NEW YORK — Never were the questions of Aaron Judge‘s fitness for October particularly fair, but that’s life for the biggest man in the biggest city whose biggest failures had come at the biggest times. The burden of greatness is heavy. The burden of greatness in New York is planetary. And for those unleashing screeds on Judge’s postseasons — on hot take shows and sports-talk radio and in bars and at family dinners and everywhere, really, that anyone talks about the Yankees — it was never about whether they were fair. After all, his performances had been undeniably foul.

Judge never paid any of this any mind because he does not wire himself to do so. He cares about winning. He cares about success. He cares more than anyone who criticizes him, mocks him, derides him, leans into his past performances as if they’re predictive of an unknowable future. Judge always separated those struggles, not just because he needed to but because it is how he lives, purposely boring and boringly purposeful. He believed the moment would present itself and he would meet it. And why wouldn’t he think that? Every other endeavor in his baseball life had treated him that way.

Regardless of how the American League Division Series between the Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays breaks, what Judge did Tuesday night was the sort of thing that should put to rest questions about his October aptitude. It won’t, because it never could, but the wide-eyed, wonderstruck, childlike gawking of everyone in the Yankees’ clubhouse told the story of Tuesday night’s season-saving 9-6 victory against the Blue Jays in which Judge left jaws agape.

Poor Louis Varland. The right-handed reliever entered in the fourth inning to protect the Blue Jays’ 6-3 advantage in a game that could have clinched their spot in the AL Championship Series. He fooled Judge on a 90 mph curveball and then blew a 100 mph fastball by him and then threw another fastball at 100, up and in. Like, really in. Like, 5.9 inches off the inner corner of the plate, at triple digits, with tremendous carry, an absolute nightmare of a pitch for any hitter at any time in the game’s history to touch, let alone punish.

Nearly 400 feet later, when the ball banged off the left-field foul pole — the one place in Judge’s world where something foul is indeed fair — no one on the field could believe it. The absurdity of it all — manipulating his 6-foot-7, 282-pound body to so thoroughly alter his standard bat path, turn on 100 and keep it fair — was not lost on Varland, the Yankees who kept watching replays of the swing in the dugout, or the 47,399 at Yankee Stadium who bore witness.

“He made a really good pitch look really bad,” Varland said.

All postseason, Judge has been doing that. His 11 playoff hits lead MLB. For all of the ugliness of striking out with the bases loaded in Game 1 of this ALDS, his at-bats have been competitive all October. What he did to Varland was the culmination, precisely what the Yankees needed to see another day.

“You could feel it like in your bones,” Yankees reliever Tim Hill said. “It was crazy. It was amazing. I mean, just the pitch that he hit. All that. I’m sure my guy over there on the other side is questioning everything.”

Yes, pitching to Aaron Judge is the sort of thing of which existential crises are made. Before Tuesday, he had never hit a pitch 100 mph or faster for a home run. He hit 53 home runs this season — and none on a pitch outside the rulebook strike zone. Before Tuesday, the Blue Jays were 39-0 this season in games during which they led by at least five runs, too.

It’s impossible to overstate how out of character this was for Judge. He prides himself on good swing decisions because he knows how important they are. On pitches in the strike zone this season, Judge batted .400, 40 points higher than the next-best hitter. He slugged .867, 115 points higher than Shohei Ohtani. In his 214 plate appearances this year that ended on pitches outside of the rulebook zone, Judge batted .109 and drove in one run. All year. He didn’t have a single extra-base hit on such pitches.

One of the biggest home runs in the career of a two-time MVP favored to win a third this year was on something he never does. And if a willingness to exit his comfort zone and in the process do something that few in the history of baseball would be physically capable of doing doesn’t show that Judge isn’t just capable of success in October but destined for it, well, nothing would. And that’s fine with him. He knows emotion is the fuel that feeds the prognostications of inevitable letdown, not consistency or logic.

“I get yelled at for swinging at them out of the zone, but now I’m getting praised for it,” Judge said. “It’s a game. You’ve got to go out there and play. I don’t care what the numbers say or where something was at. I’m just up there trying to put a good swing on a good pitch, and it looked good to me.”

Inside the Yankees’ clubhouse, they’ve been yearning for Judge to have a game like this, to further validate their unflinching belief in him. The past is indisputable. Judge’s postseason OPS is more than 250 points lower than during the regular season. The Yankees haven’t won a championship during his 10 years in the big leagues. It’s real, and it’s regrettable, and it’s part of his legacy. It is also not the ink with which the future is written, which is why Aaron Boone, the Yankees’ manager with whom Judge is extremely close, said: “I don’t worry about Aaron and his state, even understanding all the outside noise.”

From Boone’s perch atop the dugout, he had the perfect view of the left-field foul pole. As the ball carried through the night, Judge stood near home plate. He didn’t pull a Carlton Fisk, trying to wave it fair. He just waited for it to land.

And when it did, helping raise his batting average this postseason to .500 and his OPS to 1.304 — nearly 300 points better than his career regular-season OPS, for the record — Judge uncorked a mini-bat flip and started his jog around the bases. When he got back to the dugout, teammates lined up and greeted him with a full high-five line.

“He’s the real deal, and as beloved a player as I’ve ever been around by his teammates,” Boone said. “They all admire him, look up to him, respect him, want his approval, and that’s just a credit to who Aaron is and how he goes about things.”

After slapping the last hand, Judge took one more step toward the end of the dugout. There awaited a television camera. Judge looked at it, pointed and turned around. He then pirouetted back and gave the audience one more stare. This was not an accident. Nothing Judge does is. It was a message, a reminder, a siren for everyone that didn’t believe.

The Yankees were still alive. And as long as that’s the case, he plans on carrying them. Even in October.

NEW YORK — Mike Sullivan coached the Pittsburgh Penguins for 10 seasons, leading them to two Stanley Cup championships. On Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, he watched them ruin his debut as the New York Rangers‘ latest head coach.

Sullivan admitted it was a peculiar feeling having Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and others he coached in Pittsburgh suddenly become his opponents.

“I mean, obviously it’s different. It’s different. I knew that was going to be the case,” he said after Pittsburgh’s 3-0 victory on the opening night of the 2025-26 NHL season. “But I’m excited about the group we have here in front of me with the Rangers. I’m looking forward to working with this group.”

The Rangers were shut out by goalie Arturs Silovs (22 saves) and watched forward Justin Brazeau score two goals in the Penguins’ win. They were outshot 15-5 in the third period and couldn’t muster anything consistent offensively in Sullivan’s debut.

“Well, I think my first observation is we got a long way to go to become the team we want to become. Some of it I think we can iron out, but certainly we’ve got a ways to go,” said Sullivan, who will coach Team USA in the 2026 Winter Olympic men’s hockey tournament in Italy. “I’m not going to overreact to it. It’s one game. We’ve got a lot of hockey to play,” he said. “So is it disappointing? Yeah. We’re going to see what we can take from it. We’ve got to move on.”

Sullivan and the Penguins agreed to part ways in April despite his being under contract through the 2026-27 season. Hired in 2015-16, Sullivan was the franchise’s most successful coach with 409 wins, only the 14th coach in NHL history to win 400 games with one team. Pittsburgh won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017 with Sullivan.

Days later, after he left the Penguins, Sullivan was hired by the Rangers to replace coach Peter Laviolette, signing a five-year contract that made him the NHL’s highest-paid coach. Sullivan, 57, had previously served as an assistant coach with New York from 2009 to 2013, during which time he coached Rangers GM Chris Drury as a player.

Penguins captain Crosby acknowledged it was a different feeling having Sullivan behind the Rangers’ bench instead of his.

“I just go out there and compete, but it’s always weird that first little bit,” he said.

For Crosby, it wasn’t just seeing Sullivan coaching the opponents. Sullivan brought former Penguins assistants David Quinn and Ty Hennes with him to New York.

While Sullivan took the loss against his former team, new Penguins coach Dan Muse earned a victory against his. Muse was an assistant coach under Laviolette for two seasons in New York and reportedly interviewed for the vacancy before Sullivan was hired. Crosby was happy to get Muse the win.

“Every team will tell you, especially early in the season, it’s not going to be perfect. You’re just trying to be on the same page as much as possible. And I feel like he prepared us well to start the year,” Crosby said.

Pittsburgh had Crosby, Malkin and Letang in its starting lineup, three players who have been on the Penguins team together since 2007.

“We had three guys that have been playing together for 20 years, and I thought it was important that they get to start the game together,” Muse said.

DETROIT — The Seattle Mariners have heard it for years. They are the only team that has never made it to the World Series. After a telltale win in Detroit on Tuesday, the Mariners are one win from getting closer to sending that bit of trivia in obsolescence than they’ve been in 24 years.

All it took was an 8-4 win over the Tigers in Game 3 of the ALDS that gave the Mariners a 2-1 lead in the series and emblematic of what they have become since the roster was boosted by midseason additions.

“Huge game, a lot of momentum,” Mariners starter Logan Gilbert said. “I’ve been saying it for a while: This is the most complete team I’ve been on and seen.”

It was very much a complete victory for the Mariners, who opened an 8-1 lead after a rain delay of nearly three hours before quashing a ninth-inning Tigers rally.

It wasn’t just the pitching of Gilbert or the end of game door slam from closer Andres Munoz or the ongoing long ball heroics of AL MVP candidate Cal Raleigh. It was all of that and more.

“One through nine, guys had good at-bats,” Raleigh said. “And that’s kind of what we’re preaching.”

Gilbert put up seven sterling innings, striking out seven. Raleigh hit his second career postseason home run and first on the heels of his historic 60-homer season. J.P. Crawford enjoyed a perfect night in the nine-hole that included a homer. And trade acquisition Eugenio Suarez launched a home run.

“We’ve been battling all along getting to this point,” Suarez said. “Being one step closer to going to the championship, we’re not done with the job yet. We have to continue playing like this.”

The Mariners got contributions up and down the lineup. They scored on the three long balls but also went 4-for-9 with runners in scoring position and scored two runs in the third thanks to aggressive baserunning. They quashed Detroit’s late push with a game-ending double play.

The Mariners won by getting contributions across the board, from nearly every player and in every phase of the game.

“That’s the team that we are,” Crawford said. “We create chaos, and we keep the line moving.”

Seattle entered the season drawing plaudits for a standout starting rotation and star players in Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez, but there were concerns about lineup depth and offensive consistency.

The Mariners’ offense improved, but the rotation fell short at times because of injury issues to George Kirby and Gilbert. But in July, the team started to get healthier, and before the trade deadline dealt for Suarez and first baseman Josh Naylor. Suddenly, a roster with clear strengths but just as clear holes started to look very complete.

That revised version of the Mariners was on display in Game 3, moving Seattle one win from reaching the ALCS for the first time since 2001. It’s one victory that will erase a little more of so much bad history.

“We got a tough road ahead of us,” Raleigh said. “Really tough pitching tomorrow. You know it’s going to be a challenge. We got to bring it tomorrow. We can’t take a game off.”

The Mariners will send righty Bryce Miller to the mound in Game 4 on Wednesday. He’ll face Detroit’s Casey Mize and a Tigers team that, in scoring three ninth-inning runs that forced Mariners manager Dan Wilson to summon Munoz from the bullpen, showed that they will not go quietly.

“We’ve earned our way here and we’ve had to play more and more back-against-the-wall-type games,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “I know our guys are going to be ready.”