It took 801 games, but Aaron Judge finally has his first three-homer effort.
And with such a long wait, Yankees catcher Kyle Higashioka made sure to remind the All-Star outfielder who accomplished the feat first.
“I joked with him, I said, ‘I remember my first time,'” the backstop said after the Yankees snapped a nine-game losing streak with a 9-1 win over the Nationals on Wednesday. “But no, it was fantastic. We’ve been kind of waiting for that for a long time. Me and [Anthony Rizzo] have been joking with him a lot. Now we have nothing to hold over his head.”
Higashioka did indeed hold that over Judge’s head, especially since the 33-year-old recorded a three-homer game on Sept. 16, 2020, in a thrashing of the Blue Jays.
Though Higashioka only has four multi-homer games in his career and 38 long balls total in his career, he had made sure to let Judge know over the course of their Yankees tenures about who between them had actually gone deep three times in one contest.
But that all changed on Wednesday night.
“Over the years, he’s had a three-homer game already, he would always remind me every game I’d have two and I couldn’t get the third one,” Judge told reporters after the game. ” ‘Hey, one of these days, kid, you’ll join my club, be in the exclusive club.’ So that was the first person I was looking forward to seeing once I got back to the dugout.”
Judge went deep in the first with a solo shot and in the second with a grand slam before he got a chance to join Higashioka’s club in the seventh.
Judge smashed a 95-mph fastball on the outside corner into the right-field seats, just inside the foul pole for the final shot of the night.
In a game that the free-falling Yankees needed desperately, Judge said afterward that the notch in the win column meant more.
“I don’t play this game to hit homers,” Judge said. “I play the game to put us in position to win ballgames.”
Despite missing nearly two months with a toe injury, Judge still has 27 homers with a 1.051 OPS this season.