Aaron Judge has proven capable of carrying the lineup for weeks at a time, but the Yankees are hard to stop when Judge and the rest of the heart of their batting order are bashing baseballs out of the ballpark.
One game after Judge and Juan Soto combined for three home runs, Judge and Giancarlo Stanton went deep in Thursday’s 5-0 home win over the Mariners.
Judge now has nine homers in his past 17 games, essentially putting his .220 batting average in April behind him with a monstrous .391/.533/.932 slash line in May to raise his overall OPS for the season to 1.027 — fourth-best in MLB.
“Looked up over there and said to [bench coach] Brad [Ausmus] in the middle of the game, he’s up over 1.000 OPS now,” Aaron Boone said of Judge, who has reached base safely in 20 consecutive games. “Thought his at-bats [Wednesday] night after his first-inning homer were really good.
“He’s seeing it right and taking the right swings and he was all over it again today. Great at-bat after great at-bat. As good as it gets.”
Judge reached base in all four plate appearances Thursday, including two walks plus an RBI double in the seventh inning.
He previously had driven Luis Castillo’s 2-0 pitch over the wall in center in the third for his 15th homer this season to move within two of the MLB lead.
With Judge fully heated, the first-place Yankees have gone 16-5 in May ahead of a nine-game western swing beginning Friday night in San Diego.
“We split a [four-game] series against the Mariners, a good team. We had a great [three-game sweep] against the White Sox. But there’s a lot of room for improvement,” Judge said. “A couple of things didn’t go our way in this series.
“We’ll tighten some things up, but the thing I love about this team is, it doesn’t matter who we’re playing, or if we’re down in the game or up in the game, everybody’s always on top of the game and ready to compete. So we expect to go out there and compete on the West Coast against some great teams and we’ll see what happens.”
Stanton also had taken Castillo deep leading off the second inning, his 12th of the season.
It marked the 40th game (playoffs included) in which Judge and Stanton homered in the same game, the fifth-most in franchise history.
The Yanks are 36-4 in those games, after the duo snapped a tie for sixth place with Jorge Posada and Alex Rodriguez.
They trail only Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth (75); Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle (56); Ruth and Bob Meusel (47); and Mantle and Roger Maris (43).
Stanton also tied Darrell Evans for 54th on the all-time home run list with 414, leaving him 17 outside the top-50 in MLB history, with Edwin Encarnacion next at 424 career homers.