Yankees.com: ‘What a performance’: Judge rips 3 of Yanks’ club-record 9 HRs

From Bryan Hoch:

The crowd was already buzzing when Aaron Judge stepped in for his first at-bat Saturday afternoon, with Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger having swatted Nestor Cortes’ first two pitches for home runs. The Yankees captain made history by following with a third consecutive homer, and there would be plenty more offense to come.

Judge enjoyed the third three-homer game of his career, also slugging a grand slam and a two-run shot among a franchise-record nine home runs in the Yankees’ 20-9 rout of the Brewers at Yankee Stadium.

“Seeing the Bleacher Creatures jumping up and down, you have to step out and catch your breath there for a second before you step in the box,” said Judge, who collected a career-high eight RBIs. “It gets your heart rate going a little bit. It was definitely fun.”

Well, that was a lot of fun.

LESS fun, of course, was how godawful their defense was behind Max Fried, and how often Fried gave up hard contact and lost control. In general, Fried looked like the guy he was supposed to look like, getting soft contact that just went horribly wrong thanks to fucked up Yankee defense, but he also hit a couple of guys with pitches that clearly didn’t go where they were meant to go, and gave up a few legit hits on top of all of the soft contact.

In general, if he had even NORMAL defense (even Fried fucked up on defense, making a terrible error on a play that would have ended the inning, and Fried is a three-time Gold Glover!), he likely would have only given up two runs, and he would have gotten a win. Because he WASN’T normal, he had a worse time of it. He opened last season with a few stinkers, which is why his ERA last year was the worst of his career, but that “worst of his career” was 3.25, so obviously he just turned lights out after his first four stinkers. Well, today wasn’t even THAT much of a stinker, so a similar turnaround would give him a dominant season (his ERA right now is only 3.86).

Now, after that offensive explosion, people are obviously going to be talking about how the Yankees changed up some of the bats of the players to move the widest part of the bat to the label, which is where their stat guys were saying a lot of their guys (Volpe and Jazz, in particular) were hitting the ball, and that might possibly have an impact on Volpe now being on pace for 162 home runs. We shall see. I doubt it’s that big of a deal, as people have been making designer bats for DECADES and no one has jumped on board with it like this before, but if it matters, you’ll see EVERY team do it soon. It’ll be something interesting to watch.

After this game, it sure doesn’t seem like Marcus Stroman is going to have a good day against the Brewers, as they have speed, and he pitches to groundballs a lot, and the Yankees are all temporarily idiots on defense, but we shall see!

Marcus Stroman, #3 starter. BLECH.

Featured image is Judge’s grand slam.