Aaron Judge is one of the biggest players in baseball, but even his bat is no match to Roberto Clemente’s.
With the Yankees in Pittsburgh to open a series against the Pirates, Judge was given a replica model of the Hall of Famer’s bat, which the Yankees slugger used in batting practice.
It is no ordinary bat, either. Clemente’s bat measures at 38 ounces by 36 inches whereas the typical bat Judge uses is 33 ounces by 35 inches.
Judge, who entered Tuesday with an MLB-leading 29 home runs, said he was checking out the bats while him and a few teammates took in a private tour of the Roberto Clemente Museum during their day off on Monday (which was arranged by former Pirate Gerrit Cole).
“I was checking out all the bats he had and kind of rubbing a couple of them on me to get a little bit of luck,” he told reporters before the game. “It’s pretty impressive what he swung, for someone his size, too.
Judge is 6-foot-7, 282 pounds. Clemente checked in at 5-foot-11, 175 pounds.
“You see the pictures of him, I’m thinking this guys’ 6-5, 6-6 but you hear he was maybe 5-11, 5-10. It’s pretty impressive he was able to swing something like this and produce the numbers he did,” Judge said.
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While Judge took some batting practice with the bat, teammate Kyle Higashioka took some swings outside the cage with it and said, “that’s a man’s bat.”
Clemente died in 1972 in a plane crash delivering relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua during the offseason after he had just reached the milestone of getting his 3,000th hit.
His impact and legacy on the game and Pirates franchise is significant, which is why Cole wanted to take some of his teammates to the museum.
“Any time you can share what Roberto was all about with some players that are new and maybe not quite as exposed to the story as they otherwise have been now after being there, that’s part of the legacy [of Clemente],” he said, per the NY Post. “It’s also cool with a lot of the old memorabilia, some of it we don’t mess around with and don’t touch…but to watch guys pick up some of the old equipment and think about whether they’d be able to perform the same way now…is always interesting to see different guys’ perspectives with different bats.”
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