Aaron Judge couldn’t have scripted a much better start to Wednesday night’s game.
The 2022 MVP robbed 2021 MVP Shohei Ohtani of a home run in the top of the first, then blasted one of his own in the bottom half of the inning to give the Yankees an instant 2-0 lead in an eventual 3-2 walk-off win.
Asked if it was his best first inning ever, Judge not surprisingly played it down.
“It wasn’t too bad,” Judge laughed. “Especially for [Jhony] Brito coming in and having a bounceback inning for us there after his last start. Coming out and putting up a zero there is big time.”
Which felt better, robbing the home run or hitting one?
“You always love putting runs on the board, especially after a game like last night where the offense wasn’t really clicking and we really couldn’t get anything going,” Judge said. “Being able to jump out to a two-run lead there and letting Brito settle in and do his thing, that was big for us.”
Still, the storyline wrote itself with Judge’s robbery of fellow superstar Ohtani, as he went back in center field and met the ball with the heel of his glove, and was able to barehand the ball on the warning track as he was coming down from his jump.
“If I was a good outfielder, I would have caught it on the first try,” Judge laughed. “But we made the play. It’s kind of tough timing those things up.
“I was just trying to scratch and claw and bring that back into the park. Luckily I was able to get enough glove on it to kind of shoot it back in there and make a play.”
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