Aaron Judge Comes Through Yet Again, Delivering Another Walk-Off Home Run
NEW YORK — Yankees starter Jameson Taillon was seated in the training room at Yankee Stadium during the ninth inning on Thursday night, cooling down from his bounce-back performance on the mound while keeping a close eye on a scoreless game against the Royals on a nearby television set.
All of a sudden, with Aaron Judge stepping up to the plate, Taillon glanced to another monitor in New York's weight room, seeing flashing lights and bedlam in the Bronx.
"This dude did it again," he recalled saying to himself.
A few seconds later, the TV broadcast caught up to the stadium's live feed, showing Judge clobber a first-pitch fastball from Royals closer Scott Barlow off the back wall of the visitor's bullpen in left-center field, the slugger's third walk-off home run of the season.
"It's pretty unbelievable," Taillon added. "But we've come to expect it. It seems like every big moment, he's up there and he comes through."
Judge's home run did more than clinch a 1-0 victory over Kansas City, a happy ending to Andrew Benintendi's Yankee debut. The game-winning blast also snapped a pretty frustrating stretch for this club, a team that's been treading through adversity since the All-Star break.
After two losses to the Mets at Citi Field earlier in the week, the Yankees had one hit through the first eight frames on Thursday night. Royals right-hander Brady Singer was nothing short of spectacular, spinning seven scoreless innings with one hit allowed and 10 strikeouts.
Even with the win, the Yankees are still 0-for-18 with runners in scoring position over their last three games, losers in five of the first eight contests of the second half. Like Taillon said, however, Judge stepped up and delivered at the right time, something he's done over and over all season long.
It's what Most Valuable Players do.
"We've had the best player in the game on our side and it seems like time and time again when it's mattered most, he seems to come up big for us," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said after the win. "He's in the middle of just a special MVP-like season and to see him do it night in and night out, both sides of the ball and just who he is in that room, and how the guys look to him, we couldn't ask for a better leader of our team."
Factoring in Judge's 431-foot moonshot on Thursday, the 30-year-old has 39 home runs this season. He's the fourth Yankee and 10th Major League player in baseball history to hit 39-plus home runs through his first 100 games of a season, joining a list with names like Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Bonds.
Judge also joins Mantle as the only other Yankee to hit three walk-off home runs in a single season. No. 99 has four walk-off hits this year, six total in his career in pinstripes.
"It doesn't cease to amaze the season he's putting together," Boone said. "Barlow is obviously really tough. To put it up in the air where he did, not many people can hit it like that and ride it out like he did. Huge to get us off on the homestand where it was a grind for us tonight. We'll take it."
Judge admitted after the game that he wasn't sure if he got enough of the homer off the bat. That's why he quickly put his head down and ran out of the box, making sure he could get to second if it happened to stay in the yard.
Asked if this dramatic win gives his club an opportunity to exhale, putting an end to this tough skid, Judge acknowledged that it didn't feel good to come up on the losing end in Queens and get shut down early on Thursday.
"This team's got a lot of heart and really all the way until the end, we didn't really care what we did the night before or previously in that game," Judge explained. "It was just, someone's gonna get it done."
As it has been countless times this summer, and will be again over the coming weeks, Judge was the one that got it done for those in pinstripes.
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