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MLB playoffs 2025: With one game-tying swing, Aaron Judge reorients the ALDS vs. Toronto and quiets the October critics

NEW YORK — For four seconds, Aaron Judge, like the rest of us, was transfixed.

The Yankees captain, silent and motionless in a sea of rising decibels, lingered by home plate, waiting. His eyes, wide with anticipation, tracked the white sphere curving through the night air. They held no sign of panic.

And then, suddenly, a joyous clang. The ball ricochetted off the foul pole. The reaction, from the crowd, was volcanic. For Judge, predictably, it was business as usual.

After delivering the most significant swing of his career thus far, a game-tying, three-run tank that reoriented the complexion of this ALDS, Judge paused for a beat, discarded his bat, motioned calmly toward his teammates going ballistic in the dugout and began his slow trot around the bases.

It was the type of moment Yankees fans had been waiting for, praying for; an exhale of Judge-ian proportions. Perhaps that was the case for the man himself. Yet in typical fashion, he didn’t show it. Although Judge, in the aftermath, clearly understood the significance of it all, he downplayed his own role in the story.

“Felt like I made good contact. Thought we had a chance,” he said after New York’s 9-6 victory on Tuesday in Game 3. “You just never know with the wind, if it's gonna push it foul, if it's gonna keep curving or not. I guess a couple of ghosts out there in monument park helped kinda keep that fair.”

How do you hold something so big and not let it consume you?

To thrive in this demanding, unrelenting cauldron called Yankeedom, one must simultaneously appreciate and ignore the significance of it all. That is a complicated, formidable endeavor. The history is unavoidable here, laid on thick and on purpose. Yankee Stadium is a museum with a museum. There’s an entire park of monuments. A plaque with Joe DiMaggio’s famous quote — “I wanna thank the good lord for making me a Yankee” — hangs in the hallway between clubhouse and dugout.

It sounds grandiose, saccharine, overwrought, but love it or hate it, this franchise is the throughline of this pastime’s past. History is everywhere here, it lives in this place, like a spectral fog trapped beneath the iconic frieze that circles this rebuilt colossus.

Judge thoroughly understands this dynamic and the expectations that accompany it and floats through it with ease. Jeter wrote the blueprint, but the big guy, in this modern age of always-on, has perfected it. He knows when to smile at the cameras and when to avoid them. What to say and more importantly, what not to say. As part of this dance, Judge often references the legends who came before him, but he does not, it seems, compare himself to them. That’s outside noise, pure distraction, a job for scribes and talking heads.

“It’s hard to think about it like that. If you carry it around, it’s gonna weigh you down,” Game 3 starter Carlos Rodón told Yahoo Sports. “If he carried it around, he wouldn't hit .330 with 54 homers. I don’t know. He just walks in here, and he lives it.”

For nine regular seasons now, that has been the case. Judge has won two AL MVP awards and is potentially in line for a possible third. He has a batting title, 368 career home runs, the largest contract in franchise history, enough fame, fortune and accomplishment for five lifetimes. Yet he is most defined by what he does not have: a championship.

Such is life in the Bronx.

This is Judge’s eighth trip to the playoffs. He has already taken the seventh-most postseason plate appearances in franchise history. If the Yankees win this series, he will soon pass Yogi Berra and Paul O’Neill and move into fifth. But his career October stat line before Tuesday — .223/.333/.454 — was pedestrian, well below his lofty standards. His numbers in situations defined as “high-leverage” were even worse: 3-for-17 with three walks, two singles and a double.

As such, he has endured an avalanche of criticism from many corners of Yankee Land for what he hasn’t been when the games truly mattered. His now-iconic flub in Game 5 of last year’s World Series didn’t help matters. Fair or not, the “Judge can’t handle October” narrative existed, growing in power with every game.

But with a timely blast, he silenced that chatter, at least for now.

Up as the tying run, with his Yankees — his Yankees — down three in the game, down two in the series, teetering on the brink, staring winter in the face, Judge rose to the moment. With the count 0-2, he turned on a 99.7-mph heater under his hands from Toronto reliever Louis Varland and dispatched it 373 feet into the seats.

The drama was made possible only because Toronto jumped to an early 2-0 lead on a stadium-silencing drive from Vladimir Guerrero Jr., their own franchise anchor. Guerrero’s homer, his third of the series, was an absolute no-doubter, half warning shot, half hammer blow. But faced with that opening salvo, New York didn’t back down. They answered in the bottom half, when Giancarlo Stanton roped an RBI single to plate Judge and trim the deficit to one.

That score wouldn’t hold for long.

The Jays pounced on Rodón in the top of the third, chasing the southpaw from the game by scoring four runs on four hits to secure what appeared to be a commanding 6-1 lead. But again, the Yankees punched back immediately in the bottom half. A Judge double scored Grisham, a Stanton sac fly scored Bellinger, and suddenly, New York was within striking distance.

Those runs set up Judge’s game-changing, season-altering, legacy-defining long ball one inning later. The moment felt gigantic in scope and scale, difficult to wrap your arms around. But the grand euphoria was made possible only by the micro, by the millimeter-perfect details of the swing itself and the hours of fine-tuning those details in the cage.

Asked to explain, mechanically, what it takes to get to a pitch like that and the work that goes in behind the scenes, Judge let out a “woof,” smiled and just shook his head.

“We’d be here all night.”

But Judge’s home run merely tied the game. Toronto escaped the fourth without further damage. It wasn’t until Jazz Chisholm Jr unleashed a 409-foot, go-ahead laser off the facing of the second deck that the Yankees and their fans could breathe, smile, relax. The Bombers had the lead for the first time in this ALDS.

They tacked on a few more for comfort’s sake — an Austin Wells RBI single, a Bellinger double that scored an intentionally walked Judge — and the bullpen held firm. After Rodón’s early exit, New York relievers combined to toss 5 2/3 scoreless innings.

In some ways — Aaron Judge’s legacy, for instance — Tuesday night felt bigger than a single victory. But for the sake of this series, it was just one win. The Yankees are still trailing. The Jays still hold home-field advantage in this best-of-five. And yet, the tenor of this series changed on Tuesday. It felt like an enormous ocean liner beginning to turn.

The pitching matchup for Game 4 favors the Yankees. Toronto plans to start Varland on Wednesday as the opener of what looks to be a bullpen game. New York will hand the rock to rookie Cam Schlittler, who electrified the sport last week with a sparkling, eight-inning, 12-strikeout performance in the wild-card clincher against Boston.

A trip back north for an all-deciding Game 5 feels entirely possible, if not likely.

“Tonight was special, but there's still more work to be done,” Judge proclaimed in his postgame media conference. “Hopefully we have some more cool moments like this the rest of the postseason. We've got another big game tomorrow night. Maybe we can do something special tomorrow night and talk to all of you all one more time before we head back up north.”

Injured Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, the only other person on the roster who can begin to comprehend the weight on Judge’s shoulders, put it like this.

“He's well aware it's a sick moment,” Cole told Yahoo Sports. “But you know, he has a lot of sick moments. It's part of the deal, you know? He just kind of looks at it as an executed swing and moves on.”

Perhaps that is how Judge does it, by minimizing it all. A swing is just a swing. A win is just a win. Tomorrow, another day. Teammates above all else. Baseball is a process-oriented life, so perhaps committing to those cliches makes it easier to tune out expectations. Maybe living it, as Rodón put it, lets Judge lessen the weight of his place in history.