Yankees Magazine: Blueprint for the postseason

A grind. A marathon. A slog. There are many ways to describe the rigors of baseball’s physically punishing and mentally exhausting 162-game schedule. The games themselves might not be as brutal as football, and the players display a different type of athleticism from what is required on a basketball court or in a hockey rink, but if they don’t have the intestinal fortitude to endure all the ups and downs of a season that starts in mid-winter and lasts well into fall — “This game can eat you up,” as Yankees manager Aaron Boone likes to say. Even when things are going well, it can humble you in a heartbeat.

Over 162 games, MVP candidates will go through slumps, Cy Young winners will get knocked around, Gold Glovers will make errors. In the end, consistently great players will stand out among their peers. Postseason baseball is a different beast. When the going gets tough during a short playoff series, where every game means so much, World Series hopes can be quickly dashed if a team’s top dog gets muzzled.

The best teams find ways to overcome their superstars being silenced, or at least contained. It’s how you get a Bucky Dent or a Scott Brosius hoisting a World Series MVP trophy. That knife cuts both ways, though. In the 2022 American League Championship Series, Houston’s Jose Altuve and Yordan Alvarez were a combined 6-for-30 against Yankees pitching with one RBI.

“But Chas McCormick — I couldn’t get him out,” said Yanks ace Gerrit Cole. The Astros swept the series.

The Yankees are back in the postseason for the first time since that disappointing ending two years ago. And once again, they charge into October with the most feared hitter in the American League leading the way.

After captivating the entire sports world with his record-breaking 62-home run campaign in 2022 — a season in which he also led the Majors in RBI (131) and runs scored (133) and would be named AL MVP — Aaron Judge was mostly held in check during the postseason. He had four hits in five ALDS games against Cleveland, then just one hit in the Astros series.

This season saw the Yankees captain set a new career high in RBIs, lead the league in home runs and post the best slash line of his nine-year career. His gaudy statistics will more than likely net him a second AL MVP Award this offseason. The Yankees would love to get that kind of production from Judge in October, but even if they don’t, they have every reason to believe that their stated goal of winning the World Series is still well within reach.

Three nights in September showed why.

This year marks Cole’s ninth trip to the postseason in 12 big league seasons. Among active pitchers, only Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer have started more playoff games. As an October stalwart, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner has seen how carefully the Yankees’ No. 3 hitter gets pitched to this time of year.

“There’s a heightened awareness from the opposition to not let Judge beat them,” Cole said. “And I think he’s been put in that position to where nobody was really forcing [pitchers to come] in the zone to him. And so, I think the addition of Juan [Soto], along with whoever is hitting behind him, is crucial to his postseason success. Personally, I think it’s crucial to our postseason success, as well.”

From the moment he first put on the pinstripes, Soto has thrived in the 2-hole — “our most consistent hitter all year,” Cole said — but surrounding Judge with ironclad protection seemed to be an elusive exercise for much of the season. Then, in a 10-day span at the end of July, the calculus changed drastically. Rookie catcher Austin Wells took over as the Yankees’ primary cleanup hitter, Jazz Chisholm Jr. was acquired at the Trade Deadline and Giancarlo Stanton returned from the injured list.

Judge hit .389 in August with 12 homers and 24 RBIs in 26 games, earning his third AL Player of the Month Award of the season. Two homers against Colorado on Aug. 25 — his 50th and 51st of 2024 — had many folks wondering if he could top his own AL record of 62, but both Judge and the Yankees cooled off a bit as the calendar flipped to September. The team lost three of four series, and after splitting the first two games of a three-game set with Kansas City at Yankee Stadium, the Yanks clung to a half-game lead over Baltimore in the AL East.

With the potential for Judge to match the longest homerless streak of his career (15 games during his 2017 AL Rookie of the Year campaign) and the big fella batting below .200 over the previous two weeks, no one was panicking yet, but reporters began wondering if something was up.

“That’s hitting,” Boone said during his Sept. 11 pregame meeting with the press. “Even [during] another historic season that he’s putting together, you’re still going to go through it at different times. We saw him [struggle] a little bit in April. We saw it now for a couple of weeks where, he’s not dominating like his usual self, but something that I’m confident in is he’ll get rolling.”

With a smile and a glint in his eye, Boone added, “I look forward to when we hop on again.”

That night, the Yankees had managed just two hits against Royals left-hander Cole Ragans and trailed, 1-0, in the sixth. Gleyber Torres drew a one-out walk, but a 14-inning scoring drought — the Yanks had been shut down by Seth Lugo in a 5-0 loss the night before — looked poised to continue when Soto fouled Ragans’ 81st pitch of the night off his right foot and crumbled to the ground.

“It was a lot of pain,” Soto said after the game. “It missed my whole shin guard, so I was [ticked] off. But definitely after that, I just tried to focus on the at-bat.”

He limped back into the batter’s box, but not before casting a glance over toward his teammates in the dugout.

“The way he was looking around, you could see it in his eyes,” Chisholm said. “He was about to do something special.”

Two pitches later, Soto ripped a 402-foot home run into the right-field bleachers, bringing the crowd to life in an instant. On the YES Network broadcast, instead of his trademark “See ya!” Michael Kay bellowed, “The pain is gone!” — and was only half joking on his ESPN radio show the next day when he said Soto has a Broadway gig waiting for him when he is done with baseball. One of the game’s greatest talents is also one of its greatest showmen.

“That was like Kirk Gibson!” exclaimed Kay’s broadcast partner, Paul O’Neill. “You hobble back into the box and go deep.”

In the top of the seventh, Salvador Perez’s sacrifice fly off Clay Holmes tied the game, 2-2, and it stayed knotted until the 10th inning. The Yankees had been 4-8 in extra-inning games coming into the contest, and with Perez at bat again, pinch-runner Dairon Blanco stole third base, then scored on a wild pitch to give K.C. a 3-2 lead. A one-out walk to Perez prompted Boone to bring in Luke Weaver, who stranded the All-Star at first.

The bottom of the 10th saw Oswaldo Cabrera bunt Anthony Volpe over to third, followed by a game-tying sac fly from Wells. Weaver tossed a 1-2-3 11th, and after Soto moved pinch-runner Jon Berti over to third to begin the bottom half of the inning, Kris Bubic intentionally walked Judge, opting to face Chisholm, who hit a ground ball to the left side of the infield. Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. made a diving play to snag it, but the speedy Berti beat his throw home, giving Chisholm his first career walk-off hit.

“It just takes heart,” the 26-year-old Bahamian infielder said. “We know we’re not playing to our ability right now. Nobody’s hot right now. Cap’s cooled off a little bit. Soto went into a little rut. This is how you stay together. This is a championship team, and this is what we do. We grind it out, and we win games. No matter who’s down and who’s up, we’re going to win games, and this is how you do it.”

Judge reached base three times that night, but if the Royals’ game plan was to keep the bags clear of traffic when he was up, they executed. In five plate appearances, Judge never batted with a runner on. (Soto was more than happy to clear them for him in the sixth.) It was the guys around Judge in the lineup who made the Royals pay — a formula that the Yankees will likely need to deploy again as the weather turns cold.

“I feel like a lot of things are in my hands,” said Soto, who won a World Series with Washington in 2019 and helped lead San Diego to the 2022 NLCS against Philadelphia. “Because if I’m on first, I don’t think they’re going to try to walk him, so I just have to make sure I’m on base for him to get some pitches.

“But at the end of the day, it’s the playoffs, you know? He’s the greatest hitter, but in the playoffs, a lot of people are excited, a lot of people are pumped. Some pitchers — how can I say it? — they have a little bit of ego. They think they can get him, and they’re going to make mistakes. And I know he’s not going to miss it.

“It’s going to be exciting.”

There have been instances in recent years when the Yankees peaked during the regular season, piling up enough wins to earn a postseason berth but, as Cole says, “kind of hanging on threads physically” by the time the playoffs began. This year felt the opposite: Jasson Domínguez’s September callup gave the team an abundance of outfielders, and with Clarke Schmidt’s return from injury, having six healthy starters meant that a pitcher had to skip his turn in the five-man rotation.

At first, that someone was Nestor Cortes, who was brilliant in relief of Schmidt at Wrigley Field on Sept. 7. He returned to the starting rotation five days later to begin a four-game series with the Red Sox, who, at 74-72, sat in third place in the AL East at the time, four games out of the final Wild Card spot.

“There’s so many guys in the mix, but you only have one ball and so many spots,” Boone said. “I think that’s the old ‘good problem to have,’ which we have right now, but we’ve got to do our best to just make sure we’re all with one thing in mind, and that’s to be the best and most complete and try and go get a championship. That’s where our focus needs to be.”

Similar to the cleanup situation, the leadoff spot was something that had vexed the Yankees until later in the season, when Boone decided to give Torres another shot there. The 27-year-old second baseman, who hit leadoff for the Yankees’ first 12 games of the season, had struggled, by his standards, for most of the year. But he never lost the support of his manager. Moved back into the top spot in mid-August, Torres started to take off, then further rewarded Boone’s faith by smacking a full-count sinker from Cooper Criswell into the first row of seats in right field to kick off the September series against Boston.

That was all the Yanks would muster against the right-hander. Chisholm — who never played third base in his 4 1/2 seasons with the Marlins — continued to look like Graig Nettles at the hot corner, making an excellent play to begin an inning-ending 5-3 twin killing that got Cortes out of a fourth-inning jam. The left-hander struck out nine across five strong innings, allowing just a solo homer to Danny Jansen to begin the fifth. Both bullpens shined as the game rolled on, holding the score at 1-1.

For the second night in a row, the Yankees headed into extra innings and called upon Berti — who led the Majors with 41 stolen bases in 2022 — to pinch-run. Soto stroked a single past a diving Trevor Story and into center, and it was déjà vu all over again as Berti slid home with his second game-winning run in 24 hours, cutting the Yankees’ magic number to five.

“We always stick together,” Soto said during his second straight postgame on-field interview, this one with Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports. “It doesn’t matter if we don’t have runs the whole game. We stay in the game and try to win.”

Aside from Torres’ leadoff round-tripper, there were no extra-base hits in the game for the home team. But a close victory against a familiar opponent in front of a raucous crowd on the back of excellent pitching and sharp defense? Sounds like October baseball in the Bronx.

“It’s about being a full, well-rounded baseball team,” said Stanton, who has now gone to the playoffs six times in seven seasons since being traded to New York. “It’s not always about the home run but the big hit, the timely hit, the little things that don’t show up on a scorecard: getting guys over, wearing pitchers out, an eight-pitch out compared to a one- or two-pitch out. That adds up. That’s stuff that you don’t comment on or pay attention to — fundamentals, really. The more outs past 27 that you give other teams, the worse it’s going to turn out for you.”

Judge was held to a single in four plate appearances in the Boston series opener — his career-long 16th straight game without a home run — but still, no one expected the drought to last. Pitching coaches can game plan all they want to, and hurlers can be as careful as can be with him. Eventually, the big guy’s gonna eat.

“Homers, even for guys like him, they still come in bunches,” Boone said. “You’re going to have those stretches. I guess it is amazing that he has avoided those, but that’s just a testament to how good of a hitter and how much power he has.”

The manager did note, however, that “the game takes a toll on you, especially when you go to the post like Aaron has pretty much every single day.”

On a gorgeous Friday night in the Bronx, 45,292 fans flocked to Yankee Stadium early, hoping to snag one of the 18,000 Yankees jersey hoodies being given away before watching the latest episode of baseball’s greatest rivalry. A couple hours later, the Yankees’ two-game winning streak looked to be in jeopardy as Masataka Yoshida hit a two-run homer off an otherwise-terrific Schmidt in the sixth inning, and Mark Leiter Jr. allowed a two-run homer to Story in the seventh to give Boston a 4-0 lead.

Judge had walked, struck out and singled in his first three at-bats, all of which came with the bases empty. But the seventh inning provided the ideal scenario. Three walks sandwiched around a Torres RBI single brought the captain up to the plate with the bases loaded and no one out.

“That whole inning, the guys in front of me, the guys behind, it was just great at-bat after great at-bat,” Judge said later. “It’s really just about going up there and trying to do your job. Guys did a great job getting on base, and I’ve got to go up there and do the same thing.”

Red Sox reliever Cam Booser’s first six pitches of the night had all missed the strike zone, and when he tried a get-me-over 95 mph fastball right down Broadway to avoid falling behind Judge, 3-0, the AL home run king was ready to pounce. He crushed it into the left-field seats — the eighth grand slam of his career — turning a 4-1 deficit into a 5-4 lead and sending Yankee Stadium into sheer bedlam.

“Jazz came up to me after Judge hit that homer, and just to see our dugout erupt, to see Yankee Stadium erupt, he was like, ‘This is pretty sick,’” Boone said. “That was one of those really cool regular-season moments you get at Yankee Stadium.”

As the Yankees’ home run hitters have done throughout the season, Judge raised his arm as he trotted toward second base and pointed toward his teammates in the bullpen, drawing the relief corps into the volcanic celebration that had exploded all around them. If Soto’s homer two nights earlier set a new high-water mark for decibel level on the season, Judge’s slam raised the noise meter even higher.

“I was in the training room, but I was going crazy,” said Schmidt, who called it the most memorable game of his career so far. “What a clutch hit. Words can’t describe how cool that was. Such a special moment. Deep in the season in a rivalry game, creeping up on the end of the year, coming close to the playoffs, that’s something that can really fire a team up.”

At his manager’s prodding, Judge reluctantly took a curtain call, waving his helmet to the deliriously frenzied Bronx faithful. Weaver nailed down the final two innings, striking out five and emitting a roar of his own after recording the final out of a Yankees victory for the second time in three nights.

“The guy’s a gamer,” Judge said of Weaver, his former Cape Cod League teammate who made his big league debut on the same day as him — Aug. 13, 2016. “He’s done it his whole career, and I feel like once he came here and put on pinstripes, it elevated his stuff. It’s been impressive to watch. You put him in any situation — close out a game for us, put him in the middle, facing their toughest hitter — it doesn’t matter. He’s going to do his job, and I love having him do that.”

In the postgame clubhouse, Judge played coy when asked if he was relieved to end the homer drought. “Was it 16 games? Oh, I didn’t really know that,” he said with a wry smile. “Is that a lot, or, is it not? … It will probably be longer at some point in my career. We’ll definitely break that.”

More important than any individual accomplishment was the fact that the Yankees had won another hard-fought one-run game. Even though he provided the big blow, Judge acknowledged the walk that Alex Verdugo had drawn ahead of Torres’ single after being down in the count, 0-2, as being the key at-bat in the seventh inning. Asked during the postgame on-field interview by Apple TV’s Tricia Whitaker what gives him confidence in his team down the stretch, Judge replied thusly:

“Games like tonight. Battling back after being down, 4-0, but never losing faith — that’s what it’s going to take in the postseason. You’re going to have some tough games where you’re down, and you’ve just got to rely on each other and keep the faith.”

How far will the resolve and unity that was forged over the course of Spring Training and 162 regular-season games take the 2024 Yankees? We’re about to find out. They’ll need to play smart, disciplined baseball. There’s no giving away 90 feet or making sloppy mistakes in the field. The pitchers will need to stay on the attack and never give in, not even for one pitch. And it will take contributions from everyone on the roster.

Opposing pitchers, rightfully so, will tread ever so delicately with Judge, lest they see him put a game-breaking long ball in the seats. It will be incumbent upon everyone else around No. 99 to do their jobs and to pick each other up. “Sometimes what gets you here doesn’t always get you there,” Cole said. “Everybody’s pulling the cart in the same direction, and it’s really irrelevant who’s doing the most pulling, as long as the group is working together.”

“Everybody wants to be the hero, wants to have that big moment,” Soto said. “But at the end of the day, you’ve got to do the little things: try to take the outs that they give you, get the runs that they give you. Any chance that the other team gives you, you’ve got to take it.”

If the Yankees can do all that, it might not matter whether Judge has a monster postseason or not. As they showed during those three nights in September, the Yankees can beat teams — good teams — in lots of different ways.

“If we just focus on us and do what we’ve got to do,” Judge said, “we’ll be where we want to be.”

Nathan Maciborski is the executive editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the October 2024 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.