‘62’ Review: Aaron Judge’s Record-Breaking Year

Two stars of Major League Baseball’s American League had spectacular seasons last year. Aaron Judge, the slugging outfielder for the New York Yankees, broke the AL’s single-season home-run record with 62 longballs. Shohei Ohtani, the two-way phenom for the Los Angeles Angels, hit 34 homers while winning 15 games as a pitcher, posting an excellent 2.33 earned-run average and striking out 219 batters.

Judge was named the AL’s Most Valuable Player; Ohtani’s dual performance, remarkable though it was, merely drew eyes to a franchise that otherwise floundered all year. Judge’s heroics helped the Yankees, who got off to a rollicking start, survive a lackluster second half and hold on to a playoff spot. He was key to the team’s success.

Breaking home-run records is a Yankees business. Babe Ruth swatted 60 homers during the 1927 season, which ran 154 games. That record stood for 34 years, until Roger Maris hit 61 during the 162-game 1961 season. (He broke the record during a 163rd game, played to make up for a tie in April.) Though National League sluggers Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds put up cartoonish home-run totals at the height of the steroid era in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Maris’s AL mark stood until last October, when Judge belted his 62nd dinger of the year against the Texas Rangers at Globe Life Field in Arlington.

Bryan Hoch, who covers the Yankees for MLB.com, recounts the magic in “62: Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees, and the Pursuit of Greatness.” The book, which features an admiring foreword by Roger Maris Jr., follows the arc of one of the most impressive offensive seasons in recent memory. Judge also happens to be one of the most likable and admirable figures in baseball, an ideal face of the game.

A three-sport athlete from Linden, Calif., Judge, now 31, was drafted by the Yankees in 2013. He made his major-league debut in 2016 and set a single-season rookie record with 52 home runs in 2017, a tally broken a couple of years later by fellow New York slugger Pete Alonso of the Mets. Though Judge would battle injuries over the next few years, he was a reliable home-run threat, though he never challenged the gaudy total he put up in 2017. Until last year.

Mr. Hoch alights on all 62 of Judge’s home runs, listing the exit velocity, distance traveled and launch angle of each, as well as the opposing pitcher and number of runners batted in. The approach underscores the full extent of Judge’s home-run prowess. His 10th homer was a three-run walk-off shot at home against the Blue Jays in May that left the bat at 112.5 mph. His 19th was a solo shot off Ohtani in a June game against the Angels. In July he crushed his 36th homer 465 feet in Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles. His 42nd, by contrast, was a 364-foot line drive into the shallow right-field porch at Yankee Stadium. Launched at a 22-degree angle, it would not have been a home run in any other major-league park.

At the start of the season, Mr. Hoch points out, Judge turned down a $213.5 million offer; he would later express some frustration that the Yankees’ front office made the number public. Judge’s decision to test out free agency paid off in the wake of his MVP season. After some off-season drama about where he’d land—for a moment it seemed he was going to be a San Francisco Giant—Judge signed with the Yankees for nine years and $360 million. His record-breaking year was not only a performance for the ages, but a massively lucrative bet on himself.

Judge tied the record in Toronto with his 61st longball off the Blue Jays’ Tim Mayza on Sept. 28. It took him another week to break the record in Arlington against the Rangers’ Jesús Tinoco in the penultimate game of the regular season. The most palpable feeling, aside from jubilation, was sheer relief. Roger Maris Jr. chimed in on Twitter, declaring Judge the new “clean” home-run king, and lauding the slugger as “all class” and “someone who should be revered.”

Aside from interludes revisiting the elder Maris’s 1961 season, much of the book consists of a day-to-day recapping of the 2022 Yankees season, with Judge’s home-run chase as the throughline. The author’s inclusion of advanced metrics will please stat nerds, though the book is also padded with a lot of game summaries and quotes, from Judge and teammates, of a similar nature. At times it can feel as drawn out as, well, a full season of major-league baseball.

The book, like the 2022 Yankees, has a sad and familiar denouement—defeat in the playoffs to the hated Houston Astros, who also beat the Yankees in 2017 and ’19. Mr. Hoch quotes manager Aaron Boone after his team got swept in the league-championship series: “I said we needed to slay that dragon. We haven’t done it yet, and that hurts.” Judge’s historical season was a small consolation in the immediate aftermath of another playoff exit at the hands of Houston.

Judge figures to be a Yankee for life, and was named the team’s 16th captain after signing his massive deal in December. He was having another remarkable year (19 homers!) before a toe injury sidelined him in early June. The Yankees offense has sputtered without him, though he now appears close to returning. He’s been missed.

Mr. Shull is a books editor at the Journal.