Judge stuns the home crowd with a gargatuan blast during the Giants’ game against the Yankees.
2 minutes to read Sun., Jun. 2, 2024, 7:26 AM GMT+1
Judge’s huge shot stuns the home crowd as the Giants fall to the Yankees.
The story Judge’s enormous bomb stuns home crowd in Giants’ defeat by the Yankees first aired on NBC Sports Bay Area.
SAN FRANCISCO: Aaron Judge has to have anticipated this inquiry. After almost two minutes, the enormous star of the New York Yankees tried his best to conceal his excitement with a well-known genuine smile.
Did you have the Coke bottle in mind?
“I wasn’t,” Judge remarked following an uncontrollably audible giggle. “Man, I was just trying to reach out.” Yes, that is quite far away. I was just relieved that it over the fence and allowed us to advance two runs because it’s quite far out there.
With two games remaining in the Giants’ three-game series against New York, Yankees supporters have taken over Oracle Park. On Friday night, Judge treated the home audience to enough agony with his two-home run effort to close out an incredible May. He had a spectacular start to the month of June with his first at-bat, blasting a rare blast in the Giants’ 7-3 loss on Saturday night.
Giants star Judge was up against it all from Logan Webb, but the former AL MVP—who leads the majors in almost every power-hitting category this season—came out on top once more. It took more than two sweepers, three sinkers, and three changeups to finish the job.
Judge blasted an off-speed pitch that caught much too much of the plate deep into the left-field bleachers on the ninth pitch he saw in the first inning and the fourth changeup Webb attempted to beat him with.
It was easy to wonder, as the ball continued to carry until a sunny San Francisco night turned frigid, if Judge was truly going to go somewhere that no batter at this ballpark had ever gone before. No, although for a brief while it sure seemed like it.
It’s no longer there, the fabled 501-foot sign beside the giant glove in left-center field next to the Coke bottle. Judge had two targets in the batter’s box that he had to hit, whether he was aiming for them or not. And he almost reached undiscovered ground.
Judge’s two-run home run in the opening inning provided the Yankees with the necessary buffer off Webb recorded an exit velocity of 115.7 mph after covering 464 feet.
That was the sixth-farthest and sixth-hardest hit ball at the stadium in the Statcast era since 2015, yet for some reason, that was his third-longest home run of the season alone.
“I knew he immediately gobbled it up,” Aaron Boone, manager of the Yankees, said. “Ohh, it’s just one of those moments.” Simply amazing at-bat. Indeed, the outcome was exceptional, but it was a contest between a very excellent pitcher and undoubtedly a fantastic batter.
Giancarlo Stanton, who finished the eighth inning with a two-run home run down the left-field line after hitting numerous moonshots himself, said, “It was going.” It was close—about twenty or thirty rows up.
Judge’s large fly reminded me of Andres Galarraga about twenty-three years later. During his first of two spells with San Francisco in 2001, Galarraga cleared the bleachers with a solo shot that was the closest to a Coke bottle ever.
Judge, a native of Northern California who grew up a Giants fan two hours from the field, had smashed 1,284 feet of home runs in his first 10 innings of his first-ever game at Oracle Park. Judge, however, feels that his teammate has a better chance than he does of ever smashing a ball hard enough to rise all the way to the glove that’s impossible to miss or the Coke bottle.
“Stanton,” remarked the judge. That appears to be the only one I have. He hammered one halfway up the bleachers in his first round of BP today, and I said to him, “You’re just warming up, huh?”
“At the top of my list is him.”
Hundreds of family members and friends have traveled to see Judge play for his hometown team. The mood has felt like thousands more people joined the party through two games, regardless of how many tickets he set aside for them. The Yankees aren’t underestimating the significance of these three games to Judge, either in terms of Boone or his teammates.
But no hard feelings. In Judge’s opinion, at any rate.
I adore the Giants, declared Judge. It’s not a personal matter. I have a task to do for each team that we play.
It’s one thing to be romantic about baseball. No matter how much Giants fans wish he were wearing their colors instead of the Bronx Bombers’, Judge’s five-for-seven game with three home runs and six RBI so far is the epitome of love. He rounds the bases with a smile on his face the entire time.
