Aaron Judge and the Yankees Agree on Nine-Year, $360 Million Contract
In terms of total dollars, Judge’s deal will trail only those of the Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Trout (12 years, $426.5 million) and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Mookie Betts (12 years, $365 million). Both of those deals came via contract extensions, not free agency.
What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
But until the end, the Yankees feared they could lose Judge, which fueled the record spend.
“Yesterday was a long, rough day in a lot of ways,” Yankees Manager Aaron Boone said late Wednesday morning before departing the meetings. Boone said he had “a pit in my stomach” all day and was bothered enough that he phoned Judge late Tuesday evening.
“I was going to make sure I was going to reach out to him, especially with the feelings I was having during the day,” Boone said. “I wanted to talk to him and make sure he knew, certainly, how I feel about him, how we felt about him.”
Cashman said he never went to bed Tuesday night while working to close the deal.
What the Yankees didn’t know as uncertainty swirled was that Judge, on his way to Hawaii for a vacation, sneaked into San Diego on a private plane for an in-person meeting with the Padres on Tuesday evening. That meeting, which went for about three hours, was described by a person in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity as comprehensive and earnest.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/sports/baseball/aaron-judge-yankees.html