As Aaron Judge galloped toward history last year, he identified only one problem with his astonishing season: He did not, actually, do enough galloping. He wanted to steal 20 bases, and hitting 62 home runs meant he had 62 fewer chances to do that. He finished with 16 swipes.
So on the day he re-signed with the Yankees for nine years and $360 million this winter, he sent the team’s baserunning coordinator, Matt Talarico, a text: I’m ready to get back to work.
Heading into last season, when his 62 homers would set the American League home-run record, Judge had decided to focus on improving his baserunning. And having done that, he decided to do it again.
“It’s not an accident he’s where he is,” Talarico says, “and that’s why.”
As he did a year ago, Judge reported early to George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa this spring so he could continue to sharpen the element of his game in which he says he took the most pride.
David J. Phillip/AP
“You gotta set the table every now and then,” Judge says.
Judge spent most of last season hitting first or second in the lineup, and he took that responsibility seriously. He worked 111 walks—19 of them intentional—and hit 87 singles, and he tried to steal second as often as possible, or at least go first to third on a single. He tried to advance on a ball in the dirt. He wanted to be able to score on an out. And he wanted to help the “boppers hitting behind me”—DH Giancarlo Stanton and first baseman Anthony Rizzo—make outs less often.
“I’m not saying I’m a fast guy, but if you’ve got a Billy Hamilton over there, that’s usually going to lead to more pitches in the zone for the hitter, more fastballs for the hitter,” Judge says. “They throw a bunch of slop out there. So hopefully if I can put a little bit of fear in those guys to maybe give Big G or Rizzo a better pitch to hit, that’s going to lead to more wins for us.”
For most of his career, the Yankees encouraged Judge to play station to station. But after the 2021 season, he told Eric Cressey, who oversees the team’s strength and conditioning department, he wanted to earn the green light. Cressey put him in touch with Talarico.
Talarico was ready, with as thorough a presentation as he could fathom, just in case he got only one shot. (“I didn’t know [yet] what kind of person he was,” he says. “I didn’t know he was one of the most dedicated people on the planet.”) Talarico showed Judge videos of Judge’s best attempts overlaid with those of longtime Yankees center fielder Brett Gardner, who twice topped 45 stolen bases in a season. “You can run with him,” Talarico told him.
“He wasn’t always doing it,” Talarico explains. “But at certain times, he was at least up there. I said, ‘You might not win the race, but you’re [making them look] twice.’”
At 6'7", 282 pounds, Judge might seem out of place in speed training, but Talarico saw him as an ideal candidate. “It’s force application,” Talarico says. “Having the ability to produce force—Aaron Judge is an 80 grade [on the 20-to-80 scouting scale] when it comes to that. Then it comes down to force application: Are you applying that in the angle and in the spot so that you’re not wasting that force? … We get that 80-grade force in the right direction, and it’s a fast runner. It’s not ‘fast for a big guy.’ It’s fast.”
The mechanical adjustments Judge needed to make were minor. He and Talarico discussed creating a strong, efficient position when he runs. They worked through the runner’s progression of marching, skipping and bounding, both with and without resistance bands. And mostly they focused on reading pitchers and staying aggressive.
Judge watched films of his best runs and those of others. (Talarico keeps videos of what he considers to be the ideal version of a play—for example, he labeled a 2019 Bryan Reynolds steal of third base “Stealing Third 101.”) Judge added speedwork to his workouts, including on his honeymoon. He began to think of himself as a threat.
The key, Talarico says, was helping Judge recognize he was already physically capable of everything he wanted to do—he just needed the mindset to match.
“Step one to four [in baserunning] is critical, and the rest kind of takes care of itself,” Talarico says. And over a distance as short as 90 feet, small adjustments can make a huge difference.
Judge noticed that difference immediately last season, as did nearly everyone else.
“I think just the technique is what’s improved,” he says. “I think the speed has been the same. If you look back at sprint speed over the last couple years, it’s been about the same. I think now, just the awareness of when to go, some techniques of how to do it, how to time it up, is what’s kind of jumped off the chart.”
His sprint speed actually dropped from 27.6 feet per second in 2021 to 27.3 last season. (That figure, for what it’s worth, was better than that of 5'9", 180-pound Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts.)
Manager Aaron Boone saw Judge as a base threat as well, giving him the green light in perpetuity. Talarico works with players at all levels of the Yankees organization, and the prospects loved that even the team’s best player was going through workouts similar to their own—and getting results. Judge earned the ultimate compliment when Talarico replaced the Reynolds video with one of Judge stealing third against the Orioles in July. Now prospects watch his footage.
“If you’re gonna be one of my 101 examples to teach, it’s gonna be perfect,” says Talarico. “And so Aaron Judge doing it helps so much, because he is. If you’re a fast runner in our organization and you see that, you’re like, ‘I can do it.’”
Even Tim Locastro, now a Met but at the time the Yankees’ pinch-running specialist, tried to pick Judge’s brain on momentum steals.
Locastro was watching from the dugout when Judge doubled to lead off the seventh inning with a one-run lead over the Rays in September, then took third on a grounder to short. He scored on a sacrifice fly. The Yankees won 2–1.
That’s unbelievable, Locastro thought. No one’s going to notice that, but it ended up being the deciding run.
Those are exactly the moments Judge envisions repeating this year. He thinks the rule changes—larger bases, limited pickoff attempts, fewer infield shifts—will help him be even more productive on the base paths. He declines to identify a target number of steals but says he’d like to hit double digits again.
Maybe, to give himself more chances, he should hit fewer home runs.
