By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/10/18/the-judge-banged-his-gavel-again/Yankee fans thought they could start to quit worrying about Aaron Judge coming out of a troubling postseason
slump when he hit a mistake into the left field seats Monday night to finish the Yankee scoring. That was Game
Three. In Game Four, Judge made sure they could. For now, anyway.
Just don’t ask the Leaning Tower of 161st Street how his boyhood dreams of hitting for distance in the south
Bronx compares to actually up and doing it.
“I haven’t reflected on tonight’s game yet,” Judge said, after the Yankees overthrew a 4-0 deficit to beat the
Astros 6-4. An overthrow that began with Judge leading off the bottom of the seventh against Lance McCullers,
Jr. “But as a kid I’ve been in that situation in my head a thousand times, through the minor leagues, all your
daily batting practice, your cage work. I’m putting myself in that situation. Get out there and get the job
done.”
McCullers was only pitching slightly over his own head and definitely the game of his life when he threw
Judge a hanging curve that dropped right into the kid’s wheelhouse. Judge banged his gavel and wheeled
it over the center field fence and into the batter’s eye area several feet behind it.
That was only the first Yankee run of the day, but to look around their dugout you’d have thought it was
just a question of when, not if the Baby Bombers would come back and win and even this American League
Championship Series at two games each.
“I thought Aaron’s home run just lit a little spark,” said manager Joe Girardi after Game Four. Little spark?
It lit a small wildfire, even as it sent McCullers out of a game he’d pitched brilliantly until Judge swung.
Didi Gregorius followed Judge with a rip off Astros reliever Chris Devenski that was deep enough to hop off
the center field fence for a triple, and designated hitter Gary Sanchez sent Gregorius home with a bullet of
a line out to right just deep enough to let Gregorius score unmolested.
Almost faster than you could say “guilty,” the Yankees cut the deficit in half.
Until he lined a three-run homer into the left field seats Monday, Judge was in a frightening postseason slump.
Except for a launch in the wild card game he’d been so futile at the plate it almost made even the crustiest
fans on both sides of the ledger pity him.
He’d smashed the major league record for homers in a season by a rookie and looked like Jose Altuve’s only
serious competition for a Most Valuable Player award. But now he looked like a guy who’d only come up from
the minors at the last minute and was in well over his 6’7″ head, playing for a team whose fans tend to
measure a man by what he does in the postseason, the regular season be damned, almost.
It turns out not to have fazed the big kid one lick.
“To a certain extent, I enjoy failure,” said Judge, who spent some time living with Brett Gardner during the
season and learning from a well-seasoned veteran how to handle baseball’s loudest market without losing his
marble. “It’s part of the game. There’s always room to grow, there’s room to improve. So it’s been a fun ride.
And it’s my first year, still pretty crazy.”
Pretty crazy? He and the Yankees hadn’t seen anything yet.
They only got two in the seventh but they made the eighth into an inning that may yet live in Houston infamy.
Joe Musgrove, who’d relieved Devenski to contain the Yankees in the seventh, surrendered a leadoff single to
Todd Frazier and a followup to pinch-hitter Chase Headley, with Headley making second on a dive just ahead
of Altuve’s tag to set up second and third with nobody out.
“Just stumbled and stumbled and stumbled and finally went down,” said Headley of his awkward turn around
first and path to second, where only his left hand touching the pad just ahead of the tag kept him alive. “I
went from one of the best feelings of my career to one of the worst in just a matter of seconds.”
Then Astros manager A.J. Hinch decided to ask his closer Ken Giles for a six-out save. Gardner sent Frazier
home on a ground out. Jacoby Ellsbury was sent out to run for Headley. And off the top of the left field fence’s
State Farm Insurance sign went Judge’s game-tying double.
Gregorius grounded one right through Astros shortstop Carlos Correa’s glove for a base hit to nudge Judge
to third, and Sanchez lined Judge home with a clean single into left, but Gregorius kicked his horse into
overdrive and scored while Sanchez turned his single into a double.
Somehow, with Giles out and Luke Gregerson in to pitch for the Astros, Gregerson squirmed out of a bases
loaded fire pit to keep things 6-4, Yankees. Unfortunately, that’s the way the game would finish, after Aroldis
Chapman zipped through the top of the ninth, striking out Yuli Gurriel and Alex Bregman before getting
pinch hitter Evan Gattis to fly out to shallow left to end it.
Sanchez moved to behind the plate for Chapman. He was the Yankees’ starting DH in the first place because
Yankee starter Sonny Gray has pitched better with Austin Romine behind the plate than with Sanchez. Gray
pitched to Romine three times on the season and had a 1.45 ERA to show for it; pitching to Sanchez eight
times, his ERA was 4.63. Sanchez has his defensive liabilities, of course, and handling Gray’s breaking balls,
most of which dive deep and get close to the dirt, is one of them.
“In the past couple days, we talked and got on the same page about what he liked to do and what makes
him good,” said Romine, referring also to a simulated game Gray pitched last Thursday. “I think we stuck
to that for as long as we could tonight.”
“I feel good. I got to work on a lot of stuff,” said Gray, who was plagued by location trouble in his division
series start against the Indians, before Game Four. “That’s something that’s been pretty beneficial to me.
Especially for me, if you get out there and feel sharp, it’s, ‘Here we go, this is what I’m going to do’.”
The gambit paid off . Throwing an array of cutters, sinkers, sliders, and curve balls, to the point where
you could count on one hand plus another finger, maybe, how many fastballs were in the mix, Gray was
a match for McCullers and the latter’s harder breaking pitches.
It may have been reminiscent of ancient World Series duels between two classic anti-howitzers, Preacher
Roe of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Eddie Lopat of the Yankees—minus the spitballs both were suspected of
throwing. (Roe eventually confessed, after he retired, of course.) Casey Stengel, who’d admired those
contests, could have said about Gray and McCullers what he once said after watching Roe and Lopat go
at it:
Those two fellas certainly make baseball look like a simple game, don’t they?
It makes you wonder. You pay all that money to great big fellas with a lot of
muscles and straight stomachs who go up there and start swinging. And they
give ‘em a little of this and a little o’that and swindle ‘em.
Gray and McCullers swindled each other’s teams into one-hit ball and kept them off balance enough. At
least until Gray ran out of fuel in the top of the sixth and McCullers ran into Judge in the bottom of the
seventh.
“He was awesome,” said Hinch of McCullers after the game. “And really proud of him because I know
how important this start was for him.” It was only McCullers’s first start since 30 September, but he
didn’t pitch like a man who needed to have his rust sanded off.
Somehow, Gray—who hasn’t been anything like a strikeout artist despite a few early strikeout-heavy
outings in his Oakland years—struck out four, never mind that no Astro went down on a strikeout until
the fourth, when Gray nailed Altuve and Gurriel. But he ran empty at last when he walked George
Springer to open the top of the sixth and then lost Josh Reddick on an interference call when Romine’s
mitt grazed Reddick’s bat on a foul off.
When Gray opened Altuve with ball one low and away, Girardi took no chances and went to David
Robertson. But Robertson walked Altuve to load the pads for Correa. He struck Correa out swinging
on a curve ball away from the zone, but Gurriel lined a 1-1 pitch past Frazier diving at third to send
home Springer, Reddick, and Altuve when Frazier himself cut off the throw and bagged Gurriel in a
rundown as the Astros first baseman rounded second hoping to stretch for a third base.
Then Bregman grounded out for the side and a 3-0 Astros lead that turned Yankee Stadium into the
south Bronx’s largest funeral home. The Astros tacked a fourth run on after Marwin Gonzalez doubled
with one out in the seventh and Brian McCann—the former Yankee and once a Braves mainstay—hit a
two-hopper to second that skipped and hopped up off and past Yankee second baseman Starlin
Castro.
Springer dialed Area Code 5-4-3 for the side but you could almost feel the stadium crowd tallying just
how the Astros were going to finish the Yankees off come Game Five.
They forgot to check in with the Judge. He had a verdict to deliver, yet. Astroland would love to appeal
to a higher court, if one can be found.
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