rail grew louder until the Captain reached his workout station and turned to look at us.

I’ve always thought that while Derek Jeter seemed to have been born to be the Yankee captain, Aaron Judge has made himself into one. While Jeter was natural, Judge has always been intentional. He pauses for a beat before answering a reporter’s question, as if he knows the weight of his words and is considering them carefully. As captain of the New York Yankees, he stands at the end of a line of players who aren’t just franchise heroes, but baseball legends, and sometimes — like on Sunday afternoon — it looks like he can’t believe he belongs.

He was going through a workout that, in hindsight, didn’t seem designed for a player whose return was unknown. All of his actions were tied to specific in-game movements he might have to do on Tuesday. A quick pivot to the right before striding back to mimic chasing a flyball, then a pivot to the left to do the same. Later he’d take some live fielding, and he’d end his thirty-minute workout with similary precise baserunning drills simulating every situation he might encounter on the bases.

It was all interesting to watch, but what I’ll remember was a moment when he was just about to begin his work. The calls from the rail had reached a crescendo, and Judge turned to his fans and waved. But here’s the thing — it was a sheepish wave. He ducked his head a bit and smiled awkwardly, probably conceding that it had been three months since he’d done anything warranting our cheers. There was nothing impressive, after all, about shuffling from one cone to another.

Aaron Judge is something different. Even if Jeter did eventually outpace all of his contemporaries with longevity and consistency, at no point in his career was he ever even the best shortstop in baseball, let along the game’s best player. Aaron Judge is not only the best player in the game today, he’s almost certainly the best Yankee any of us will see with our own eyes, and yet he’s somehow more accessible than Jeter ever was. While he might be embarrassed by cheers for doing something as mundane as a rehab workout, I have to believe that Judge understands. That sheepish wave and nod of his head might just have been because he knew something we didn’t. “Wait until Tuesday night,” he might’ve been saying. “Then I’ll give you something real to cheer about.”

[Photo courtesy of the author.]