Yankees' Aaron Judge hits 50th, 51st home runs to help club move into tie with Blue Jays atop AL East
The Yankees' Aaron Judge follows through on his 50th home run of the season, a three-run blast in the second inning against the White Sox on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium. Credit: Jim McIsaac
There was little evidence in the Yankees' clubhouse on Wednesday afternoon of the achievement and celebration from the night before. The only hint one might have gotten that the Yankees had clinched a playoff spot Tuesday night was the scent of stale champagne.
It was time for the Yankees to get back to the business of chasing down the AL East-leading Blue Jays in their quest for the division crown and top seeding for the postseason. And go to work they did.
Aaron Judge hit his 50th and 51st home runs of the season and ace Max Fried continued his late-season run of strong performances as the Yankees trounced the AL Central cellar-dwelling White Sox, 8-1, before 37,751 at the Stadium.
The Yankees have won four in a row and 10 of 13.
“I looked at everybody as they were walking through here throughout the day and everybody just had a focused, determined look in their eye,” Judge said. “They knew that we punched our ticket, we’re in the postseason [with] an opportunity to go back to the World Series,’ but there’s still a greater goal ahead of us in the last couple games — trying to go out there and get the division . . .
“Even last night [when] we were celebrating, they know we’ve still got a mission ahead.”
Judge embodied that determination to complete the mission with his blasts. His first homer was a 392-footer into the Yankees’ bullpen for a 3-1 lead that put him on a list with Babe Ruth, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as the only MLB players with four 50-home run seasons.
His eighth-inning 395-foot homer into the rightfield seats — which followed Trent Grisham’s 34th of the season — gave him 46 career multi-homer games, tying Mickey Mantle for second on the franchise all-time list. Ruth did it 68 times.
The Yankees’ pursuit of the Blue Jays — who led them by five games in the standings on Sept. 16 — has become fascinating. Their win, combined with Boston’s 7-1 victory in Toronto, lifted the Yankees into a first-place tie at 90-68 with four games left in the regular season. The Blue Jays own the tiebreaker, so the Yankees need to pick up one more game on them to take the division title.
“All across Major League Baseball . . . it’s been a crazy 10 days to] two weeks, and we all expected it to be that way this final week,” manager Aaron Boone said. “But for us, it’s about handling our business — it really is. Obviously, we got ourselves into the postseason last night. Guys came out with Max leading the way today, and won]. A chance to win another one tomorrow.”
“Just take care of what we do and] we’ll be where we want to be,” Judge said. “Our goal was, once we start the season, is ultimately just go out there and win a World Series, get back there. But it starts by winning your division. So that’s our goal.”
Fried, the presumptive Game 1 starter in any postseason series, is 19-5 with a 2.86 ERA. He gave up one run, four hits and two walks with seven strikeouts in seven innings. He’s earned a win in each of his last six starts dating to Aug. 27, pitching 40 1⁄3 innings to a 1.79 ERA.
“[He’s] everything you want from a guy at the top of your rotation — we couldn’t have asked for more,” Boone said. “[He] navigated the season so well: got off to such a good start for us, hit a bump in the road there for about a month . . . . and made some adjustments and finished with a flurry.”
“He was a horse for us, an ace, and now looking forward to getting the ball in in October,” he added.
Asked about his 19-win season, Fried replied, “[We’re] not finished yet. It’s been very apparent that the goal of this team is to go to the playoffs, get deep in the playoffs and win a World Series. I like to put a lot of team goals in front of how I individually do. So if we come out and go deep in the playoffs and win the World Series [that’s] pretty successful. But we’ve got a long way to go.”
And the Yankees, who have won 28 of their last 40, are still pressing the accelerator.
After Judge’s homer in the third, the Yankees got two more in the inning for a 5-1 lead as Paul Goldschmidt hit an RBI single and then scored from first on Jazz Chisholm Jr.'s double to the gap in left center.
The Yankees are playing their best baseball of the season at the moment, and the reward for overtaking Toronto would be considerable. If they can in these final four days, they'd sidestep playing a best-of-three AL Wild Card Series and get a bye into a Division Series with six days off and likely be the top seed in the AL. The Yankees were the top seed in the AL last season when they won the pennant.
Fried Rice
The Yankees’ starting battery Wednesday night was lefthander Max Fried and catcher Ben Rice. Though Rice had started 15% of the club’s games behind the plate, he’d never caught the Yankees’ ace. In Fried’s previous 31 starts, Austin Wells was behind the dish 27 times and J.C. Escarra the other four. Fried didn’t shy away from the notion that this could be seen in the postseason. “It was great, great to finally work together, Fried said.” “If something happens [and] we need to pair up in the playoffs, we have some familiarity.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
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