The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – 62: Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees, and the Pursuit of Greatness by Bryan Hoch

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

62: Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees, and the Pursuit of Greatness by Bryan Hoch https://amzn.to/43mrT8Z “The definitive story” (Tyler Kepner, The New York Times baseball columnist) of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge’s incredible, unparalleled run to break Roger Maris’s home run record and the franchise both men called home. Aaron Judge, the hulking superman who carried an easy aw-shucks demeanor from small-town California to stardom in the Big Apple, had long established his place as one of baseball’s most intimidating power hitters. Baseballs frequently rocketed off his bat like cannon fire, dispatching heat-seeking missiles toward the “Judge’s Chambers” seating area in right field, sending delirious fans scattering for souvenirs. But even in a high-tech universe where computers measure each swing to the nth degree, Roger Maris’s American League mark of sixty-one home runs seemed largely out of reach. It had been more than a decade since baseball wiped clean the stains of its performance-enhanced era, in which cartoonish sluggers Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds made a mockery of the record book. Given a more level playing field against pitchers sporting hellacious arsenals unlike anything Babe Ruth or Maris could have imagined, only an exceptional talent could even consider making a run at sixty-one homers. Judge, who placed the bet of his life by turning down a $213.5 million extension on the eve of the regular season, promised to rise to the challenge. “In the most thorough telling yet of an all-time-great Yankees performance” (Jeff Passan, New York Times bestselling author), veteran Yankees beat reporter Bryan Hoch unravels the remarkable journey of Judge’s run to shatter Maris’s beloved sixty-one-year-old record. In-depth, inspiring, and with an expert’s insight, 62 also investigates the more significant questions raised in a season unlike any other, including how—and where—Judge will deliver his encore. About the Author Bryan Hoch has covered New York baseball for the past two decades, serving as MLB.com's Yankees beat reporter since 2007 while making regular appearances on MLB Network. A two-time New York City Marathon finisher, his wife Connie once danced on stage with Bruce Springsteen. They have two wonderful daughters, Penny and Maddie.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. The big circus is in the sky.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, people of all ages, welcome to the Chris Voschow podcast. Today we're going to be talking baseball. The Yankees. You may have heard of them. A storied baseball franchise with multiple winners. And we're going to be talking about number 62, Aaron Judge, today. And a great new book that's come out on him that we'll be talking about as well.

In the meantime, though, we have to always guilt and shame with the podcast ad plugs, as always. But they're pretty simple. Just refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisFoss. LinkedIn.com, 4ChessChrisFoss. Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisFoss. And let's see.

There's some new threads there on the Instagram thing. There's the Twitter competitor. Go see us at the Chris Foss Official and the Chris Foss Show over there as well. Today, we have an amazing gentleman and author on the show. He's the author of the latest book that has come out July 11th, 2023. It'll be coming out. You can pre-order it now. We're five Books are sold. 62. Aaron Judge.

The New York Yankees in the pursuit of greatness. Brian Hoke is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking about his amazing new book. He's covered New York baseball for the past two decades, serving as MLB.com's Yankees beat reporter since

2007 while making regular appearances on MLB.com's Yankees beat reporter since 2007 while making regular appearances on MLB Network. A two-time New York City Marathon finisher, his wife Connie once danced on stage with Bruce Springsteen. Did she upstage you with that or did Bruce upstage you with that? What's going on?

It's hard to compete with Bruce Springsteen. I think she gets top billing there. You probably still forgave her because it with Bruce Springsteen. So, yeah, no, I think she gets top billing there. Oh, there you go. Well, you probably still forgave her because it is Bruce Springsteen, after all, really, when it comes down. The boss. The boss. Come on, man.

Yeah. There you go. So the boss met the boss. Let's see how that works. So welcome to the show, Brian. How are you? I'm doing great. I'm here in Yankee Stadium.

It's a beautiful day. You can't tell by this little back room that I'm in, but it is beautiful. The sun is out, and the Yankees are going to play the Orioles here tonight. Yeah, I mean, what a great voice. You're calling right from inside the building. The call is coming from inside the building. Yeah, exactly.

There you go. So, give us a.com. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs, please? Easiest way would be to go to brian-hok, H-O-C-H dot com. And that's the landing page for everything. You can find out about all the books, all the stories I'm writing for MLB.com, Yankees.com. And, of course, you mentioned all the, yeah, we've got to do threads now, huh? I just signed up for threads yesterday.

And so it feels like 2009 all over again with the wild wild west twitter but yeah obviously twitter instagram and tiktok and god whatever comes next right yeah i'm still trying to get caught up on tiktok like i you know i'm too old and our our stuff is probably a little too highbrow for most of the tiktok stuff they're like, reading books? What's going on? I don't get this guy. So welcome to the show. What motivated you to want to write this book? Well, I'll tell you what. Obviously, Judge, as we know now, wound up catching Roger Maris,

eclipsing and setting the new single-season American League home run record, and that's where 62 comes from. But really, it started coming into my mind last season around the all-star break probably right around now actually the yankees were off to a great start they had about a 15 and a half game lead in the american league east and judge was playing like an mvp and i'm not great at math but i know that 31 is half of 62 so i know he had already gone about halfway there and so this is about the point last year where I started just kind of collecting, just in case.

And then once he got around to August and he had 50 home runs, I started looking at the calendar. I said, he's going to break this record. And it wasn't a question of if he would. I think it was more when. And so by that point, I started saying, okay, there is this story to be told here. And I don't want it to just be the day-to-day story of Judge chasing this record. But this chase, this home run pursuit is a great way to kind of branch out.

And it gives us a lot of spokes on the wheel to kind of talk about a lot of things about Major League Baseball, about the Yankees, about Judge, and to kind of peel back the layers of history and talk about what Roger Maris did in 1961. So I think it came together nicely. It was a perfect jumping-off point to really tell some great baseball stories. There you go. And to introduce people more to baseball, maybe some in our audience that are laymen to baseball, and what the number 62 represents. Give us the foundation of what that is and why it's important and Babe Ruth and everything else.

Absolutely. Babe Ruth Roger Maris and now Aaron judge who have all held this same record 60 61 and 62 of the single season home run record in the American League now They all played for the same team played the same position different ballparks different errors, of course But there is that connection there that through line between Ruth and Maris and now Judge. Now, it's important to note that 62 is the American League record, but it is not the Major League record.

Now, if you, yeah, 73 is actually the Major League record. Barry Bonds said it back in 2001, but as we found out about Bonds and Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, those were all performance-en performance enhanced or expected to be performance enhanced. And I'll give myself some cover there. But I think that we look at the

McGuire, Bonds, Sosa records now differently than certainly I do than what I saw last year with Judge, where testing is now in place and essentially everybody agrees that judge did it clean and so now this is we certainly talked to Roger Maris jr. who wrote the forward to this book and he says that he now considers 62 the real record that judge said last year if you ask me bonds I saw him do it 73 I watched it it happened I don't want to pretend it didn't but i do consider i do put it in a different bucket than what i saw last year with judge and is this more important uh in in this time and day and age because of that kind of i think they kind of called

it the asterisk era of of uh you know the Bonds and all those things with the performance. They're like kind of there's like an asterisk there. Sometimes actually a real literal asterisk. You know, one of the things that we have in the book here is that the record-breaking home run, it was actually the home run that Barry Bonds hit to pass Henry Aaron. It was the 756th career home run. And this is a career home run record. But it was purchased at auction by

Mark Echo, who you may know. He's a designer. He paid a lot of money to it. He stamped it with an asterisk, and then he donated it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. And you can actually go see it. It's still there on display because it's history. And obviously this guy had

the money to literally put an asterisk on this ball and say, yeah, it's a record, but it's stained in some way. I think that Barry Bonds is a fantastic player. McGuire, Sosa, those guys deserve to be mentioned, but there

is a reason that none of those three players are in Cooperstown right now. Do you think they ever will be? I think that if Bonds isn't going to get in, and he had 10 cracks there on the writer's ballot, he didn't get in, then I would say it's

questionable. Because if you just looked at the numbers alone, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens both should have been first ballot Hall of Famers. They were both among the greatest players that I ever saw with my own two eyes. But we found out too much. And I think that the chemical enhancements, the artificial there, that has definitely clouded it for a lot of the voters. Hi, Voxers. Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far.

We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. And so this probably adds a lot more value to what Aaron Judge did then. Yeah, and I think it's important to make that connection,

is that we haven't seen a season like that since the years where I'm talking about it, the late 90s and the early 2000s, when honestly it kind of made a mockery of the record book and people were breaking records every single year. And then baseball finally cracked down. And lo and behold, the power numbers came back down to earth a little bit. So I think that to have Judge doing it on the stage that he did it in New York City, playing for a prestigious franchise like the New York Yankees,

it really did capture the national attention. And they were cutting in on college football broadcast in September to show his at-bats, which when have we ever seen that before? That's true. And when I saw that happening, I said, all right, this is more than just the Yankees right fielder is having a good season. This is more than just he's having an MVP season. It's more than just the Yankees are trying to lock up a playoff spot.

This has become kind of a national phenomenon where even the Today Show and Jimmy Fallon are doing segments on the home run chase. I said, this is something bigger, and it's a story that needs to be told in more of a long-form format. And for those who aren't big into baseball, why is it so hard to get to 62? I mean, what are the odds? I mean, clearly there's only been three people who have naturally gotten to it in the history of baseball. Why is that, and why is it so hard? I mean, why does it mean something?

Well, I think it's hard just to hit one. So, you know, it's obviously hitting a baseball. Ted Williams always used to say hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. And you think about it, you've got a guy who's 60 feet, 6 inches away from you, and he's throwing it in the high 90 mile per hour, you have a split second to react. Even especially now, I think the pitchers are just becoming tougher and tougher to hit. Let's compare it to 1961 when Roger Maris broke that record and was in pursuit of that.

You typically would face the same pitcher three or four times a game, and he's getting tired out there on the mound, and they weren't throwing that hard to begin with. They may be throwing 90 miles an hour, probably more likely 85 miles an hour. Now in the modern day, you've got a complete stable of guys in the bullpen who are coming out. You go to the bullpen a lot earlier in the modern game. Guys are coming out throwing 97, 98, 99 miles an hour.

Some of the triple digits. You have a fraction of a second to react to those pitches coming in. They're throwing hellacious breaking stuff. It's not just fastballs and changeups. They have sliders. They have curveballs. They have all sorts of pitches. And there's a reason that batting averages around the game have gone down.

And baseball has actually tried to counteract that by making some changes here in 2023 but last year uh it was hard to hit basically and I think Judge did it on a level that we haven't seen and from wire to wire he had an MVP type year and did it in the uh in the shadow of a contract too, where that was another thing with the business going on, the business side of baseball that we can explore in this book. He was betting on himself. The Yankees offered him a lot of money, a contract extension on opening day. He turned it down and said, no, I'm going to bet on myself,

and I bet I could do better than that. And darn if he didn't. He went out, had a great season, a season for the ages, and was rewarded with a nine-year, $360 million contract. better than that and darn if he didn't he went out had a great season the season for the ages and was rewarded with a nine-year 360 million dollar contract and uh named the 16th captain in new york yankees history so he really and to use the baseball phrase here he picks the perfect game from start to finish last year there you go that guy wanted a raise damn it well he was going to get raised in one way or the other. They offered him $213.5

million on opening day. I was there in the press conference, and I'll use a prop here. I had my notepad, and I remember writing that down, and I said, $213.5. I think I would take that offer. Yeah, I probably would, too. So credit to him. He looked at the

competition out there, and you're in LA, so you know. He looked at Mike Trout, and he said you're in la so you know he looked at mike trout and he said no i'm gonna get paid like mike trout i want to be the high among the highest paid players in the game and he said and you're gonna pay me like mike trout because i'm gonna go out and have a season for the ages and he did and he put it all together and the question with judge his entire career has never been about the talent it It's been about the health because you've got a guy who's 6'7", 282 pounds. He's essentially a football player in baseball cleats. But last year, it was just one of the greatest seasons I've ever seen.

And he kind of has a, you know, you talk in the book about how he kind of has this kind of, I don't want to say backwards, but, you know, coming from that sort of aw shucks demeanor, small town California, all the way to stardom, you know, somebody who's not like, you know, an egotistical sort of rock star. Like, I can do whatever. You know, humbleness sort of thing of coming from, you know, America. Kind of what we kind of imagine baseball. Yeah. Baseball works.

The American pie, you know, american culture sort of thing whatever there's a lot of that there too i mean there's so many different angles i mean he's adopted he's by racial he's the uh it's a product of two educators high school teachers who uh really were no nonsense they raised him the right way and if he came home and wanted to play video games and go ride his bike he couldn't do it until his homework was was done i mean we are talking kind of a andy griffith type upbringing and he grew up in the san francisco bay area but a little more inland and so he grew up cheering for the san francisco giants but he's more uh the place he grew up is called linden california it's the cherry festival capital of the world.

They have a big annual festival every year. So it's very agricultural and rural up there. And he talks about it as a perfect place to grow up. You go down to the neighborhood pizza shop, and everybody in town knows everybody. And the way he put it in the book, he said, I had a mom in every house on my block because they it kind of paints a picture of this kind of picturesque 1950s tight upbringing and then you air drop this kid who just happened to be taller and stronger than everybody in this town it's kind of like a Clark Kent thing Clark Kent Superman where you air drop him into the middle of Manhattan and you say all right you

are now the face of the New York Yankees. And we kind of traced that adjustment process, and it took some time. It did, because for a kid who was a little bit shy and a little bit awkward at times to kind of grow into himself, one of the scouts I talked to, the baseball scouts who watched him in his high school years, said this kid was like a newborn giraffe Just trying to find his footing in a lot of ways He's kind of gangly and awkward and then you look yeah now and I think the Clark Kent Superman thing is actually very

Appropriate because he is a superhero in baseball clothes I mean if you were gonna draw draw a picture of an extra strong athlete, if you had never watched a baseball game in your life and you came and watched the Yankee game, you would look at Judge and you would say, wow, he must be the best player on the field. And I think that that's not something that comes very easily. It's more than just a raw physique. It's the way he carries himself and handles himself, too. There you go uh you know

it you go from the small town to the uh the big show in the big city basically and so uh it's it's quite the ride and so you detail what it's like for him to grow up as a child his birth and everything and and all the way up to that and some of the things that shaped him and made him into the person he became. Absolutely. And I think that's a big part of the story because for so many, it's hard to make it in the major leagues. The odds are astronomical against you playing one game in the major leagues, let alone to be named rookie of the year and to become the starting right fielder for the most prestigious franchise in Major League Baseball and then to become an all-star and win an MVP award. I think it took a lot of people along the way to draw him to that point. And we kind of investigate that.

One of the big situations he had was in 2016, he finally made his major league debut and he gets called up He hits a home run in his first at bat. So he starts off great But then he realizes that it is really difficult at the major league level and he winds up his batting average 179 at the end of the year and so that's obviously a striking out a lot He goes home and on the flight back to California, he pulls out his iPhone, and he types in the notes column there. He says 179,.179 at the top, and he wanted to use that as motivation to basically say,

never again, I'm going to do everything in my power to work and make sure that this never happens again, because he got embarrassed by it. Major League pitchers were eating him up for lunch. They had figured out, hey, don't throw the big kid a fastball down the middle, and he was just striking out over and over. And so one of the things that he did was somebody with his agency connected him with this guy named Richard Schenck, who is a character, man.

He's a self-taught hitting instructor in St. Peter's, Missouri. He actually owns a billiards hall. And just by watching Antivo, watching Barry Bonds at bats and rolling them back with a wiffle ball bat in his basement, he somehow has, or claims to have, unlocked the secret of what made Barry Bonds great. And so somebody in Judge's agency said, hey, why don't you go talk to this guy? And so they did set up a meeting.

And at first he was very skeptical, as I would be too, that this kind of mid-50s guy with a little punch over his tummy and jeans and dad jeans could somehow out hit a professional athlete but they did what was called a contract drill a contact drill where they would put a tee side by side and they would say go and every time this guy Richard would get to the ball faster than judge did and so after a couple rounds of that judge looked at him said hey man what are you doing here and so that started this kind of

renaissance that Judge did in shortening his swing, getting to the ball faster, hitting it harder, and so this is really the building blocks and it takes you a little bit behind the scenes of what made Aaron Judge a great all-star athlete. Wow. I mean,

the swing is important, too, even though everything's coming at you at 100 miles an's, it, and the swing is important too, even though everything's coming at you at a hundred miles, you know, an hour roughly, and, and, uh, you've got split second, you know, that, that whole swing and the, and, and how you swing it and how you use it. You know, I, I learned a little bit, uh, the, it was, it was the golf, it was the golf legend, our Arnold Palmer's school of golf. And, uh, man, I mean, just, I mean, just it's like an artwork. It's a science. It's craziness to be able to get that perfect.

And I imagine it varies depending upon what sort of athlete you are, size and build and everything else. Absolutely. There's so many different mechanics. And, yeah, when I was trying to learn to play golf, I read the same book you did, trying to break down a swing and then try to learn from the pros there yeah I mean but anybody who has gone to a golf course or tried to hit in a game can tell you that just

because you swing it right one time doesn't mean you're gonna do it the next time next time I my golf ball is going in the sand or is going off into the lake it's very off into the lake. It's very rare to be able to do it consistently over and over and over. And I think that's what makes the professionals great is that they're not perfect every single time. And you're going to see a professional athlete strike out. It's part of the game. It happens.

They're going to look silly sometimes. But it's cutting down on those errors. And, yeah, to use that golf analogy and take it one step further, I'm chasing my golf ball in the woods every single time and trying to hack it out of the high grass. These guys are probably keeping it on the fairway if they were professional golfers. Oh, yeah. I mean, professional sports players, I mean, like I see the professional hockey guys, and those guys can land a puck on a nail on a plane flying down the highway or something, you know, it's just insane what they can do, but yeah, it's, it's hard.

And it's challenging and then it's grueling. And, you know, I know, uh, the MLBs, you know, tried to do different things to tweak the game, maybe speed it up. I know they've got those, those cool boxes now that, you know, you can kind of see what's going on with the strike zone and stuff. And how's that all working out for the baseball industry? I'll tell you what, as the reporter, I love the pitch clock because baseball has always been the one game,

well, one of the games, I guess golf is one, but without a clock. Basketball has a clock. Hockey has a clock. Football has a clock. But with baseball, if the pitcher wanted to stand there on the mound and not throw the ball for 20 minutes, he could, in theory. Now you can't do that anymore. Now you're limited to 15 or 20 seconds. And so it really has cut down on the dead time.

And what I found, I was a little skeptical about it, too. This is the first year we've had the rule change here. The pitch clock has changed it so much for the better because it's cut out a lot of the dead time where guys are standing around and adjusting their belts and tying their shoes. You can't do that stuff anymore. Now you've

compressed it where you're just getting the action. You've lost none of the action. The pitchers are still being thrown. The hits are coming off the bat. Guys are running around the bases. That's what we come here to a ball game to watch. The difference is that we're doing it now two and a half hours, 245 instead of 345 or four hours.

I just think that, especially with this younger generation, first of all, a four-hour baseball game is too long anyway, in my opinion. I've lived through so many of them. The Yankees red stop Sunday night at Fenway Park where I'm walking out at 1.30, 2 in the morning, and I'm just saying, oh my gosh, I've got to catch a flight in the morning. What am

I doing here? Now we're cutting that down to a much more reasonable, but it's not about me. It's about the fans. Kids want to stay up and watch these games. Kids have school in the morning. People have to go to work in the morning. I think that it's baseball listening to what their customers need.

Sometimes that means they speed it up a little bit. They still want to see nine innings. They want to see runs scored. They want to see the action on the field. We just don't need to see guys standing around for unknown amounts of time. I think's great i mean i understood the the prior way you know it was kind of like a chess match or a poker game sort of thing where you're you're kind of playing and there's a little bit of mentally screwing with each other i i think that's one of the challenges

of of baseball too you know it's been kind of glorified in in different movies about how uh you know baseball players have a lot of time on their hands maybe than some other people and they you know they're very superstitious and they have different things and when you're in the dugout and you've got time you know it can fuck with your head you know especially probably if you're trying to get to 62 and you know you, you hit 50 and you're like, oh, man, it's going to rain. And then you get down to those last two. And I think I remember this, you know, they were playing on TV. They're like, ah, he's almost there.

And you're like, I wonder what it would like to be that guy where, you know, the whole world's going, when are you going to hit the next one? Yeah. And, yeah, we definitely get into that in the book, the pressure that was put on him. And because it became this phenomenon where Judge wanted to go out there every day and try and help the Yankees win. And that was his goal. That was his single mindset. The fans and the media, we all came here for a different reason. And you could tell that, especially in Yankee Stadium,

during the late in the chase when he was around 57, 58 home runs, the crowd was different here. It was dead silent like the Masters, you know, when he would come up to the plate because everybody came out, pulled out their cell phones and was recording every pitch of it, waiting to see if they were going to be a witness to history. And it just got kind of weird at times. Some of the Yankees were getting up out of the dugout and saying,

hey, it's okay to make noise here. It's weird to have the ballpark be completely quiet, everybody standing. And just kind of this, exactly, it was kind of this hush. And it's nothing that i've ever experienced before you know uh and during my time on the beat i was here when derrick jitter was chasing 3 000 hits which is a great career milestone and alex rodriguez did the same uh but we knew that they were going to get there eventually it was it was a career record this would judge there was kind of a time limit here and you would be looking at the calendar, and you say, oh, they've only got 12 games left. They've got 10 games left.

Oh, he's down to seven games left. Is he going to get there? And if he didn't get there, then the numbers were going to completely reset for this year. So there was definitely pressure, and obviously there were family members coming in, friends, and it was all anybody was talking about. And sometimes he would hit a ball. I vividly remember this. They were playing a game here at Yankee Stadium, and he hit a ball down the left field line, a double. And he's running into second base, and you kind of hear the crowd go,

oh, wow, exactly. And it was just kind of like, you know, I understand we all want to see a home run here, but home runs don't happen every single day. But it was cool. It was a phenomenon unlike any I've experienced. And probably really good for baseball and giving a resurgence. And I like all the changes they're making and stuff.

It's fun. You know, I grew up with old world baseball you know i grew up a uh dodgers fan and uh uh who was my favorite uh player back in the 70s uh steve garvey garvey yeah and and so you know i love the game but yeah there's only so many times i can watch you tie your shoe and and rearrange the business and and uh talk to the manager and stuff. I remember those days, so there you go. What do you hope people come away from when they read the book? I hope they come away with an appreciation for where we stand right now in baseball history.

It's great to talk about Judge. He's a fantastic player, of course, and it is a book that centers on Judge, but there's a lot of different angles that I wanted to explore in this. And so while it is a book about Judge, and it is a book about how the New York Yankees are run in this day and age, I feel like fans of any team will come away from reading this book and kind of learn something about baseball, the way it's operating, because I was able to, you know, through my day job here at MLB.com, I know almost everybody here in the Yankee organization, and I have their contact information.

I was able to lean upon them and kind of peel back the layers of the onion here and say, all right, when this was happening, what was going on behind the scenes? When this was happening, what was the thought process in that? And so there's a lot of stories from behind the scenes in a major league front office that you're not going to find anywhere else in this book and i'm proud of that i'm also proud of the historical work i was able to do here because one thing i did not want to do in this book was just have a recounting of it would have been very easy but i could have just said on this day judge hit home run number 48 and then on this day hit number 49. That would have been boring to me, and I already lived it once, so I didn't feel like that was the story I wanted to tell.

So as I mentioned earlier, what I wanted to do was connect him to Babe Ruth, to Roger Maris, and by doing that, I dug through a lot of books, a lot of archival newspapers. There's not many guys left from the 1961 Yankees. Unfortunately, Roger Maris isn't with us anymore, but there are two players left from that team, Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubik, and I was able to get both of them to talk at length for this book,

not just about what Roger Marris went through in 1961, because that's been well-chronicled, but I wanted to get their take on what it was like here in this Twitter-Inst Instagram world of 2022 to watch somebody, another Yankee, going after their friend Roger's record. They were both great on that. So I feel like we have these vignettes throughout the book where we kind of flashback to 1961, and it ties everything together really nicely, the kind of the history of baseball. Because one thing baseball does better than any other sport, I would argue, is it celebrates its own history.

And what happened today is connected to what happened yesterday. And I definitely wanted to make that point that this does not exist in a vacuum. It's not just about one player having a great year. It's a book about baseball that I think a fan of any team will really find something they enjoy. And coming from, you know, a small town and greatness and going through the gauntlet of life and the journey of learning your trade and your craft and then being super successful. Awesome.

It's been wonderful having you on the show, Brian. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the internet, please. Sure, absolutely. It's great being on with you. Thank you, please. Sure, absolutely. It's great being on with you. Thank you, Chris. It's bryan-h-o-c-h hoke at, oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, I was giving you my email address. My bad. Although you can email me too if you want to. It's bryan-h-o-k-e.com. There you go. Thank you very much again, Brian, for being on the show.

Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, and all those crazy places we are on the internet. Order up the book, wherever fine books are sold, but stay on those alleyway bookstores because you might end up getting in, you know, you might get mugged. Anyway, I was trying to find the page I was looking for. Order up wherever Fine Books are sold. 62, Aaron

Judge, The New York Yankees, and The Pursuit of Greatness. Available July 11, 2023. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you next time.