With Juan Soto on second and a 3-1 count working against him, Blue Jays pitcher Kevin Gausman grooved a 95-mph fastball down the middle of the plate on Friday.
Aaron Judge responded by clobbering the third-longest home run of his career – and his 40th of the season. With a 477-foot, 117.5-mph, first-inning moonshot, Major League Baseball’s home run leader joined elite Yankees company, becoming just the fourth player in franchise history to hit at least 40 bombs in three different seasons.
The others? Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Lou Gehrig.
Here’s a look at HR No. 40 from Aaron Judge.
He got there in style. #Yankees pic.twitter.com/iCw1oScaDt
— Gary Phillips (@GaryHPhillips) August 3, 2024
Judge also became the league’s first player to reach 100 RBI with the blast, but his mammoth dinger – and a two-run, fifth-inning homer from Anthony Volpe – proved insufficient in a rain-delayed, 8-5 loss.
“If it would have came with a win tonight, that would have been pretty sweet,” Judge said of his homer. “But we were kind of sitting on 39 for a while. Juan told me in Philly, ‘I’m gonna keep getting on base because I want to be that 100th RBI,’ so he was able to do that tonight.”
Austin Wells added an RBI single in the fifth, but starter Marcus Stroman had already put the Yankees in a hole.
The right-hander found immediate trouble, allowing three runs in the first before being charged with four more in the third. Stroman, an ex-Blue Jay, hit the showers after just 2.2 innings, seven earned runs, eight hits, one walk and three strikeouts over 64 pitches.
While Stroman has never been a blow-it-by-you pitcher, his velocity significantly lacked on Friday with a four-seam fastball that averaged 88.8 mph. That was 1.2 mph slower than his season average.
Stroman’s 90-mph season average is also down from 92 mph last year, but he and Aaron Boone didn’t voice concerns over the decrease.
“It wasn’t an alarming velo drop,” Boone said. “We’ll certainly pay attention to it, but the velo didn’t make alarms go off.”
Stroman added that he felt fine physically but off mechanically. That, he reasoned, could have contributed to his velocity problems.
“I’m just very out of sync,” he said. “Everything’s not fluid right now. So it feels very different pitch to pitch.”
Whatever the cause, Stroman now has a 6.20 ERA since June began. He had a 2.60 ERA prior to that.
Stroman, in his first season with the Yankees, now has a 4.10 ERA after 22 starts.
The Blue Jays added an eighth run with Tim Hill pitching in the sixth, though it was earned by Michael Tonkin.
Friday began a stretch of 15 straight games for the Yankees against teams with losing records, but they started on a sour note after ending a road trip with five straight wins and a sweep over the Phillies.
They’ll look to get back on track Saturday with Carlos Rodón on the mound. José Berríos will pitch for Toronto.
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