Forget the 60 home runs and 128 RBIs. The best moment of Yankees star Aaron Judge's remarkable 2022 season may have been what happened with one of his home run balls.
home run ball and then handed it to Derek, who was wearing a Judge jersey. Derek's emotional reaction, paired with a hug from the generous Blue Jays fan, created one of those videos where thousands of people tweet "If you're having a crappy day, watch this."
Derek's eyeballs flooded, and Lanzillotta, wearing a Blue Jays jersey and a surgical mask on his face, couldn't even control his disbelief. As Judge got to Derek and started to pull him in for a hug, Lanzillotta put his hands on his head. His knees buckled a little, and the top of his body lurched backward. Even from under the mask, it looked like his jaw dropped.Lanzillotta glanced over at Cesar, and he seemed to be in fairytale land, too.
From the day he was born in August 2012, little Derek Rodriguez loved baseball as much as his dad. He'd sit on his lap and watch games in Venezuela, and then became an Aaron Judge superfan when he got a little older. He loved the cool name, the long home runs, and the bigness of Judge. Around the same time that the Rodriguezes were plopping down in their seats, Lanzillota and Singh were outside the stadium, hustling to grab a beer before heading in. They eventually made their way into the stadium and had planned to snag some loonie dogs -- that's what the Jays call their hot dogs. On select nights such as this one, loonie dogs are $1 a piece, and Lanzillotta and Singh were laughing about how many they thought they could put down.
Cesar smiled and nodded. What were the chances a ball would end up in their laps? Fangraphs once estimated it at 1 in 1,200. And in the 200 level of the left field stands? Yeah, good luck. As the game wore on, Lanzillotta went to his go-to move. Every half-inning when the left fielder would warm up, he would spend the entire five minutes pestering -- correction,-- at either team's starter to turn around and throw the ball into the stands. He's gotten about 10 balls over the years doing that for three hours, so it sometimes works.
The game breezed along, with the Blue Jays leading 1-0 in the sixth inning. Singh told Lanzillotta he was going to the bathroom. On the way back, he noticed the loonie dog line was almost wiped out, so he made a quick pit stop to grab some food. With a full count, Manoah got ready to dial up another high 90s fastball as Judge dug in. A football field away, Derek Rodriguez cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled for his favorite player, right as Mike Lanzillotta took the last bite of his first loonie dog. He was thinking about reaching for a second dog just as a crack of the bat stole away his attention.off the bat at 114.9 MPH.
The ball flew straight to Lanzillotta. The ball whistled in for a landing, chest high, on a rope to him. Lanzillotta says he felt zero pain from the rocket hitting his hands, but Singh sure felt the ball off his cheek. An inch or two higher... Singh doesn't even want to think about if it hit him in the eye. "I'm going to trust my own hands next time," he says.
A slew of cell phone cameras captured what happened next. Lanzillotta looked down at the ball that hit his hands and then ricocheted off his friend's cheek, at the loonie dogs that shouldn't have been in a carrier, below the seats that weren't theirs, and he felt like that ball had been sent from the heavens for the little dude in the Aaron Judge jersey. "The way the stars aligned that day, it was nuts," Singh says.
But Derek heard him. And when he got to Lanzillotta, his joy came out through an outpouring of tears. Lanzillotta patted Derek on the back and then palmed the back of his head like a mini basketball. But they knew him. What Lanzillotta didn't realize was that as he got ready to order his replacement beers, video of the moment had gone viral twice -- once on the interwebs, and also within the stadium, which had shown the whole thing on the scoreboard several times. He was now both Internet famous and Rogers Centre famous.
When he talks about it, he says, "All I remember is..." and then he starts rubbing his hands under his eyes and making a whimpering noise, mocking his own tears. "I know crying is something natural to do," Derek says. "But I feel like that much crying... was too much crying." As Derek celebrated in the living room, his dad said, "And oh yeah, we're going down in the dugout, too.", right after Derek Rodriguez's mom shrieked as her son's giant hero approached, Aaron Judge spoke.Derek didn't say a word, he just turned around and tugged on the back of his No. 99 Yankees jersey, the same one he'd worn the night before and then all day at school during his victory lap.
Toward the end of the dugout get-together, Judge turned his attention toward Lanzillotta. In the postgame scrum the night before, Judge had seemed genuinely lit up by the idea of a Blue Jays fan being so kind to a young Yankees fan, and his exuberance showed through when he got to meet Lanzillotta. "You know they offered us tickets to come down to New York and sit in the Judge's Chambers?" Lanzillotta said."Aaron, just for your information, if we come to New York... I'll be chirping from the stands -- a lot," Lanzillotta said.
Then they went their separate ways. Both realized it wasn't the end of something. Just the end of Chapter 1., the Lanzillottas traveled to the Bronx to be guests of the Yankees and to sit in the Judge's Chambers. The Rodriguezes hoped to go, too, but had some travel paperwork snafus that didn't get straightened out in time.
Right before the game, Lanzillotta and his crew were all given complimentary Judge's Chambers robes to put on, and he held his nose and slid it over his Blue Jays jersey. It felt like a perfect solution -- he could wear his Blue Jays stuff, and it'd be covered up by a robe.
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