Yankees manager Boone vividly remembers wild ‘Arson Judge’ fiasco originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO – A shower at the MLB Winter Meetings isn’t usually followed by a cell phone frenzy ringing off the hook. For New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone, that was his world in December 2022, when he stepped out of the shower waiting to get dressed for his regular media car wash.
In reality, Boone was entering one of the craziest offseason scenes in recent memory. All because of a tweet. No tweet.
Perhaps the most tweeted misspelling in history.
Arson Judge will live forever. Aaron Judge, however, is in his second season of a nine-year, $360 million contract to remain a Yankee. The alternative was the Giants or the San Diego Padres, and for a few minutes, MLB columnist and expert Jon Heyman had the entire baseball world believing that Judge was headed to the Bay Area instead of the Bronx.
Heyman on December 6, 2022 tweeted “Arson Judge appears headed to Giants,” only to then tweet four minutes later that the Giants had not heard from Judge and apologized for “rushing.”
“It wasn’t a good time,” Boone recalled Friday at Oracle Park during his pregame news conference before the Yankees played the Giants. “But everything changed the next morning.”
That’s when the 2022 MVP made it official that he would stick with navy pinstripes instead of orange and black.
Although Boone didn’t believe Heyman’s initial tweet was true, typos and all, he admitted that seeing it made him “uneasy.” Boone had not yet spoken to Judge and couldn’t be 100 percent sure which direction his native Northern California superstar was leaning. But the two spoke later that night, six or eight hours after social media went up in flames after dinner around 9 p.m., before Yankees owners even heard from them.
Boone’s phone came back on the next morning. This time the messages were all positive. The feeling wasn’t exactly the same in San Francisco.
“Waking up literally the next morning to texts and stuff from friends that he was back, it was pretty early in the morning, it was obviously a good wake-up call,” Boone said.
Judge, a three-sport star at Linden High School, will play against the Giants at Oracle Park for the first time since the whole debacle a year and a half ago. In fact, Friday will be Judge’s first time playing against the Yankees in San Francisco. He was dealing with a left oblique strain in 2019 when the Yankees traveled to play the Giants.
The former American League MVP has played 15 games in the Bay Area, hitting five home runs at the Oakland Coliseum and has played against the Giants three times at Yankee Stadium. In those three games, Judge hit .462 (6-for-13) with two home runs and four RBIs.
Judge followed up his historic 2022 season by hitting 37 home runs last year. No Giant has hit 30 home runs since Barry Bonds last played in 2007.
As for what kind of reception Judge will receive from Giants fans, Boone took a long, thoughtful pause. Boone played 12 seasons in the MLB and is in his seventh year managing the Yankees. His family is of baseball lineage and bleeds the same shade of red as the seams on a ball. Although Judge’s batting practice generated the largest pregame crowd at the stadium in years, Boone knows the boos probably won’t be silenced completely.
“I don’t know. I mean… like, I don’t know. I really don’t know,” Boone said. “I mean, I know he’s excited to come play here. I know Northern California means a lot to him, his family is still here. I know he is excited to return.
“I imagine, like most superstars, there is a level of mixed reactions all the time. That’s certainly the case when we go places, so I’m sure there will be a bit of that. But he is also such a beloved figure for being one of the faces of the sport, that it is hard not to like Aaron.”
Any feelings Giants fans have toward Judge will be heard. Feelings are feelings. The reality is that Judge has played all 58 games this season and leads all major leagues in home runs (18), walks (45), slugging percentage (.617), OPS (1.020) and OPS+ (186), while leading the American League in doubles (18) and total bases (129).
It took Shohei Ohtani one game to record his first two hits in San Francisco earlier this month, and two games to throw his first long ball almost into McCovey Cove. The Giants will do everything in their power to keep a zero next to Judge’s hit totals in this park, and cheers or boos won’t make a difference.
“I think Aaron is, in my opinion, where he should be,” Boone said.
We’ll see if Oracle Park agrees in the next three games.