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We should talk about Aaron Judge. He ends up the full line here. He bats 184, three homers, 11 walks, 20 strikeouts, and 64 plate appearances across the whole postseason. Ed is helped by the last two days. He was batting 140, entering game four of the World Series. It felt like he started to just have better at-bats in that game. Now, granted, he wasn't facing the best of the best Dodgers pitchers. He faced Gasparius, Hudson, Honeywell, and Landon Knack, and he ends up coming away with, in that game, a single against Honeywell, a walk, a hit by pitch, and a reach on error. So just like an eventful day at the very least. So it was less them dotting up sliders at the bottom of the zone and him following off a lot of pitches, you know, fastballs up. They had a great game plan for him, right? And one of the things that you and I spent a lot of time on this last week is our live coverage, our live blog, we brought, for most of the games we brought in two players, and we're asking them questions like, what do you do if you're Aaron Judge right now? How do you pitch to Freddie Freeman? And the judge comments were so interesting, especially from pitchers, because they're like, they're so good at reading swings. And the thoughts I was getting, even during the game last night from from jameson tyone that uh he was just like you can see or maybe this is from max das actually during this one was that that you can see the way he's following off these pitches he's just a little bit off and when you're a little bit off against this caliber of pitching you're just gonna they're gonna dot something up that you can't catch up to they were not making mistakes to him. And the occasional mistake, he was falling off instead of hitting for a home run. Or if he got a hold of it, he got a little bit under it and it goes, you know, 270 feet instead of going over the fence. He finally woke up. He has a huge homer in game five to start off the game. And you could tell, you could see how they got the Yankees rolling, right? Jazz Chisholm falls with a back-to homer. And then there's another run in the second inning, that Verdugo single that chases Jack Flaherty, and then Stanton hits another homer in the third inning. And, man, when Aaron Judge is a threat again, it changes the entire complexion of things for the Yankees. And yet, in the end, you look back and what killed them this series, it was falling behind 3-0 and he was just not a factor

in those three games. One thing I was going to point out too is that we talked earlier about how good Mookie Betts was this postseason. And he didn't have a great World Series, great NLCS, but again, like kind of did a lot of the things right, right? Like, I mean, he played well. He had more walks and strikeouts in the World Series, even though he didn't hit a ton. He finished tied with Stanton for the most RBIs this postseason. Mookie Betts' first 20 playoff games through Game 4 of the 2018 World Series, he was hitting.226 with a.310 slugging. He was a.625 OPS in his first 20 playoff games. And then in the last game of the 18 world series, he finally hits a home run and he has been just a tremendous post-season performer since then. He's played in like another, whatever, I'm a 53 games with an 807 OPS. Give these guys enough time. I think that they show up, but right now this is what you see from Judge, right? He had a bad series. He did. He was maybe starting to come out. I mean, that first inning at bat, you know, it was first pitch, right? The homer. You start to think, oh, it's Judge. If this series keeps going, man, give that guy two more games, who knows what he's going to be able to do. But he didn't have it there. I don't know. I think you still like your odds with him. The Yankees get back to the postseason next year. I think you're still going to like him a whole lot hitting second or third and to do some damage, but it wasn't there for him this postseason.