NEW YORK — With Aaron Judge in the building, there’s always a chance for fireworks.
Yet little about the New York Yankees’ performance through six-plus innings of a 6-2 victory on Tuesday could be described as explosive. The hosts, up 4-2 on the Cleveland Guardians in the seventh inning of ALCS Game 2, were playing well enough to win yet poorly enough to worry the 47,054 souls huddled together on a brisk night in the Bronx.
Ace pitcher Gerrit Cole was duller than a bad documentary, walking four batters across 4 1/3 burdensome innings. The Yankees, who ranked as the league’s worst baserunning team in the regular season, stumbled into a pair of outs on the basepaths. It was, at best, a B+ performance.
Sure, boxes were being checked, goals reached — nitpicking any October victory feels almost reductive — but few would have felt overjoyed by how the Yankees were showing in the first two games of this ALCS. The ultimate goal — for any team and for this team in particular — is a World Series title. But through 16 innings, that destination somehow didn’t feel much closer. The narrative: These Yankees were a rickety golden wagon trudging forward, falling their way upward into the World Series.
Then, as he so often does, Aaron Judge rewrote the story.
With a single swing, Judge shifted the mood, changed the energy and put his teammates and the masses at ease. For the 14th time in his playoff career, the Goliathan slugger disappeared a baseball. His two-run shot hung in the air for an added beat, the crowd hoping, urging, willing the ball over the wall.
Cleveland center fielder Lane Thomas gave fruitless chase. The blur of white flew out of sight, giving the Yankees a much cozier 6-2 lead. The yard, in the same breath, exploded and exhaled.
“I was excited it went out,” Judge said in his postgame chat. “You never know on these windy, chilly nights what that ball is going to do when you hit the center here, but the ghosts were pulling out there to Monument Park, that’s for sure.”
Before Judge’s swing, the Yankees were in the lead but not in control.
That was despite pushing across three early runs against Cleveland starter Tanner Bibee, who was pulled after four outs. In the second, Guardians manager Stephen Vogt intentionally walked Juan Soto to face Judge, marking only the third time ever that the hitter preceding Judge was given a free trip to first. Judge followed with a sac fly.
Yet still, there was a certain … stuck-in-neutral feeling permeating the chilly autumn air. Perhaps it was simply attributable to an off-night from Cole.
“Just got to do better. Got to do better,” the frustrated hurler admitted after the game.
Cleveland worked some long at-bats early against Cole, even though the Yankees starter finished his first three innings scoreless. He ran into big trouble in the fourth, but Cleveland failed to capitalize.
Down a trio of runs, the Guardians loaded the bases behind a pair of singles and a four-pitch walk. That brought light-hitting catcher Bo Naylor to the dish with one out. Cole was looking rickety; the crowd was growing antsy.
And so, Vogt took his shot. The first-year skipper called Naylor back, opting to use his best pinch-hitting option, right-hander David Fry, in the early innings. It was, given the situation and Naylor’s recent offensive struggles, a sound decision. There are only so many opportunities against a hurler such as Cole. When one knocks, you have to kick the door down.
But Fry — who delivered the crucial, go-ahead home run in Cleveland’s ALDS Game 4 win — did not deliver this time. Instead, he popped up the first pitch, a 97 mph high-and-tight fastball on the corner, for a deflating second out. The next batter, Brayan Rocchio, struck out looking on a borderline call to conclude a nine-pitch battle. Cole and the Yankees emerged scot-free.
That aggressive maneuver came back to haunt Cleveland one inning later, when replacement catcher Austin Hedges, one of the worst statistical hitters of his generation, came up in an enormous spot with the Guardians threatening. In the fifth, Cleveland had bounced Cole from the game and scored a pair of runs. The bases were loaded with two outs. Hedges, the emotional rock of this Guardians team, struck out swinging.
From there, the game inched sloppily forward. The Guardians bobbled a ball in the outfield. The Yankees — more specifically, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Anthony Rizzo — ran into a pair of outs. Cleveland managed little against New York’s impressive bullpen. The night crept toward a forgettable footnote in an otherwise memorable October until Judge jolted everyone awake.
Before Tuesday, Judge had gotten some flack for a somewhat subpar showing in these playoffs. The Yankees’ run of wins kept that buzz subdued for the most part — New York manager Aaron Boone was not asked about Judge in his past three pregame media conferences — but with a player so important, the narrative is always lurking. Only more moments such as the one Judge conjured in Game 2 will satisfy all the expectations.
Such is life in the Bronx. Having Judge and his cadre of established difference-makers gives the Yankees quite a margin for error — one the Guardians don’t have. Cleveland cannot sleepwalk its way through large portions of a ballgame and expect to win, as the team’s efforts in the first two contests have shown. Twice in Game 2, the Yankees left the door open, but twice the Guardians bonked directly into the doorframe.
That said, if the Yankees play this sloppily against the National League challenger, they will surely get mollywhopped. Still, Boone was adamant postgame that he is content with his club’s performance, given the stakes.
“It’s the postseason,” he stated. “It’s all about getting wins.”
Boone is right; when the weather gets cold, this universe transforms from a process-oriented endeavor to a results-based enterprise. It is equally encouraging and ominous that the Yankees’ offense has thoroughly underperformed thus far in October. As the great baseball scribe Sam Miller once said, “Every hitter is either hot or due.”
Judge and the Yankees, somehow, are both.
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