Yankees beat Rockies as Aaron Judge hits 49th home run

The Yankees have 33 games left after their 3-0 victory over the Rockies on Friday night.

Aaron Judge will not homer in all of them.

It only seems as if he will.

Judge, continuing to add to his AL MVP credentials daily, homered for a fourth straight game, hitting his MLB-leading 49th  in front of a thrilled Stadium crowd of 38,910.

“I’m kind of running out of words to say,” Aaron Boone said. “You’re witnessing greatness, you really are. He’s just kind of better than everyone.”

Judge,  who is hitting .333, has five homers in the last four games, seven in the last eight and 14 in the last 25. He has 43 homers and 100 RBIs in his last 92 games and 45 homers and 106 RBIs in his last 100. If he maintains that last pace — nine homers every 20 games — he’ll wind up with 64.

Friday night’s blast, a 388-footer to left-center in the sixth inning off Rockies lefthander Kyle Freeland, gave the Yankees a 3-0 lead and put Judge on pace to hit 62 home runs, which would match the American League record he set during his 2022 MVP season. Only two players — Sammy Sosa three times and Mark McGwire twice — have reached the 60-homer plateau more than once.

Judge — who, unlike the previous two players, has never been linked to performance-enhancing substances — leads the majors in almost every offensive category, including homers, RBIs (119), on-base percentage (.464), slugging percentage (.728), OPS (1.192), times on base (263), total bases (330), extra-base hits (80) and intentional walks (16).

“That’s what the best in the world does, make it look easy,” Giancarlo Stanton — who hit 59 homers in his 2017 NL MVP season with the Marlins and who hit his 22nd homer of the season in the fourth on Friday to give the Yankees a 1-0 lead — said Thursday. “We’re all feeding off that and he amazes us every night.”

Judge, who grew up a Giants fan in Linden, California, about 1 ½ hours east of San Francisco, is having the kind of season his favorite player, Barry Bonds, used to have. The kind of season, with otherworldly numbers, that few in the sport thought would be seen again (Bonds, of course, has his own ties to PEDs).

“I loved how easy he made the game look, on the offensive side and defensive side,” Judge said of Bonds, whom he still reveres. “He would get one pitch a night and he would hit it out of the park. I’m definitely not there at that point.”

That, of course, is debatable.

Besides the homers from Stanton and Judge, it was a mostly quiet night at the plate for the Yankees (76-53), who totaled five hits. The Rockies (47-82) had four.

The AL East-leading Yankees (76-53), who have won 16 of their last 24 games and maintained their 1 1⁄2-game lead over the Orioles, pitched their second straight shutout and have allowed one run in the last three games. In those games, starting pitchers Nestor Cortes, Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodon did not allow a run in 19 innings and gave up only eight hits.

Rodon, coming off his shortest outing of the season (3 1⁄3 innings in Detroit), was terrific, allowing four hits in six innings. The lefthander (14-8, 4.16) walked one and struck out five.

“Trying to find the fastball,” Rodon said. “Last week against Detroit . . . I wasn’t at my best. I was sporadic with command. Tried to hone that back in.”

Up-and-down closer Clay Holmes, who has an MLB-worst 10 blown saves, walked Ryan McMahon to start the ninth but set down three straight for his 27th save.

The Yankees scored their second run in the fifth when third baseman Ryan McMahon booted Gleyber Torres’ routine two-out grounder.

An inning later, Judge overshadowed everything else.

“A lot of us are looking at the schedule and seeing that we’re running out of ballgames until the end of the season, so it’s time to go,” Judge said. “We had a good talk the other day in our hitters’ meeting about how many series we have left and what we have in front of us and what kind of opportunity we have. It’s a lot of guys realizing that and saying, hey, it’s time to step on the gas.”