THE CAPTAINS STAND in the outfield and take a long look at the Fresno State baseball roster standing in front of them.
They're trying to figure out the answer to a strange question: Who are the best football players from this group?
Senior infielder Danny Muno has the first draft pick for the team's 2011 preseason touch football game.
Fresno State has a roster full of future MLB players, with legitimate NCAA title aspirations, so Muno is choosing from about 40 elite Division I athletes.
But he catches everyone off guard by pointing to a tall, unproven rookie who has been on campus for about six weeks.
“I'll take Big Ass,” he says. Big Ass is a true freshman named Aaron Judge .
Judge is 6-foot-7, 250-some pounds, and most of the guys know by now that he was supposedly a good high school basketball and football player, too.
He logged a lot of time over the past four months with his teammates doing offseason baseball workouts, which mostly involved running and batting practice.
He has impressed teammates with his athleticism and willingness to work, though the Bulldogs' veteran roster hasn't gotten to know him well yet.
They like him, for sure.
But none of the players intend to coddle a wide-eyed 18-year-old who is still trying to figure out whether he is a pitcher or an outfielder.
The football game is a goofy little monotony-breaker for the team.
Head coach Mike Batesole introduced it into the endless preseason schedule of calisthenics and conditioning work as a fun aside in the fall.
But the players care about it way more than Batesole ever expected. The veterans mark up the outfield grass with the outline of a partial football field, complete with end zones and sidelines.
Teams were usually five players each, with veterans serving as captains and maintaining standings.
They sometimes held practice and had mini playbooks. “I even remember some guys had shirts made up with their team names on there,” Batesole says.
Muno selects Judge first. The other captains go back and forth for a few minutes, filling out their rosters. But none of the other picks really matter -- this is about to be the Big Ass show.
On the first play, with the coaching staff camped out on the grass behind first and second base, Muno calls a wide receiver screen to Judge.
He catches the ball, finds a seam behind his blockers, and then makes about 30 jaws drop.
He is big and has good straight-ahead speed. But his juke moves are downright startling.
Judge goes side to side like a 5-foot-8 guy, and five seconds after he catches the ball, he has scooted by all five defenders as he stands in the makeshift end zone. “He made someone just about tear their ACL, then went 40 yards for a touchdown as he juked out everybody else,” says Jordan Ribera, who was Fresno's junior first baseman. “You don't think someone that size can move like that.”
The coaches couldn't believe it.
“What was that ?” Batesole yells. “He's Barry-freaking-Sanders out there.”
Muno's team goes on to win the football tournament, and Judge is the MVP.
It would be a little silly to call a preseason conditioning touch football game a signature moment in the career of Aaron Judge, three-time MLB MVP.
But for some of Judge's best friends, that game stands as the most memorable event they had experienced with him.
It serves as the end of one chapter of his life -- his incredible high school football and basketball career -- and the beginning of his emergence as a transcendent baseball superstar.
Just one question remained: What kind of baseball superstar did he want to be?
A BIG PART of why Judge is an awesome baseball player is that he never really focused on it until he got to Fresno State.
In fact, he used to openly tell people that he liked winding down one sport and getting ready for another, all year round.
Football led into basketball, which led into baseball, which led into football, and on and on for his entire childhood. “He liked doing lots of things, and he was a star at pretty much everything, including his schoolwork,” says Bob Ammerman, Judge's high school baseball coach and a longtime family friend. “If he had wanted to play soccer, he'd be a pro soccer player right now.”
He spent his elementary school years assuming he would pursue basketball when he got older because of his height.
But by the start of his senior year at California's Linden High School, basketball slid to a close third on Judge's list, with baseball a slight favorite over football.
When he was asked about his favorite memory as a high school athlete, Judge didn't mention home runs or touchdowns.
He said he loved picking up trash with his basketball teammates for community service. “We got up real early, had breakfast, and walked around the community picking up garbage.
We had a lot of fun,” Judge told The Stockton Record in 2010. “It was a good bonding experience.”
His parents, Wayne and Patty Judge, insisted he play multiple sports.
They adopted Aaron when he was one day old, raising their biracial son in Linden, a predominantly white town of 1,800 in central California's San Joaquin County.
The best way to understand the area is to know that the creator of “Sons of Anarchy,” Kurt Sutter, decided San Joaquin County was the perfect home for his show.
He said he wanted “blue collar” and “outlaw” as the backdrop for his motorcycle gang crime drama.
Wayne and Patty Judge are not outlaws.
They are educators in the sense that it isn't only a profession, it is their philosophy of life.
They met at Fresno State and embarked on long careers working as teachers in the school system around the Linden area, about 130 miles northwest of the university.
Both loved sports and considered them an essential part of the youth learning experience, so Aaron played any and every sport as a kid.
His basketball and football days at Linden High School were the secret sauce to what he has become.
He's about the smoothest 6-foot-7, 280-pound outfielder that humanity could ever produce, and it's largely because he spent his formative years trying to be Tony Gonzalez in the fall, Scottie Pippen in the winter, then Dave Winfield all spring and summer.