Aaron Judge was handed an early trip to the clubhouse in the New York Yankees‘ tilt against the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium on Saturday.
With one out in the seventh inning and New York clinging to a 5–3 lead, Judge was called out on strikes by home plate umpire Ryan Blakney. Judge disagreed with the call and said a few words to Blakney as he walked back to the Yankees’ dugout. A few seconds later, Blakney threw Judge out of the game.
It was Judge’s first career ejection in his 870th MLB game. Per YES Network’s Seth Rothman, the moment also marked the first time a Yankees captain was ejected from a game since Don Mattingly on May 13, 1994. Derek Jeter, who was the Yankees’ captain from 2003 to ’14, was never ejected in his 20-year career.
The Yankees weren’t pleased with Blakney’s decision. Judge walked back to argue more with Blakney, and he was quickly joined by New York manager Aaron Boone. Yankees first baseman Anthony Rizzo shouted his opinion from the dugout railing.
As is custom, baseball commentator Jomboy provided fans on social media with some lip reading.
Editor’s note: The video below contains profanity.
Trent Grisham replaced Judge in center field to start the top of the eighth inning. The Yankees finished off the 5–3 win to improve to 22–13, good for second place in the AL East.
Armageddon awaits. Likely for the first time since the 1978 World Series, the New York Yankees will host the Los Angeles Dodgers this weekend with each team claiming first place.
The Yankees have the better offense, the better starting pitching and the better bullpen. The Dodgers have the better defense. Most surprisingly, we all know which team has the better 1-2-3 at the top of the lineup. And it’s not the one with the three Most Valuable Players that even before a box of game balls was cracked open had people scrambling to compare them to the greatest trios ever to top a lineup.
Step aside Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman. You have been upstaged by Anthony Volpe, Juan Soto and Aaron Judge.
First, the cold, hard facts:
R
H
HR
RBI
Total Bases
Avg.
SLG
Volpe, Soto, Judge
131
207
44
125
394
.298
Betts, Ohtani, Freeman
119
215
30
105
366
.311
Second, one 100 mph pitch that helps explains why the Yankees’ trio is better: an 0-and-1 cut fastball to Volpe on Sunday from San Francisco Giants closer Camilo Doval, who had held righthanded batters to a .098 average this year. With one on and one out in the ninth, Doval was holding a two-run lead and a 91.7%-win probability. If he dismissed Volpe, Doval could avoid Judge, whom the Giants had retired only four times in 12 tries in his Bay Area homecoming.
Last season Doval could have exploited multiple holes in Volpe’s swing to put him away. Caught up in an analytical-fueled quest to get balls airborne to the pull side, Volpe swung uphill with too much head movement. He could not hit top-rail fastballs (.125), inside fastballs (.195) or breaking pitches (.148).
Doval was about to find this out. He threw a 99.9 mph cutter buried so far inside that it was off the plate. No matter. Volpe 2.0 kept his hands inside the ball and with a short, quick lash carved the pitch into the right-centerfield gap for an RBI triple. He could not do that last year.
With that one swing, another Yankees win was set in motion. Two pitches later, Soto clobbered a high fastball for a go-ahead homer.
A high fastball? Is anybody paying attention? I am astonished how teams keep thinking they can get high fastballs past Soto. This is all you need to know about how to pitch Soto:
Soto by Fastball Height in Zone This Season
Avg.
SLG
HR
Top Third
.459
1.054
7
Middle Third
.447
1.128
8
Bottom Third
.188
.313
0
That’s 15 of his 17 home runs this year resulting from fastballs in the zone belt high or higher. His past 35 home runs off fastballs in the zone have all been middle-up. Soto hasn’t hit a low fastball for a home run in almost a year—since June 14, 2023.
Judge, who is hitting everything, walked, stole second and scored on a Giancarlo Stanton double. In a span of just a dozen pitches, the Yankees scored four times and turned what was about to be a 5–3 loss into a 7–5 win.
Sure, Judge is slugging .658 and Soto has a .417 OBP and Stanton is on pace for 37 homers … all impressive, but … they’ve all been there, done that. All have been better than that in past years. Volpe is the difference maker, slashing .284/.352/.440 a year after going .209/.283/.383. He and Jurickson Profar of the San Diego Padres are the most improved hitters in baseball. Volpe gives the Yankees a leadoff hitter with speed and that kind of OBP for the first time since Derek Jeter in 2009. He creates traffic for Soto and Judge as an elite baserunner (95th percentile).
Volpe’s transformation is extraordinary. Adopting a more traditional, 1980s-type style in the batter’s box, Volpe is embracing groundballs (up from 41% to 52%), hitting the other way (23% to 32%) and putting the ball in play (he has cut his strikeout rate from 28% to 21%)—qualities that are not stressed enough at a time when batting average is the fourth lowest in history (.240).
Try to find another hitter who cut his pull percentage anywhere near what Volpe has done. You won’t. He has cut his pull rate by 21.4% (46.7% to 25.3%). Betts’s 13.8% decline is the next biggest turning away from the pull side.
The Dodgers coming to Yankee Stadium is a clash of titans and the rare renewal of a classic rivalry. The Yankees and Dodgers rank Nos. 1 and 2 in OPS, respectively, and 1 and 3 in home runs, slugging and ERA, respectively.
The Dodgers are 13–24 in the Bronx, including 3–2 in regular season games in 2016 (when the Yankees were in fourth place) and 2013 (when the Dodgers were 29–39). In the postseason, the Yankees own a big edge at home against the Dodgers, 22–10. (The Yankees were a fourth-place team when they met in the 1981 World Series; having qualified for the playoffs in the split season of the strike-marred year by winning the division in the first half.)
The star power is off the charts this weekend. Six of the past 14 MVP Awards have been won by players in this matchup (Ohtani has won two; Judge, Freeman, Betts and Stanton one each). Ohtani is a career .130 hitter at Yankee Stadium, the seventh worst of anyone with 50 plate appearances in the latest version of the yard—but he does have four homers there in just 46 at-bats. Judge has a 1.026 OPS in Yankee Stadium, the highest by any active player in any park with at least 1,500 plate appearances.
Judge has homered in 28% of the games he has played in Yankee Stadium. The Yankees win 79.0% of games when Judge homers in the Bronx (98–26). For some historical perspective, Babe Ruth homered in 27% of his games in the original yard while the Yankees won 77.1% of those games (178–53).
Amid all the MVPs and the monster home run hitters, however, don’t overlook the importance of the 5'9" leadoff hitter for New York looking to make his first All-Star team. Volpe has emerged as an impact player. The Yankees are 27–5 (.844) when Volpe scores a run and 14–14 (.500) when he doesn’t.
Judge, who measures in at 6’7’’ and 282 pounds, is only a few inches taller than Ohtani, but with the season he’s having, it’s no wonder Judge can sometimes seem larger than life.
The five-time All-Star recorded his league-leading 24th home run of the season in the eighth inning of the Yankees’ 6–4 win against the Dodgers on Sunday. Ohtani, for his part, is slashing .311/.379/.571 with 15 homers on the year.
Judge and Ohtani rarely find themselves in direct competition with each other, yet there was one play from the game in which Judge tried—but ultimately failed—to throw out Ohtani. During the eighth inning, the Dodgers star proved too speedy and managed to outrun Judge’s throw to home plate, sliding in milliseconds before the catcher tried to tag him.
The Yankees avoided the sweep against the Dodgers and went home with the victory, but this will hardly be the last time that the league’s top sluggers in Ohtani and Judge square off.
As Willie Mays turns 93 years old Monday, the position he redefined with his combination of speed, power and elan has lost its glamor. Center field is the worst position on the field this season and populated with one of the worst collections of hitters the position has ever seen.
Center fielders entered play Monday hitting .224 with a .292 on-base percentage and .648 OPS, all of which would easily be the worst rates at the position. With the way modern hitters sacrifice batting average for power, you might excuse the ineptness if there was some serious slugging. Nope. Center fielders this season are slugging .357, well below the nadir of .370 in 1989 since the mound was lowered in ’69.
How bad is the center field crisis? This bad:
Nine teams are hitting less than .200 out of center field.
The .648 OPS from center field is the worst of any position, 19 points lower than the next worst, second base. Center fielders also have the worst batting average, worst OBP, worst slugging, fewest hits and fewest total bases among all positions.
Seven teams have one or no home runs by their center fielders.
It’s not just a bad month. Since the mound was lowered in 1969, the seven worst batting averages for center fielders all have occurred in the past seven seasons (2018 to ’24).
Even the arms are worse in center field. Average arm strength has dropped from 90 mph in 2022 to 89.4 in ’23 to 89.2 this year.
What in the names of John Fogerty and Terry Cashman is going on here?
Mike Trout, Byron Buxton, Clay Bellinger and Luis Robert Jr. are hurt.
Aaron Judge, Julio Rodríguez, Corbin Carroll, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Cedric Mullins are having slow starts.
Judge, who has had an uncharacteristically slow start this season, was given his first career ejection against the Tigers on Saturday.
Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
A bevy of young center fielders are having a hard time hitting their weight, or at least .230, such as Tyler Freeman, Parker Meadows, James Outman, Ceddanne Rafaela, Kyle Isbel, Dominic Fletcher, Jose Siri, Johan Rojas, Michael Siani, Victor Scott II, Stuart Fairchild and Will Benson.
What is so strange is that the amazing athleticism and offensive profile we see from a new generation of shortstops—Elly De La Cruz, Bobby Witt Jr., Gunnar Henderson and CJ Abrams—isn’t showing up in center field.
It was Mays, who debuted with the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons and in the National League with the ’51 New York Giants, who popularized center field as a glamor position of power and speed. His two home parks, Rickwood Field and the Polo Grounds, had enormous outfields that allowed him to showcase his range.
Mays changed the game. In 1955 he became the first player to hit 50 homers while stealing 20 bases. He led the league in stolen bases each of the next four seasons, pulling the game away from its station-to-station conservatism. Until Mays, baseball had seen only one 30–30 player, Ken Williams of the St. Louis Browns back in ’22. Then Mays did it in back-to-back years, ’56 and ’57.
Mays hit .300 with 30 home runs eight times, a record for center fielders, followed by Mickey Mantle (7), Ken Griffey Jr. (5), Duke Snider (4) and Trout (3). Only three center fielders in the past six years have done it even once: Judge (2022), Ketel Marte (’19) and Trout (’18).
Comparing anybody to Mays is folly. As the journalist Murray Kempton wrote, Mays was as original as Faulkner or the Delta Blues. The actress Tallulah Bankhead, a fellow Alabaman, supposedly said the world had two true geniuses: Shakespeare and Mays.
There will likely never be a center fielder quite like Mays, who hit .300 with 30 home runs eight times.
Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated
Leo Durocher, Mays’ first manager with the Giants, once wrote that “If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better.”
Durocher said Mays was the ultimate five-tool superstar.
“And,” he added, “he had the other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super-superstar: charisma.”
Mays remains the pinnacle of what a center fielder should be. There is no one like him before or since. Forget finding a center fielder who hits .300 with 30 home runs these days. Can we at least get a center fielder who hits .280 with 20 home runs? Sadly, the answer last year was no (for the first time in 47 years) and it might be too much to ask again this year.
