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2 hours ago
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There's nothing harder in sports than hitting a baseball. Nothing. Don't let anyone ever try to convince you otherwise.
The objective, summed up in a quirky way, is to try to hit a round ball with a round bat, squarely.
That's not to mention the reaction times involved at the major league level, less than half a second to decide whether or not to swing, where to swing and then actually swing.
The fact that anyone ever hits any of these high velocity, heavy movement offerings at the MLB level is a wonder in and of itself.
Major league players have a lifetime full of swings that have prepared them to deliver clutch contact despite the sheer improbability of it all.
Aaron Judge is one of those players, a lifetime of not just baseball but of football and basketball, too, all which prepared him to turn into one of the greatest right-handed hitters ever, a living New York Yankees legend.
And on Tuesday night, with the Yankees' season hanging in the balance, Judge took the best swing of his entire baseball career.
It might've been the best swing in the history of baseball.
His teammate, Paul Goldschmidt, told Ken Rosenthal it was "the best swing I've ever seen."
Aaron James Judge 🫡#AllRise pic.twitter.com/AoIxdi3z8i
— New York Yankees (@Yankees) October 8, 2025MORE: Cal Raleigh copied Babe Ruth in the most eerie, magical way
There were two men on base, the Yankees down three, and Judge received a 99.7 mile per hour fastball that was multiple baseballs' worth inside off the plate, a ball.
In one of the most impressively instinctive moments you'll ever see on a diamond, the long-armed Judge yanked his hands inside the baseball. Hitting an inside pitch is really difficult, because the normal swing path made to hit a ball over the heart of a plate has to become compressed, with the handle of the bat pulled right into the hitter's core to get the barrel to the right spot.
Judge got the barrel there to the essentially 100 MPH pitch, somehow. And then the next hard part: It's almost impossible to turn on such a pitch and keep it fair.
The natural arm motion for many hitters on a pitch that far inside will see a torqued follow through that results in a hook that brings the ball well foul out of play.
To keep it fair, the barrel of the bat has to extend through contact out toward the field, not off to the side. And given the velocity, and how far in Judge had to bring his hands, that's almost impossible, too.
But in all that impossible, Judge made possible happen.
He got to the baseball, He found his barrel. He turned on it, then kept it fair, then watched it soar through the dark Bronx sky and clang high off the left-field foul pole.
There have been other magnificent swings in baseball history.
But it's hard to make the case that any, ever, have been better than this one from Judge.
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