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We have had a lot of home run summers in New York City, all the way back to when Babe Ruth invented the home run. The city had them for sure in the 50s, when it was Willie, Mickey and The Duke hitting home runs at the Polo Grounds and the old Stadium and Ebbets Field. Everybody knows we had the Summer of ‘61, when Roger Maris hit 61 for the Yankees and beat The Babe, and Mickey Mantle ended up with 54.
But what we have never had, not really, is a Yankee and a Met fighting for the title of home run king of baseball. But we’ve got a fight like that shaping up now between Aaron Judge and Pete Alonso, who are carrying their teams right now as much as they ever have, and who just had some week hitting balls over the fence, nine between them starting on Monday and ending on Friday night. Is all.
Once again, the Yankees look like a baseball team named Judge with him back off the Injured List. You saw what he did to the Blue Jays in Toronto, before and after he got accused by the Blue Jays and their announcers of cheating off the other kids’ papers. And just like that, this season really did look like last season for Judge, and you didn’t want to miss a single at-bat. If you did, you might miss him hitting another one out of sight.
Then there was Alonso doing the same. On Wednesday night at Citi Field against the Rays, Alonso made his biggest swing of his season and his team’s season when he hit a walk-off homer that tried to leave the borough. Then he hit another bomb on Thursday afternoon and the Mets beat the Rays again.
You saw what happened on Friday night. The Mets were losing all night to the Guardians. It was still 7-3 in the seventh. Then Alonso hit a grand slam and it was 7-7. The Guardians went ahead 9-7. The Mets came back again, again with two outs, and Francisco Lindor walked things off with a single. It was 10-9 for the Mets.
“Never say die week for the Mets,” Gary Cohen said on SNY.
It doesn’t happen if Alonso doesn’t give them life, and a chance. He now has 17 home runs for the season, to lead the world. Judge, despite yet another visit to the IL, has 13 for the Yankees through Friday night. Game on for their personal Home Run Derby.
“Fight the fight,” Alonso keeps saying, even when things are going sideways for his team.
Alonso has 41 RBI to go with those 17 home runs. Judge has 29 RBI now. There are no players in baseball, and that includes Shohei Ohtani or Mike Trout or anybody you care to mention, more important to their teams than Judge and Alonso are to the Yankees and the Mets. If this regular season is going to be anything close to what they gave us last season — when they combined for 200 victories — it starts with All Rise and the Polar Bear.
Last season, Judge and Alonso combined for the most home runs a Yankee and Met have ever hit in the same season, with 102, 62 for Judge, of course, and a quiet 40 — as loudly as Alonso hits them, anyway — for the Mets guy from Tampa. Before that, the most a Yankee and Met had ever combined to hit was 2019, when Alonso was a rookie, and he broke the rookie record for homers that Judge had set (52), just two years before. Alonso had 53 that year. Gleyber Torres (remember him?) hit 38 for the Yankees, a total of 91.
Before that? You had to go back to 2007, when Alex Rodriguez hit 54 for the Yankees (54 with a bullet, mind you, because who knows what our guy was still taking) and Carlos Beltran hit 33 for the Mets.
Last year it was as if Judge was running unopposed to be home run king, as he became the biggest star in baseball, finally passing Babe Ruth and passing Roger Maris, and ultimately breaking the American League record for home runs in a season. Two Yankees before him had hit 60 or more. Now Judge had joined a club as exclusive as the Yankees — or any other team — has ever had.
For the entire second half of the season, it was Judge sucking up all the oxygen in the room. So, it became a sidebar in baseball New York that Pete Alonso quietly continued a career that in just four seasons had him on a Hall of Fame trajectory, quietly turning him into one of the stars of his sport, even though not nearly enough people outside of New York seem to be paying enough attention to that, and to him.
He has led the world in home runs since showing up at Citi Field in the spring of ‘19. He has also led the world in RBI. Already he has broken Judge’s rookie record and broken the Mets’ record — Mike Piazza’s — for RBI in a season with 131. He is that good. And getting better, at the age of 28, three years younger than Judge.
“Not many people seemed to notice,” Showalter was saying the other day, “but the way [Alonso] reacted to the year he had last season was to go home and change his diet and get himself into the best shape of his life.”
Then, and not for the first time, Showalter said this about Alonso:
“He is country strong.”
Judge has missed 10 Yankee games so far. Alonso has missed none going into the weekend. People point out to games played as part of the home run and RBI disparity between them since Alonso hit the big leagues. There is a disparity there, you bet. Judge has missed 121 Yankee games since Alonso hit the big leagues in ‘19. Alonso has missed 16. Durability is part of who he is. It matters when you are measuring the two of them against each other.
Judge has hit 150 home runs since 2019, with 314 RBI. Alonso has 163 career home runs, with 421 RBI. Judge has played 372 games. Alonso has played 476. It’s why we want him to continue to be there for his team every day, as much as we want this recent trip to the IL for Judge to be the only one he makes this season.
There are other home runs hitters. Judge and Alonso are ours, and maybe the best. Home run summer shaping up for the two of them. Maybe never one like it for a Yankee and Met, not in the same summer. Look at the week the two of them just had. Five homers for Judge. Four for Alonso, with the grand slam being the grand finale. Yeah. Game on.
JIM BROWN, THE GREATEST PLAYER EVER, HAS DIED, BRYSON DECHAMBEU DROPS WEIGHT & RAFAEL NADAL IS NEARING THE END …
Jim Brown has died now, at the age of 87.
His football resume remains unchanged, all this time after he retired from the Browns:
He was the greatest player who ever lived.
Just that.
What does the star of the LSU team, Angel Reese, do when she’s not posing?
The capitals of panic in professional basketball are the front office, hands down.
Tell me any other time, in any other sport, where the three coaches whose teams won the most games over a three-year period — Monty Williams, Mike Budenholzer, Doc Rivers — all got fired.
My friend Stanton now says that the worst possible thing for job security in the current NBA is being called a “highly respected coach.”
By the way?
The guy who fired Doc is Daryl Morey.
I’ll win an NBA title before he does.
If the Celtics don’t make it past the Heat and make it back to the NBA Finals, Brad Stevens is going to have a lot of explaining to do about giving Joe Mazzulla on-the-job training with a title contender.
Nice to see that Bryson DeChambeau has taken off those hard-to-lose extra pounds.
Jimmy Butler is a bad, bad man.
What a shame, for tennis and for sports, that Rafael Nadal has broken down this way at the end.
It seems like just twenty minutes ago that he was winning his 21st major, at the Australian Open, coming from two sets to none down in the final against Daniil Medvedev, the signature victory of his career.
And that includes the ones he got off Roger Federer.
Michael Block, the club pro from Mission Viejo, Cal., shot even-par at Oak Hill over the first two rounds of the PGA, and all he did in the process was come up as one of the best golf stories of the whole year.
Or any year.
He is charming, and funny, and did an on-course interview with Scott Van Pelt and David Duval on Thursday afternoon that could pass for an audition tape.
All the guy did after that was shoot 70 the next day and go right after the big boys.
Other than the fact that Jokic is pretty much a perfect basketball player, I’m not sure what else you can say about the guy.
I’m a little confused these days:
Did Julius Randle have a sub-standard playoff run, or slash the tires on every Knicks’ fans’ cars.
After all the excitement of the winter sports season at the Garden, and a lot of big talk, the Rangers and Knicks combined to win a grand whopping total of one playoff series.
For anyone worried about Anthony Volpe’s batting average right now:
When Capt. Jeter was a rookie, he took a .261 average into June, on his way to finishing at .314.
He ended up hitting 10 home runs that year.
Volpe already has seven.
Why am I telling this to Yankee fans?
I’m a giver.
Well, the Yankees and Blue Jays seem to have a nice healthy dialogue going.
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