Will Aaron Judge choose the Ya...

Before Aaron Judge won the AL MVP Award, before he hit 62 historic home runs, before he donned the eye-catching No. 99 in the New York Yankees pinstripes and won Rookie of the Year, he was a child. A child of Linden, California, a small town — population 2,043 — about 100 miles east of San Francisco, just past Stockton, that is now known mostly for raising Aaron Judge.

His parents and his wife’s parents still live there, and he still uses his alma mater’s gym to work out while visiting family in the offseason. You already know this, though, if you’ve followed anything about Judge’s high-stakes free agency. After declining a seven-year, $213.5 million extension offer from the Yankees prior to 2022, Judge decisively won the bet on himself with the best power season baseball has seen since Barry Bonds.

Combine San Francisco’s war chest, Yankees fans’ desperation to keep their gilded face of the franchise, Judge’s California upbringing and his epic contract year, and you have one of the most explosive choices in the history of MLB free agency. Oh, and to add a little more spice, the Giants will play the Yankees in the Bronx on Opening Day.

According to Passan, Judge could make his decision during next week’s Winter Meetings in San Diego. As the baseball world awaits a choice that could shift the course of at least two franchises and reset the free-agent market’s agenda, I wanted to know which hot stove tropes — the hometown team, the extension breakdown — have held true for previous big-ticket free agents.

Could hometown influence pull Judge toward the Giants?

During Judge’s rookie year — when he bashed a measly 52 homers — the 6-foot-7 slugger took the occasion of his first visit to Oakland as a major-leaguer to reminisce about his Little League days. He didn’t follow the A’s, he told NJ.com’s Randy Miller. Instead, he had adopted the uniform number and even mimicked the batting stance of his favorite player from the World Series-bound 2002 Giants.

“My dad's favorite number is 35, so as a kid I wore 35, and Rich Aurilia was the shortstop for my favorite team, and he wore 35," Judge told NJ.com. "I liked watching him."

Could failed Yankees extension negotiations point to a Judge exit?

A different pattern — one that will cheer Giants fans and worry Yankees faithful — shows up more clearly in the annals of major free-agent negotiations: Top players who make it all the way to the open market have overwhelmingly chosen to change teams.

Once again drawing from the league’s 100 largest contracts — the smallest of which is Carlos Correa’s $105 million deal from last offseason, for reference — we can see that a player of this caliber reaching free agency without agreeing to an extension has not boded well for his former employer. Of those 100 deals, 46 were extensions, and one was Masahiro Tanaka coming over from Japan without an existing MLB team.