Yankees head into O's showdown on an offensive tear

We come right out of a cool weekend series between the first-place Guardians and the first-place Braves with four games that start on Monday night between the Yankees and Orioles, ones that end April in the American League East and then take us into May. The two teams get ready to slug it now the way they’re expected to slug it out at the top of the division all season long. This will be one of those early-season series that will have some September in it.

The Yankees moved back into first place on Sunday by scoring 15 runs for the second straight game in Milwaukee, and that wasn’t even the best news for Aaron Boone’s team, because the very best news was that Aaron Judge started to hit this past weekend. That is, of course, not such great news for the Orioles and everybody else.

Judge got hot in Milwaukee. Juan Soto continued to look as if he’s going to stay hot all season long. The Yankees keep getting good starting pitching even without Gerrit Cole, but now they are also getting the kind of top-to-bottom, batting-order balance they have lacked for years. So, they have 19 wins going into Baltimore, after finishing 19 games behind the Orioles last season. That happened, by the way, just one year after the Yankees had finished 16 games ahead of them. And that 35-game turnaround is one of the biggest in Yankees history.

“We’re excited,” Judge said in Milwaukee on Sunday, addressing his team’s upcoming series in Baltimore. “We’ve been watching [the Orioles] from afar. They’re a great team. They’ve got a young, great team, did a lot of great things last year, especially winning the division. We’re excited to get out there and have some fun.”

Big games, big fun, even this early in the season.

The Yankees lost in 11 innings to the Brewers on Friday night, Judge struck out two more times, his batting average at the end of the night was .178. It had fallen to .179 a little more than a week ago when he struck out four times and heard boos from his own fans at Yankee Stadium. But then on Saturday against the Brewers, he got two hits, one of them his fifth home run of the season. On Sunday, as the Yankees were putting 15 on the Brewers again, he went 3-for-4 and hit another home run and suddenly his batting average was up to .211.

What is really striking about the way the Yankees have played, starting with their four-game sweep of the Astros in Houston to start the season, is that they have essentially done what they’ve been doing without Cole and without Judge, who’d given them so little before this past weekend. Now Judge looks as if he's back, while the Yankees continue to wait for their ace to come back.

The Yankees didn’t expect to have an offense that could produce 36 runs in a three-game series, even though that’s exactly what just happened. But in Milwaukee, we saw the Yankees swinging the kind of big stick the Yankees hoped they would after trading for Soto and hitting him ahead of Judge. A 1-2 punch at 2-3 in the batting order.

This past weekend, though, it wasn’t just the two of them. It was all of them for the Yankees. Anthony Volpe, now the leadoff man, got two more hits. Alex Verdugo, who came to the Yankees from the Red Sox -- something that doesn’t happen every day -- was at .267 at the end of the series, and had become the Yankees’ cleanup hitter. Gleyber Torres has started to hit after a start as bad as Judge’s, and Oswaldo Cabrera, who started out hot as a replacement for DJ LeMahieu at third base, got a couple of hits on Sunday and was back up to .269.

Catcher Jose Trevino, who got to pitch the ninth inning of Saturday night’s blowout win, was back to batting ninth in the series finale, knocking in three runs and raising his own average to .280. And none of those guys were even the hitting star of Sunday’s game because Anthony Rizzo, who really had a lost 2023 season because of the aftershocks of a concussion, went 4-for-4, raised his own average to .277 and hit his 300th career homer along the way.

The Yankees, nine games over .500 going into this series with the Orioles, were 10 games over when Judge ran into that outfield door at Dodger Stadium on a Saturday night last June. At the time, they were in third place -- two games behind the Orioles, who were in second at the time behind the Rays. From then until the rest of the season, the Yankees were eight games under .500. And it wasn’t just Judge, because the Yankees didn’t do much the last two months even after he returned at the end of July. A lot of things went wrong for the ’23 Yankees, starting with all the injuries.

Eleven months later, a lot of things are going right for them -- a right time for them to face the Orioles and see exactly where they are. The Yankees look as if they’re back. We know the Orioles aren’t going anywhere. Let’s play four.