Aaron Judge’s Clutch Homer Saves the Yankees—And His Reputation

The New York Yankees live to fight another day. History will record that it’s because the Judge ruled they should live.

It was not Aaron Judge who completed the Yankees’ 9-6 comeback win over the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 3 of the American League Division Series on Tuesday. Yet he was the one who flipped the “on” switch with a game-tying three-run home run off the left field foul pole at Yankee Stadium in the fourth inning.

It would be impossible to overstate just how badly the Yankees needed that after what happened in Toronto in the first two games of the ALDS. To quickly recap, the Yankees:

• Lost 10-1 in Game 1 and 13-7 in Game 2
• Allowed Toronto to set a record with 23 runs in the first two games of a postseason
• Allowed Toronto to become the first team to score 20 unanswered runs in a playoff series

It looked early in Game 3 like the Yankees were in for more of the unsparing same. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. kept up the “There goes that man again!” energy with a two-run homer (his third of the series) in the first inning, and the Blue Jays took a 6-1 lead into the bottom of the third. Their probability to win was at 80 percent.

Visions of the future surely crept into the minds of Yankees fans everywhere, and it must have looked like a great big ball of uncertainty. If it really was going to be 1, 2, 3 and all she wrote for the 2025 team, that would be one more wasted year of Judge’s prime and possibly the end of the line for general manager Brian Cashman and manager Aaron Boone. What then?

Yet all that had to go on hold as soon as the Yankees pushed two runs across in the third, and the focus was entirely at the plate when Judge strode to the plate with two runners aboard in the subsequent inning.

Though he may not have been thinking it, the rest of us were: He needs this one.

Yeah, yeah. The two-time AL MVP had entered the game with a .444 average to show for five playoff games. But even that wasn’t allowing him to wave away the stink of his poor defense and no-shows in clutch spots, not to mention the weight of his postseason history.

Entering Game 3, Judge was one of 106 players with at least 3,000 plate appearances in the regular season and 200 plate appearances in the postseason. And of the bunch, the 241-point gap between his regular season OPS (1.028) and playoff OPS (.787) was the biggest of them all:

1. Aaron Judge: -241
2. Reggie Sanders: -222
3. Joe DiMaggio: -217
4. Josh Reddick: -212
5. Kyle Tucker: -197

The absolute nadir for Judge’s bat in October came just last year. The Yankees made it to the World Series for the first time in 15 years, but his .184 average throughout is part of the reason why they’re now 16 years removed from World Series championship No. 27.

So when Judge went down 0-2 against Louis Varland, you could practically hear the articles writing themselves. But then he did something no batter had done all season: turn on a 100 mph fastball and hit it out of the ballpark.

Like that, the game was tied and the win probability had swung 22 points in favor of the Yankees. It is technically Judge’s second-biggest playoff knock after his game-tying homer off Emmanuel Clase in Game 3 of last year’s ALCS, but that ended in a loss for the Yankees. This time, Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s go-ahead homer in the fifth was all they needed to avoid that fate.

The Yankees still trail the series 2-1, but it genuinely feels like a whole new ballgame. On the hill for the home team in Game 4 on Wednesday will be Cam Schlittler, who was last seen making an instant star of himself. The Blue Jays are countering with a bullpen game…just one day after Shane Bieber could give them only 2.2 innings in Game 3.

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” as possibly the wisest man ever once said. But at least the Yankees are pointed in a happier direction, while Judge himself can look back on his playoff story and finally see a signature moment.

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