Major League Baseball

Yankees’ Opening Day win preceded by Aaron Judge contract drama

Updated Apr. 10, 2022 7:44 p.m. ET

By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer

NEW YORK — Baseball is back, and so is the Bronx Circus.

The first full-capacity Opening Day crowd at Yankee Stadium since 2019 was treated to an absolute peach of a ballgame on Friday afternoon, as the sport’s two titans battled deep into extra innings, with the Yankees taking a hard-fought 6-5 win over the Red Sox.

After a few days of torrential rain in the Big Apple, gray clouds gave way to sunshine as 46,097 fans enjoyed a picturesque spring day at the yard until new Yanks signing Josh Donaldson sent everyone home happy with a walk-off single up the middle in the bottom of the 11th.

While the game itself was compelling spectacle, the true drama came 90 minutes or so before first pitch. At a pregame news conference, Yankees GM Brian Cashman divulged specific dollar figures of the club’s most recent extension offer to all-world slugger Aaron Judge. Judge is in his final year of control in New York, and with the two sides set to enter arbitration over the outfielder’s 2022 salary, there were talks of a lengthy extension in the weeks leading up to Opening Day.

But they failed to come to an agreement before Friday’s game, with Judge declining the Yankees' most recent offer, which, according to Cashman, would have been a seven-year, $213.5 million contract.

Why was sharing this information so bizarre? Typically, teams keep negotiation specifics close to the chest or, at the very least, leak them through the media in order to gain leverage. Hearing that private information directly from the GM’s mouth could theoretically irk Judge enough to change the tone of the discussions.

At the end of the day, though, money will speak loudest, and it’s likely that Cashman had either approval from above or a strategic reason to spill the $213.5 million beans, but nobody around the ballpark on Friday could recall a GM doing anything like that, let alone hours before the first pitch of Opening Day.

The fallout from Cashman’s sharing session is still unclear. It could end up meaning absolutely nothing, and Judge could ink an extension tomorrow. Or the face of the franchise could be insulted enough to leave the Bronx this winter. Only time will tell.

But on the day, the grand architect of the Yankees, a man somehow in his 25th season at the helm of the sport’s largest behemoth, left the stadium vindicated.

For now, Cashman's Yankees are 1-0, thanks to the timely hitting of his biggest offseason acquisition, Josh Donaldson (with an assist from the extra innings runner-on-second rule). While both teams plated a run in the 10th — Boston on a Xander Bogaerts RBI single, New York on a Gleyber Torres sacrifice fly — the Red Sox came away empty-handed in the top of the 11th.

New York took advantage. After making the final out of the 10th, Isiah Kiner-Falefa parked on second base to start the 11th, and Donaldson poked the third pitch of the inning up the gut through a shifted infield to bring the other newest Yankee around to score.

It was a serendipitous end to the season’s first game. Many folks, myself included, were critical of the Yankees for not being more aggressive to improve their lineup in the offseason. But for an afternoon, Donaldson proved to make the difference.

Not everything went according to plan for the Yanks, though, as their ace, Gerrit Cole, was decidedly lackluster in his first start of the year. Cole looked unsettled in the dugout when the game’s start time was predictably delayed eight minutes or so by the extended pregame festivities. A clearly impatient Cole was seen on the broadcast screaming "Lets f---ing go" — and not the hyped kind — as comedian Billy Crystal strolled out to the mound to lob in the ceremonial first pitch.

Cole was on the backfoot from the jump. He walked leadoff man Kiké Hernández on four pitches and then allowed a moon-scraping homer to Rafael Devers on a fastball just above the strike zone. Last season, Devers had a well-above-average swing-and-miss rate on heaters above the zone, so it wasn’t an awful pitch in an 0-1 count, but Devers got his barrel to it, and boom: Two batters in, Sox 2, Yanks 0. Boston added another run in the frame on a JD Martinez RBI double after Cole missed his spot with another fastball.

The inconsistent four-seam fastball was the theme of the afternoon for Cole. It was the first time since April 2018 that he failed to record a swing-and-miss on his four-seamer. There was nothing characteristically amiss with the pitch — it had comparable velocity and spin numbers to his 2021 averages — but Cole’s inability to command the heater all afternoon definitely played a role in Aaron Boone’s decision to not let him face the Boston order a third time through.

Cole’s fellow 2021 Cy Young vote-getter, Nate Eovaldi, wasn’t much better, as the tall Texan labored through his five innings of work. The critical blow off Eovaldi came on an all-time memorable Giancarlo Stanton homer in the bottom of the fourth.

With the bases empty, Stanton took an Eovaldi slider and dispatched it just over the conveniently close fence in left. The ball left the bat at 116.3 mph, with a launch angle of 15 degrees.

Now, if you’re not particularly interested in all the fancy, newfangled Statcast numbers, give me just a moment to make you care about this one. In the Statcast Era (since 2015), there have been only four other balls hit that hard and that low, none of which was to the opposite field. As such, it’s quite possible that Stanton hit the most line-drive-y opposite-field home run in baseball history on Friday.

Both bullpens picked up the slack following the underwhelming performances by the aces, combining to toss 12 innings with just one earned run (the extra-inning runner on second doesn’t count as an earned run). Michael King was particularly dynamite for the Yanks, as the righty threw both of the extra innings, limiting the damage to a run in the 10th before blanking the Red Sox in the 11th.

The only run allowed by the Boston pen was a DJ LeMahieu game-tying, solo shot in the eighth off 2021 breakout star Garrett Whitlock in his third inning of work. That blast pushed the game to extras, setting up Donaldson’s 11th-inning heroics.

Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.