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MVP favorite Aaron Judge’s home run helps Yankees sink Twins 5-2

betsy helfand, pioneer press
·2 min read
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Aaron Judge took another step forward in his march toward history on Monday.

Judge, who is chasing Roger Maris’s American League-record 61 home runs, made Trevor Megill his latest victim in the sixth inning on Monday afternoon. Judge’s league-leading home run 54th home run — which matches the total hit by the first five members of the Twins’ lineup on Monday — broke open a game that had been tied to send the Yankees to a 5-2 Labor Day win over the Twins.

The outfielder found a pitch to his liking from Megill, and sent the slider, which was located right over the heart of the plate, 404 feet out to left field.

Judge, the presumptive American League Most Valuable Player frontrunner, finished the day 2 for 3 with a walk, doubling in his first at-bat off Chris Archer and coming around to score the first run of the game when former Twin Josh Donaldson drove a pitch to the wall in left-center. Donaldson watched the ball out of the box, acting as if it was a home run, and wound up getting thrown out at second to end the inning.

Another former Twin, Marwin Gonzalez, got in on the action a couple innings later, hitting a solo home run off Archer to give the Yankees a two-run lead at the time. Those two runs would be the only two the Yankees would score off Archer in his five-inning start.

The Twins very briefly tied the game up in the fifth inning when catcher Gary Sánchez, a long-time former Yankee making his return to the Bronx, hit the Twins’ longest home run of the season, a 473-foot shot that left the bat at 115.1 miles per hour.

But Judge opened up the game the very next inning, hitting his home run, and later in the game, another former Twin, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who, with Josh Donaldson, came to New York for Sánchez and Gio Urshela in March, hit just his second home run of the year, taking reliever Emilio Pagán deep.

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