Aaron Judge is a 30 year old, 6’7”, 282 pound Unicorn, ie, a person or thing that
is highly valued.
Aaron is presently employed, as my most favorite player, by my favorite Major League Baseball (MLB) team, the New York Yankees.
No doubt, he is highly valued, but the problem is quantifying his Unicorn value.
Aaron achieves Free Agency at the end of this Baseball season and will thus be free to “test the market” as to his unique value and be signed by any MLB team.
This Spring the Yankees, still having Aaron under contract, made a contract renewal offer of $213,500,000 for a 7 year contract (over $30,000,000 guaranteed per year) and Aaron turned it down. His feeling was that in this era of inflated player contracts he was more valuable.
As a consequence, in his “Walk Year”, he is playing for his next contract.
In essence, he chose to put up or shut up over a guaranteed $30,000,000 per year offer. Quite a gamble!
At this writing, unquestionably, Aaron is having the greatest “Walk Year” of any athlete in the history of all professional sports.
He has tied both iconic Babe Ruth with 60 Home Runs (within Babe’s then 154 game schedule) and the Roger Maris single season American League record of 61! Plus, he leads in all 3 “Triple Crown” categories: Batting Average, Home Runs and Runs Batted In with 7 games still to play.
The sky’s the limit!
PS: He's a good son too, as he gave the invaluable 61st Home Run ball to his mom :)