Aaron Boone said if Aaron Judge continues to hit at his current pace, he may get a bit of the “Barry Bonds treatment,” with opposing teams choosing to walk him intentionally rather than watch him do more damage.
One such occasion seemingly came up Tuesday, when Judge was at the plate with the Yankees down by two runs with two outs in the bottom of the seventh.Aaron Judge looks up to the sky after grounding into a double play with two runners on in the seventh inning of the Yankees’ 3-2 loss to Reds on Wednesday night.Moll threw one pitch to Judge and it ended up in the left-field seats for his 32nd homer of the season.
“I’ll usually let the bench decide if we want to intentionally walk someone,’’ Moll said. “And then there’s some level of pitching around him. I felt the best thing to do was to get to 0-1 as fast as possible — which we did and it ended up going over the fence.”Instead, Judge made it a one-run game.The end result of the game made it easier for Moll to live with the homer and he said he understood the mentality that would lead a team to walk Judge in that kind of situation.