Aaron Judge has already accomplished a myriad of things with the Yankees.
By smacking his 16th and 17th home runs of the season on Monday night, he reached another impressive feat, something that Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Reggie Jackson never did.
With 17 homers through the team’s first 42 games, Judge joined an exclusive list. Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Alex Rodriguez and Tino Martinez are the only other Bombers to ever hit 17 home runs in the team’s first 42 games of a season.
The 17 round-trippers also give Judge the current Major League lead, by far. Entering Tuesday, the next closest player is Houston’s Yordan Alvarez with 12. Judge is also hitting .325 — well above his career average of .279 — and trails only Mike Trout for the league lead in OPS. By Wins Above Replacement, only Manny Machado has been better this season.
With two home runs, three RBI and a walk on Monday, Judge had a better night than some hitters have in a week. Nobody understands just how hot he is quite like the men who share a dugout with him, and they are just as dumbfounded as the rest of us. When asked about the current run that Judge is on (he has an .829 slugging percentage in the month of May, clobbering 11 homers in 20 games), Gerrit Cole couldn’t hold back an appreciative smile.
“Sometimes I feel like he’s salivating for something, gets it, and drills it,” Cole said of Judge’s approach at the plate. “And then sometimes I feel like he’s just being a good baseball player, staying up the middle, and then drills it the same way.”
Of his 49 hits, 24 are singles, eight are doubles, and 17 have cleared the wall, including six that went to right or right-center field.
“He’s not looking for slug all the time, he’s just putting better swings on balls than guys are throwing,” Cole said.
“It’s really special,” Aaron Boone said, repeating that sentence twice. “I sometimes take him for granted, I think. But not right now. He’s really carrying us offensively right now.”
The Yankees have hit their first true obstacle of the year, not only losing three games in a row for the first time in 2022, but also losing several key players. They will, barring a medical miracle, not get indispensable reliever Chad Green back from Tommy John surgery for at least 12 months. Two guys they look to for stability in the back end of the bullpen, Aroldis Chapman and Jonathan Loaisiga, have been treated very unkindly by opposing hitters. Injured pitchers Domingo German and Zack Britton have not pitched for the Bombers at all this season.
And on the heels of his “Jackie” saga — which certainly affected the clubhouse, even if the Yankees downplayed it — Josh Donaldson joined Joey Gallo and Kyle Higashioka on the COVID injured list on Monday.
In other words, the Yankees are not at full strength right now. With three of their regular position players all going on the COVID IL in the same week, Isiah Kiner-Falefa was forced to hit fifth on Monday night. The shortstop known mostly for his glove had not started a single game for the Yankees above the seventh spot until this avalanche started.
This presents a perfect example of why it helps so much to have Judge, who is neck and neck with Trout in the early race for American League MVP. Adding to the list of mind-blowing Judge statistics, he is the only player in franchise history to have nine three-RBI performances in the team’s first 42 games. He is the second player to have four multi-homer games in the first 42, an honor he shares with Ruth.
“I got a job to do at the top of the lineup,” Judge said. “I got a lot of great hitters around me, which makes my job a lot easier.”
In 2017, Judge’s best full season in the big leagues, the protection immediately after him in the lineup was often Matt Holliday, Didi Gregorius and/or Starlin Castro. As a result, Judge ran an 18.7% walk rate, the tenth-highest of any qualified Yankee hitter in the integration era. Teams rarely had an incentive to pitch to him, as they knew that the quality of the Bombers’ lineup dropped off as soon as he left the box.
Now, as Judge has settled into the two-hole with Anthony Rizzo and Giancarlo Stanton usually behind him, the price of walking No. 99 becomes steeper. Teams can’t afford to pitch around him nearly as much as they used to, and because of this, Judge is walking 11.0% of the time he comes to bat this season. That’s a good thing for the Yankees in many ways. First, an 11% walk rate is still elite (league average right now is 8.5%), but the Yankees would also definitely rather watch him jog around all four bases than just to one of them.
Getting their best player more pitches to hit is a tasty recipe for success and one of several reasons why the team came into Tuesday with the second-best overall offense in the AL, trailing only Trout’s Angels.
If Judge continues at this pace, the Yankees won’t be trailing any team for much longer, whether it’s on the statistical leaderboards, the scoreboard during games, or in the fight for baseball’s best record.
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