Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and their teammates hardly had time to party at Yankee Stadium. They had a game to play in Houston, and soon.
Judge and Stanton hit home runs as the New York Yankees beat the Cleveland Guardians 5-1 Tuesday in the deciding Game 5 of the AL Division Series.
The last out, which Yankees second baseman Gleyber Torres punctuated by cradling the ball to mimic the “rock the baby” motion Cleveland’s Josh Naylor used after homering a night earlier off Gerrit Cole, came shortly before 7:30 p.m. in New York.
That meant the Yankees had less than 24 hours before playing Game 1 of the AL Championship Series against the Houston Astros at Minute Maid Park on Wednesday night.
“The challenge is we’re facing a great team,” New York manager Aaron Boone said. “As far as the quick turnaround, we’ll be fine. That’s baseball. We do that all the time. We’ll walk in there with some confidence. We know they are great team and rested and ready.”
The matchup will feature the top two teams in the AL in the 106-win Astros and the 99-win Yankees — they seemed to be on a collision course for this ALCS rematch all season. Houston won the regular-season series 5-2.
Houston beat the Yankees in the 2019 ALCS when Jose Altuve hit a bottom-of-the-ninth home run off Aroldis Chapman in Game 6.
The Astros topped the Yankees in the 2017 ALCS in seven games and went on to their only World Series — it was a title that has since been tainted after the Astros were found to have illicitly stolen signs that season.
Altuve, a three-time batting champion, went 0 for 16 in Houston’s three-game sweep of Seattle in the ALDS. The star second baseman hit .300 with 28 homers in the regular season.
“This guy’s been good for a long time,” Astros manager Dusty Baker said. “Sometimes it’s not always up. Sometimes, no matter how great you are, sometimes there are down times … but I’m expecting big things out of Altuve. Because he expects big things out of himself.”
Here’s what else to know about the MLB playoffs:
OH, BROTHER!
They say that Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love, and that will be on full display when the Phillies take a 1-0 edge over the Padres into Game 2 of the NLCS.
Aaron Nola is set to pitch for the Phils. One of the batters the right-handed ace will face is his older brother, San Diego catcher Austin Nola.
The Nolas will be the sixth set of brothers to play against each other in the postseason, and first since Baltimore’s Roberto and Cleveland’s Sandy Alomar Jr. in the 1997 AL Division Series.
This will be the third big league game where 29-year-old Aaron and 32-year-old Austin have opposed each other on the field. In 2021, Aaron struck out his brother; last June, Austin hit an RBI single off his sibling in a 1-0 win.
This time, one of them is going to the World Series and the other is headed home.
