Aaron Judge waited until the exact inning the Yankees clinched a playoff spot to hit his first home run since May, and I don’t care how many times people tell me baseball doesn’t write scripts like that, because I watched it happen and it sure looked like one.
Monday night in Minneapolis, in the rain, with New York already up big on the Twins, Judge turned on a pitch from A.J. Minter and put it 415 feet into the second deck in left field. Three-run shot, eighth inning, his 18th homer of the season and his first since May 24. That’s not a typo. May.
The guy missed 84 games with a fractured rib and came back into a lineup that had spent the summer answering, over and over, whether it could survive without him. The clinch itself came a few outs after his homer, when Toronto lost to Detroit while Spencer Jones stood in against the Twins with two outs in that same eighth inning. Judge’s swing didn’t mathematically punch New York’s ticket. The out-of-town scoreboard did.
But try explaining that nuance to anybody who was watching live. The ball landed, the Blue Jays lost, and both things happened close enough together that the moment fused into one memory. Even when the universe does the actual work, Judge still gets to stand there and take the bow.
That’s the Yankees for you.
The version of Judge who showed up before Monday wasn’t inspiring anybody. Three-for-20 with eleven strikeouts. A guy who looked, for about a week, like his timing left with the rib and wasn’t coming back before October. My grandmother has Yankees lineup opinions for a living and even she’d stopped defending him in the group chat.
Then this.
New York put up six runs in that eighth inning alone to blow the game open, Jose Caballero doing his part, Ben Rice dropping in a two-run bloop single that had no business landing where it landed. Austin Wells added another homer in the ninth just to make sure nobody forgot he plays too. Aaron Boone talked afterward about a team that’s grinding through tight spots and finding a gear heading into October, which is the kind of thing managers say in September whether or not it means anything, but this time the box score backed him up.
This is the Yankees’ 61st postseason berth in franchise history and their ninth in the last ten years, both franchise records, and I’ll admit that part doesn’t move me much on its own. What moves me is that the 19-21 stretch this team played without him is still going to get brought up every single time somebody wants to argue the Yankees don’t need Aaron Judge to be great. They do, very obviously. And for one night in Minneapolis, in a game that also happened to answer the wild card scrum the rest of the league was stuck in, the guy at the center of the question got to hit the ball 415 feet and let everybody sit with it.
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/2099684937943380047
Watch that a few times. I did. The rib’s fine, the bat’s fine. The timing on the whole thing is the part I still can’t get over.
