Yankees' Aaron Judge has very fond memories of Oakland Coliseum

OAKLAND, Calif. — The stadium Aaron Judge went to as a kid and dreamed of someday playing in was Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants since it opened in 2000 (it was called Pacific Bell Park then).

But the ballpark in which Judge first felt like a big-leaguer and, most significant to him, felt like a Yankee, was the Oakland Coliseum.

“It’s always been special to me,” Judge told Newsday this past week in Seattle.

The long-time-crumbling Coliseum, in its final year as a big-league stadium — the A’s supposedly will play the next few seasons in Sacramento while a new ballpark  supposedly will be built for them in Las Vegas —  easily would win a least-favorite-ballpark poll among players.  Judge, however, does not share those feelings.

The reason dates to June 11, 2013.

About a week earlier, Judge — who grew up a Giants fan in Linden, located about two hours east of San Francisco — was selected by the Yankees 32nd overall in the draft.

Joe Girardi’s Yankees were in Oakland to play the A’s and, as the club will do periodically with high draft picks when the schedule allows, invited Judge to the Coliseum to take batting practice.

“A lot of excitement, a lot of nerves, a lot of unknown,” Judge said. “It’s all these guys I’ve seen on TV for years, I watched them for years, I wanted to be like them for years, and now I’m in the same clubhouse with them and just trying to stay out of the way. You dream of getting a chance to play up there, but you never know if you’ll ever make it. You ask [yourself], is it in the cards? It was a lot.”

Though the 2013 Yankees were an aging group dealing with a slew of injuries and en route to missing the playoffs with a disappointing 85-77 record, Judge interacted with plenty of big names.

Derek Jeter was in Tampa at the time rehabbing a broken left ankle — the future Hall of Fame shortstop would retire after the 2014 season — but Judge met Mariano Rivera, Brett Gardner, CC Sabathia (who is from Vallejo, which is even closer to the Coliseum than Linden, about 45 minutes away), Mark Teixeira, Robinson Cano, Kevin Youkilis and Travis Hafner, among others.

“Pettitte, he came right up to me and said hello. Mariano. CC,” Judge said. “Quite a few legends, Hall of Famers. It was pretty surreal.”

By big-league standards, the visitor’s clubhouse at the Coliseum is on the small side, with none of the modern amenities (other than cable television) of most in-use ballparks.

The myriad ancillary rooms to which players can escape that are featured in the vast majority of stadiums?

Nonexistent.

And so Judge, on that June afternoon in 2013, as surreptitiously as his 6-7, 282-pound body would allow, put some food on a plate from the cramped “dining” area and retreated to his locker chair in a corner.

To Judge’s surprise, Sabathia, slated to start that night, called out to him.

“I was trying to stay out his way and he was like, ‘You’re from Northern California, too. Come here and eat with me,’ ” Judge said. “It was pretty cool.”

Judge’s batting-practice session — he wore a gray Yankees practice pullover and batting gloves from his college, Fresno State —  was memorable to those who saw it.

“I remember how respectful he was and then just watching him hit, how the ball jumped off his bat,” Girardi said earlier this season. “I remember thinking, ‘Ooh, this could be something.’ ”

Then-Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long, fired after the 2014 season but highly successful in later  stops  with the Mets, Nationals and currently the Phillies, has said multiple times that he remembers the day “vividly.”

“I’ll tell you what Vernon Wells said, and this pretty much summed it up,” Long said. “Vernon was at the end of his career and he was with us [in 2013] and he saw Aaron take batting practice and he looked at me straight-faced and said, ‘It’s probably time for me to retire.’ That’s how impressive Aaron Judge was. He was crushing balls.”

He still is, reaching 51 home runs on Aug. 25, although he entered Saturday night's game with only two in his last 23 games since then.

Though Judge’s major-league debut would come three years after that batting-practice session,  his day at Oakland Coliseum, to him, was the starting point.

“It really felt like I was in the big leagues,” he said. “It [the Coliseum] has always been special to me. Definitely have some good memories there, and it’s going to be sad not getting a chance to go back there.”