Yankees welcome Aaron Judge to three-homer club: ‘Now we have nothing to hold over his head’
The Yankees have had quite a few three-home run games in their franchise’s rich history, but Wednesday felt like a long time coming… at least if you ask Aaron Judge’s teammates.
"I joked with him, I said, 'I remember my first time,'” Kyle Higashioka said after the game. “It was fantastic. We’ve been waiting for that for a long time. Me and [Anthony] Rizzo have been joking with him a lot and now we have nothing to hold over his head.”
Higashioka hit three homers in September of 2020 while Rizzo was the last Yankee to do it when he launched three bombs last April.
"He would always remind me every game I'd have two and I couldn't get the third that, 'Hey, one of these days kid, you'll join my club and be in an exclusive club,'” Judge said of Higashioka’s teasing. “So that was the first person I was looking forward to seeing once I got back in the dugout."
It was all smiles after the Yankees’ 9-1 win over the Nationals on Wednesday night for many reasons. One, it snapped a nine-game losing streak -- the longest in team history since 1982 -- and came on the heels of general manager Brian Cashman’s pregame news conference where he called the season a “disaster.”
At 61-65 and 9.5 games out of the final Wild Card spot, the Yankees’ playoff hopes are all but dashed. But that didn’t deter Judge from prioritizing the win over even becoming just the 25th player to hit three homers in a game.
"Just another day. We needed a big win,” Judge said. “[Luis Severino] went out there to do his thing. I was just happy to get that first run there in the first …. It felt good to give Sevvy a lead and let him be out there and do his thing.”
Judge’s first homer gave the Yanks a 1-0 lead in the first -- snapping theri 61-inning streak of not having a lead -- and then his grand slam in the second gave Severino, who pitched 6.2 shutout innings, and the team a huge 6-0 cushion to spark the win.
“What a night he put together,” manager Aaron Boone said. “He’s special. Obviously what we saw him do last year, he’s basically doing the same, he just missed a big chunk. He's just a special player. It's pretty remarkable what he does under any circumstance."
Judge now has 27 home runs in the season, which is fifth in the American League. What makes that stat remarkable is the slugger has missed 72 games this season, two months' worth from the toe injury he suffered running through an outfield wall in Los Angeles.
Boone, a two-time member of the three-homer club while with the Cincinnati Reds, had a smile on his face when he was asked what he told his outfielder after the third homer.
“I didn’t realize it was his first. I thought he did it once last year,” Boone said. “I was thinking maybe it was his second, so I had to welcome him to the club.”
Judge almost had a chance to become a part of a more exclusive club in the ninth inning. He was in the batter’s box with two outs in the bottom of the eighth when Jake Bauers grounded out to extinguish any hopes of the Yankee Stadium crowd seeing Judge try to hit his fourth homer of the game.
If he succeeded, he would have become just the second Yankee to do so. The first, Lou Gehrig in 1932. But if you ask Judge, he wasn’t really thinking about that.
“Nah I wanted to get the game over with,” he said after a short pause and a smirk. “It would have been nice, but we were in a great position there. Sevy had a great game, guys up and down the lineup had great at-bats, it was time to pass it on to Wandy [Peralta] and close this game out.”
