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It was a bold move and in no way whatsoever did it pay off.
The Chicago White Sox elected to intentionally walk Juan Soto and pitch to Aaron Judge, the single-season American League home run record holder, in the eighth inning of their game against the New York Yankees on Wednesday night.
Chad Kuhl threw his first three pitches to Judge outside the zone before Judge demolished an inside sinker over the bullpen in left field for his 300th career home run.
“I was mad about the intentional walk,” Judge said after the game, per MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch.
Hoch added that it’s the first time a hitter in front of Judge has been intentionally walked since 2016 in Judge’s 16th Major League game. The then-rookie was hitting .196 at the time and had three career home runs to his name.
Judge’s blast made him the quickest player ever to reach 300 home runs — by a significant margin. The Yankees captain did it in his 955th career game, more than 130 games faster than previous record-holder Ralph Kiner (1,087).
More importantly, the homer turned a 6-2 Yankees lead into a 9-2 rout as New York won the rubber game of the three-game set to maintain their half-game lead over the Baltimore Orioles in the American League East.
Judge’s teammate, Oswaldo Cabrera, could see his historic homer coming.
“We know our Cap. We know in that moment, he’s going to be like, ‘OK, I’ve got this.’ It probably feels disrespectful for him,” he told Hoch. “For that reason, it probably fired him up in that at-bat. You see what happened.”
White Sox Interim Manager Grady Sizemore: ‘Pick Your Poison’
It may seem like a no-brainer to not intentionally walk the guy hitting in front of the best home run hitter in baseball, but White Sox interim manager Grady Sizemore deserves to be cut some slack. Wednesday was only his third game as manager after the team fired Pedro Grifol last week.
And, as he explained, it’s not like he had any good options in that spot.
“It’s just pick your poison. I’m not trying to get to Judge,” Sizemore said. “I’ve got a base open. [Soto has] had four homers on us. I guess there is no solution or easy way out of that jam. Soto has definitely been the hotter of those two bats, even though Judge has been hot, too.”
Though Judge is having another MVP year, Soto is amid a historic stretch of his own. He hit three home runs on Tuesday — the first three-homer game of his career — and hit one out in his first at bat on Wednesday. That makes him the first Yankee to homer in four straight at bats since Reggie Jackson did it in the 1977 World Series.
Aaron Judge Is Chasing History…Again
Judge’s 300th career homer on Wednesday was also his 43rd of the season. Through 122 games played for the Yankees, that puts him on pace for a touch over 57 by the end of the year. On one hand, that would put him six short of breaking his own single-season record of 62. On the other, all it would take is one more Judgeian spurt to put him back on track.
He’s had four separate stretches this season, for example, in which he has hit four home runs in four games or fewer. Theoretically, if he were to do that again starting with Wednesday and continuing through the team’s weekend series in Detroit, it would, at minimum, give him 46 on the season. It would bring his pace back to over 60 with well over a month left to play.
It’s not likely, but it’s never likely that a player breaks a record that is only touched every few decades.
The question is whether he will see enough good pitches to make it possible. Like his historic 2022 season, teams have taken to intentionally walking him rather than risk a long ball. When the Yankees played the Blue Jays at the start of August, Toronto walked him six times — four time intentionally.
After one of the games, when Toronto intentionally walked Judge with the bases empty, Blue Jays manager John Schneider gave a simple explanation.
“I honestly didn’t feel like seeing him swing,” he told reporters.
He’s not the only one. Judge has walked 102 times this year with 14 intentional passes. His 102 walks are tied with his teammate Soto for the most in Major League Baseball. No one else has more than 86 as of August 15.
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