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Cooler heads needed to prevail, and a splash of “out of sight, out of mind” helped. Donaldson was shuffled to the COVID-19 injured list, though he never tested positive; the pandemic-era rules provided a new loophole where a player could land on the injured list with no minimum stay, simply by stating that they were experiencing symptoms. While away, Donaldson took advantage of the opportunity to receive a cortisone injection in his troublesome right shoulder, which had been an issue since the spring.
Ultimately, as numerous conversations transpired within the clubhouse walls and hours turned into days, Judge came to consider the matter closed.
“We’re grown men,” Judge said. “He stood up and owned up to what he did, and that’s all you can ask, especially when we’re playing games every day. You can’t sit here and dwell on something that happened. You’ve got to learn from it. He made a mistake, and now it’s time to move on and keep playing baseball.”
HOMER #15: May 22 vs. Chicago White Sox’s Kendall Graveman (8th inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 111.1 mph. Distance: 431 feet. Launch angle: 28 degrees. HR in 30 of 30 MLB parks.
Even with Donaldson absent, the Yankees seemed to be dragging, held to just one run over eighteen innings of doubleheader action on a steamy Sunday afternoon. That run came in the eighth inning of the first game, as Judge took an 0-2 Kendall Graveman slider into the second deck of the left-field stands for a game-tying shot. The rest of the contest was awful for the home team; they learned that reliever Chad Green needed season-ending Tommy John surgery, and Aroldis Chapman melted down again, surrendering a go-ahead homer to A. J. Pollock and a run-scoring double to Adam Engel.
In his postgame remarks, Boone struck a confident tone, saying, “With what we’ve been getting from our starting pitching, we’ll be OK.” But would they? Their bullpen no longer felt like a strength.
The weekend ended in a sweep, and Anderson got the last laugh in a dismal nightcap, one in which Chicago right-hander Michael Kopech carried a perfect game into the sixth inning. Booed by Yankees fans each time he stepped to the plate, Anderson hushed the crowd with an opposite-field, three-run homer in the eighth inning, drawing an index finger to his lips after rounding the bases. Anderson opted not to speak to the media after Chicago’s 5–0 victory, but a hot ESPN microphone captured his words and intent just fine: “Making motherfuckers shut the fuck up.”
The dream season had come off its rails, and someone needed to step up. Guess who?
HOMER #16: May 23 vs. Baltimore Orioles’ Jordan Lyles (1st inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 112.0 mph. Distance: 418 feet. Launch angle: 22 degrees. HR in 29 of 30 MLB parks.
HOMER #17: May 23 vs. Baltimore Orioles’ Jordan Lyles (5th inning, two-run)
Exit velocity: 103.1 mph. Distance: 405 feet. Launch angle: 32 degrees. HR in 30 of 30 MLB parks.
It was going to be a long summer for the Orioles, who needed someone to eat innings. Jordan Lyles was up for the challenge; a twelve-year veteran who owned a losing career record and was wearing his seventh big-league uniform, the South Carolina native would lead the young Baltimore pitching staff in innings, strikeouts, and victories.
Gerrit Cole set the O’s down in order in the top of the first, and most of the crowd was still finding their seats as Judge got the Yankees off to a quick start. Lyles’s third pitch to Judge was a 90.3 mph sinker that Judge pounced on, drilling a drive into Yankee Stadium’s visiting bullpen. Sharp through two innings, Cole struggled to limit traffic on the basepaths, and Baltimore held a two-run lead when Judge’s spot in the batting order came around in the fifth inning.
Lyles got ahead in the count, 0-2, then tried a slider and a sinker, failing to entice Judge to swing at either. Lyles returned to the slider again, and Judge crushed it into the left-field seats. Yet even a 2-homer performance wasn’t enough, as the Yanks chewed on a 6–4 loss. In boiling down an eleven-strikeout, no-walk loss that he described as “peculiar,” Cole couldn’t help but crack a broad grin when asked about Judge’s performance.
“Sometimes I feel like he’s salivating for something, gets it, and drills it,” Cole said. “And sometimes I feel like he’s just being a good baseball player, staying up the middle, and drills it the same way. Not all the things are going his way, he’s not looking for slug all the time. He’s just putting better swings than guys are throwing. He’s just—better.”
Judge’s multi-homer performance inspired an article in the next day’s edition of the New York Times, asking, “Will Aaron Judge Hit 60 Home Runs This Season?” Comparing Judge’s performance to the eight players to previously hit 60 or more homers in a season, Judge’s 17 long balls through 40 games were more than Ruth (13) in his first 40 games of 1927, and more than Maris (11) through his first 40 games of 1961.
He was ahead of Sammy Sosa’s paces from 1998 (7), 1999 (13), and 2001 (14), had matched Mark McGwire’s clip from 1998 (17), and was ahead of McGwire’s 1999 pace (12). Judge stood 5 short of where Barry Bonds sat after 40 games in 2001 (22). The article noted that the keys to Judge reaching rarefied air would be durability and consistency. In baseball’s previous eight 60-homer seasons, the sluggers had averaged 156.8 games.
“I sometimes take it for granted, but not right now,” Boone said. “He’s a really special player, and he’s really carrying us offensively.”
* * *
Jose Trevino woke on the morning of May 24, glanced at the calendar, and knew it would be a difficult day. It was his late father’s birthday. Shuffling into the kitchen of his rented New York apartment, the catcher brewed a Keurig coffee pod and reached for a ceramic mug like the one that had been Dad’s favorite, with Mickey Mantle’s 1952 Topps rookie card printed on the side.
Nicknamed “Bugé,” a nod to his energetic affinity for the dance floor, Joe Trevino had passed away in 2013 following a lengthy illness. His son could still picture the version of “Yankee Stadium” they’d constructed in Ben Bolt, Texas, the acre-long lot with a large oak tree, where left field and right field were short and drives toward center field could roll all day. There, Dad pumped thousands of tennis balls into the strike zone, his son still able to recall his instructions for running the bases: “Open your arms like you’re flying.” Hundreds of times, Bugé had repeated one other thought: “I’m preparing you to be a Yankee.”
“From a young age, he never forced me to play baseball, but when I wanted to, he was always there,” Trevino said. “It’s just crazy that he would put me in that scenario.”
So Trevino’s heart was already heavy as he commuted to the Bronx, memories of his father sharing space with Jordan Montgomery’s game plan against the Orioles. It was in the early afternoon hours that Trevino’s cell phone buzzed with breaking news: there had been a tragedy in his home state, where a lone gunman had slain nineteen students and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. It was yet another despicable act in a country where gun violence had become all too familiar.
As he squatted behind home plate, Trevino’s heart ached for the small town. Upon season’s end, Trevino would rent out the Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington for the Uvalde Little League team, a token of his support for the community. When Trevino walked toward home plate in the eleventh inning, he wondered if his father’s spirit was in the building. It was a comforting thought. Staring at a 1-2 pitch from reliever Bryan Baker, Trevino lashed a hard liner past diving third baseman Ramón Urías, the ball rattling toward the left-field corner. The winning run came home, and as he rounded first base, Trevino could hold back his emotions no more. “Papi! Papi!” he cried, bellowing in the center of the infield. His eyes glassy and red following the hard-fought victory, Trevino clutched a wireless microphone and spoke to the crowd, his words reverberating over the public-address system.
“I just want to start by saying my thoughts and prayers are with everybody in Uvalde, Texas, tonight,” Trevino said. “I know y’all saw some tears, and there’s a reason behind it. My dad was a huge Yankees fan. He would always put me in these scenarios; he always said, ‘Ninth inning, down one, you need a base hit to tie the game or win the game at Yankee Stadium.’ ”
There had been little fanfare when the Yankees acquired Trevino less than a week before Opening Day, swapping pitchers Albert Abreu and Robert Ahlstrom to the Texas Rangers. He had hardly been their first choice; the Yanks came up short in wooing free-agent catcher Manny Piña, and general manager Brian Cashman intended to enter the regular season with Kyle Higashioka as the starter behind the plate. His backup would have been Ben Rortvedt, a square-jawed, muscular backstop acquired from the Twins along with Donaldson and Kiner-Falefa. But Rortvedt had re-aggravated an oblique injury during spring training, shoving the Yankees back into the catching marketplace.
The Yankees knew about Trevino’s reputation as an excellent pitch framer, the art of nudging umpires to see borderline pitches as strikes. It was a skill that Trevino had honed since his first days catching at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he’d moved from third base after a first-team freshman All-American campaign. Sixty feet and six inches from a machine firing 100 mph pellets, his coaches had barked: “Catch it! Make it look easy!” It was certainly not, and Trevino earned the bruises to prove it, but those rough beginnings led to something special on the defensive side. Yet as Cashman recalled later, Trevino’s greatest attribute in the spring of 2022 boiled down to three words: “He was available.”
The Trevino deal had been consummated from a podium at Cashman’s alma mater, the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he was being inducted into the college’s Hall of Fame. On an unseasonably mild spring day, ideal for taking in the pink and white clouds of the capital’s cherry blossom trees, Cashman multitasked. He prepared his remarks while communicating with the Rangers about Trevino, and also with Mets counterpart Billy Eppler about a budding swap for right-handed reliever Miguel Castro.
“I was supposed to go watch my college baseball team play that day,” Cashman said. “I had to call the coach and say, ‘Listen, you don’t have any pregame ceremonies, right? I’m not throwing out a first pitch?’ He said they didn’t, and I said, ‘Good, I’ve got two deals I’m working on. I’ll see you at the ceremony, but I can’t go to the game.’ ”
As he eyed a packed house at Maloney Hall, the centerpiece of the campus’s school of business, Cashman briefly considered putting Texas general manager Jon Daniels on speakerphone to tell the audience they were working on a trade. Cashman wondered how long it would have taken for that stunt to reach social media, thinking better of it. As Cashman and Daniels continued to work out the parameters, nervous showrunners nudged the GM to tell him, “Hey, you’re up next.” Cashman waved them away, telling them, “Oh, I know. I’ll be there. Don’t worry.” Minutes later, Trevino was a Yankee. Bugé’s dream had come true.
“At worst, we knew we’re getting a really good defensive catcher,” Cashman said. “We knew we were at least getting a quality backup catcher, somebody that we felt good about. He blew away expectations. He’s a rat. He loves the game, loves to prepare, and loves to study. He loves to find where we can have an edge.”
* * *
The next night, the Yankees were in the air, bound for their first visit of the season to Tropicana Field. The much-maligned home of the Tampa Bay Rays had opened in 1990 as the Florida Suncoast Dome, intended to lure the Seattle Mariners, Chicago White Sox, or San Francisco Giants to relocate to the Sunshine State. It would begin life as a perpetual bridesmaid. All three of those clubs flirted with the city of St. Petersburg before securing new parks in their respective home cities. Miami got its expansion franchise first, with the National League welcoming the Florida Marlins in 1993. St. Pete settled for arena football, a few seasons of Tampa Bay Lightning hockey, sporadic bookings for rock concerts, and way too many tractor pulls.
It would be five more years until the Trop hosted a big-league game, where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays took their first breaths as the perennial long-in-the-tooth loser of the powerhouse American League East. The franchise’s most iconic moment was the image of a forty-one-year-old Wade Boggs kneeling to kiss home plate after homering for his three thousandth hit. Tampa Bay wouldn’t post a winning season until 2008, the same year the team instituted a name change to the Rays and dispatched the garish green, black, and purple of their former identity.
A fresh blue, white, and yellow sunburst color scheme represented a new look in more ways than one. The Rays’ baseball operations team had developed a reputation for making more from less, though winning performances in ten of fourteen seasons had never done much to improve the club’s sparse attendance. The club’s strong local TV ratings suggested interest in the team’s fortunes, but few fans clamored to watch games in an outdated, drab facility that was difficult to reach from Tampa and other points north. Efforts to build a new ballpark in downtown Tampa and a concept to play some home games in Montreal had flopped. For the present and immediate future, the Rays seemed tethered to their artificial turf, where the raised roof and its accompanying catwalks reminded observers of a turn-of-the-century circus tent.
When Jameson Taillon and Clay Holmes combined on a shutout in the series opener, played in a breezy two hours and twenty-three minutes, Boone joked that he still had time to make it to Bern’s Steak House—a lavish red-meat Tampa landmark that players and coaches loved to frequent during spring training. In the home clubhouse, Taylor Walls was in no kidding mood. A utility infielder who would finish the year batting .172, Walls jabbed at the rivals, saying that he viewed the Yankees as “very beatable, and we know we can beat them.” Walls backed up his boast by slugging a homer off Luis Severino and contributing a pair of highlight-reel defensive plays, helping the Rays notch a hard-fought split of the four-game series. But Taylor Walls? Really? The Yankees mostly shrugged. Yet at least the visitors wouldn’t leave town without a big swing from their superstar.
HOMER #18: May 29 vs. Tampa Bay Rays’ Colin Poche (8th inning, solo)
Exit velocity: 107.4 mph. Distance: 420 feet. Launch angle: 31 degrees. HR in 28 of 30 MLB parks.
Judge was kept in the ballpark almost until the end of the series, stepping in against Poche as the Rays tried to lock down a 4–1 lead on a Sunday afternoon—not that you could tell what time of day it was. Like a second-rate casino, Tropicana Field had almost no visible windows to the outside world. It could be 3:00 a.m. or 3:00 p.m.; good luck being able to tell the difference.
Poche missed high with a fastball, then tried another, a 91.3 mph heater hovering over the plate. Judge crushed it toward right-center field, appearing momentarily as though it might land in the Touch Tank, the thirty-five-foot, ten-thousand-gallon Florida Aquarium exhibit where fans could reach in to pet a cownose stingray. There was no splashdown, but it sounded like a Yankees home game as Judge rounded the bases, most of the sellout crowd of 25,025 (the Trop once held almost twice that, but the Rays had tarped over the upper deck in 2019 due to lack of interest) pledging allegiance to the Bombers.
“We always fight until the very last out,” Judge said. “There, my job as the leadoff guy is to get on base and get a rally going. I got a good pitch to hit and was able to put a good swing on it.” But then Poche recorded the next three outs, working around a single and a wild pitch, and J. P. Feyereisen set New York down in order in the ninth to preserve a Rays win. The Yankees should have been eyeing a well-deserved day off, having just completed a grueling stretch of twenty-three games in twenty-two days, but Judge departed the Trop wishing that he and his teammates could go right back to the bat rack.
“I think everybody in here wants to play again,” Judge said. “I think we’ve got a bad taste in our mouth. It doesn’t matter how many games you’ve got in a row. Everybody in here is ready to go, every single day. I know it’s been quite a few games in a row, but this team is hungry. We’ve got a lot to prove. Two months into it, we’ve still got a lot of games to go. We’re in first place; it’s better than being in second place, that’s for sure.”
* * *
Giancarlo Stanton was never supposed to be a Yankee. Shohei Ohtani was. At least, that was the original plan.
In August 2017, Cashman and assistant general manager Jean Afterman flew to Sapporo and Tokyo to scout Ohtani, then a twenty-three-year-old stud with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, who boasted the rare combination of being a standout right-handed pitcher and a left-handed slugger. Ohtani’s dynamic hurling and hitting hadn’t been seen in the same package since the Red Sox moved Babe Ruth from the mound to the outfield in 1919. Afterman had been instrumental in ironing out the details that brought Japanese stars Hideki Matsui and Masahiro Tanaka to the Bronx. She intended to help bring in Ohtani, a player whom the Yankees had been eyeing since 2012.
The Yankees spent much of the summer of 2017 collecting international bonus pool money in trades, including $1.5 million from the Athletics, in a deal that brought right-hander Sonny Gray to New York. Media reports painted the Yankees as the favorites for Ohtani, a designation Cashman later said made him “cringe.”
The bad news came on a Sunday evening in December as the general manager dressed as one of Santa Claus’s elves to dangle off a twenty-two-story office building in Stamford, Connecticut, participating in the city’s annual “Heights & Lights” holiday festival. There was coal in the Yankees’ stocking (not Cole; that would come two years later). The Yankees had sent a stellar video extolling New York City’s virtues and the historical significance of wearing the pinstripes, but Ohtani’s representatives informed Cashman there would be no need for an in-person pitch. Ohtani had decided to play for a team on the West Coast, preferring a smaller market than New York.
