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USATSI

Reigning American League MVP Aaron Judge powered the New York Yankees to a spicy and somewhat controversial series win over the AL East-rival Blue Jays on Thursday night in Toronto. The Yankees prevailed by a score of 4-2 and in doing so took three of four. 

In the finale, the Yankees got a quality start from Nestor Cortes and three innings of scoreless bullpen work to protect the lead. On offense, Judge once again did the heavy lifting. In the second inning, Judge homered for the 12th time this season and for the fourth time in this series: 

Later in the sixth, it appeared that Judge had hit his second home run of the game, but it was overturned on replay. Instead, Judge came up about inch shy of his fifth homer of the series and instead settled on a double en route to going 2 for 4. Judge came into this series, with a 2023 slash line of .261/.353/.522, which is very good but not quite vintage. However, after assaulting Toronto pitching for a quartet of games Judge this season now boasts a line of .279/.381/.612. That's much more in line with expectations. 

As for the aforementioned spicyness and controversy, you'll recall that in the opener of the series there was some minor turbulence over why Judge had been glancing into his own dugout just prior to hitting a booming home run off a Jay Jackson hanging breaking ball. All of that led to speculation that Judge may have been side-eyeing in order to, say, get a stolen sign or pilfered pitch location passed along to him. The Jays wound up asking MLB to look into the matter and the league declined to do so. 

Then in the second game of the series, Yankees starting pitcher Domingo Germán, after three perfect innings of work, was ejected for use of "sticky substance" and subsequently suspended for 10 games. Later in Tuesday's game, Judge pulled off a nifty callback to the "sideways glance" intrigue following, yes, a home run. 

Thursday's finale would hardly be complete without some simmering hostilities, and thankfully Yankees manager Aaron Boone and Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker obliged: 

The nature of the dispute is uncertain, but it's still worth the trouble to lip-read it. 

With the drama and games concluded for the time being, the Yankees are back to a season-best six games over .500 (26-20) and back to a virtual tie with the Blue Jays (25-19) for third place in the brutal AL East. As for Judge, he's back to looking like the guy who set the AL home run record a season ago.