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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.

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Bottom 10: Things got even grimmer in Not-So-Happy Valley

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October 8, 2025

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Bottom 10: Things got even grimmer in Not-So-Happy Valley

  • Ryan McGee

Oct 8, 2025, 07:00 AM ET

Inspirational thought of the week:

We’re taking the train to Happy Valley
Won’t you come along there too
It’s beautiful there in Happy Valley
With wonderful things to do

The sun shines brightly the whole day long
Every bird sings a different song
There’s no need to worry, there’s joys untold
In Happy Valley you’ll never grow old

— “Happy Valley,” Rodd and The Cavaliers

Here at Bottom 10 Headquarters, located behind the giant lake of frying grease that is held in a secret location in metro Dallas until the State Fair of Texas starts and it’s time to cook balls of butter and funnel cake burgers, we used to roll our eyes at the term “unprecedented times.” Why? Because we once believed that all times are precedented. As William Shakespeare once wrote, “Past is prologue.” And as my Uncle Willie once said to me, shaking a spear of asparagus, “Don’t get all worked up, Ryno. Ain’t nothing gonna happen that ain’t never happened before.”

So, what changed our mind? Penn State went to the Rose Bowl Not The Rose Bowl Game to play UCLA.

So, what do we do now? A Coveted Fifth Spot team that earned that Coveted Fifth Spot by losing an OT game to a top-5 team, so we know the team isn’t actually that bad, turns right around and loses to a Bottom 10 team that we know is actually that bad. Does that mean that team should be back in the Coveted Fifth Spot because it isn’t actually that bad … or does it graduate from the Coveted Fifth Spot into the actual Bottom 10 because it is actually that bad? And what about the team that was definitely bad but beat that team? Does it graduate out of the Bottom 10 … or does it stay in the Bottom 10 because perhaps the team that we thought wasn’t bad is actually bad?

To quote Cal Naughton Jr., the NASCAR driver who thought he was bad only because teammate Ricky Bobby wouldn’t let him win, thus keeping him thinking he was bad: “My head’s all tied up like a pretzel. I got a pretzel in my head!”

And you know where they make the best pretzels? Pennsylvania.

With apologies to former SMU wide receiver Happy Nelson, former Florida State running back Happy Fick, current Kentucky D-lineman Nic “Happy” Smith and Steve Harvey, here are the post-Week 6 Bottom 10 rankings.

The Bearkats were krushed by New Mexiko State and now, after zero home kontests in September, kan kruise through most of Ocktober in the friendly konfines of Huntsville, Teksas.

The Beavers are the nation’s only six-loss team after traveling 4,477 miles round trip to lose a heartbreaker in Boone, North Carolina, to Appalachian State. Now they host Wake Forest, which will make a 4,624-mile round trip from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Corvallis and back. FWIW, Wake and App State are separated by 86 miles. The Beavs should have just stayed in North Carolina and spent the week in the foothills eating barbecue, drinking moonshine and watching the fall foliage turn orange and black, both the colors of Oregon State and the colors that your liver turns after drinking real Carolina moonshine.

It was the actual Minutemen who were perched on Bunker Hill, holding steady atop Boston as the British marched closer and closer, but refusing to engage because they had been ordered by their commanding officer, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” That was us throughout the first six weeks of the season, as we waited not so patiently for Saturday’s Pillow Fight of the Week of the Year of the Century Mega Bowl, pitting UMass against …

“Don’t fire until you see the Golden Flashes of their eyes!”

“But, sir, we can’t see their eyes!”

“Why not?”

“Because their eye sockets and cheeks are so bruised and swollen from their trips to Florida State and Oklahoma!”

So, the answer to the question that we started with “So” in the intro to these rankings is that, yes, you can be a back-to-back Coveted Fifth Spot team. And all you Texas Longhorns fans can make your thank-you checks out to the Ryan McGee Key West Retirement Fund.

Last week I failed to have the Woof Pack in these rankings and I heard from a lot of folks in Reno about that, angry that their hometown team wasn’t included. But they didn’t see the comments I received during the weeks prior from folks upset that they were included. One of them was tied around the neck of a horse’s head that was in my bed, signed by someone named “Tahoe Tommy.”

I have also heard from a lot of people in central Tennessee, wondering why I haven’t had the Mob from Murfreesboro in these rankings more, especially since their only win of the year was over Nevada, and that was by only one point. One of those notes was tied around the neck of a possum’s head that was in my bed, signed by someone named “Chevy Tahoe Tammy.”

Oklahoma State’s leading passer, rusher and receiver have all combined for exactly zero touchdowns. The last time there was this little scoring in Stillwater was when I visited town for a Beanie Babies resale convention.

Let’s give credit to the Niners, who have played games on seemingly every day of the week but Saturday to get national TV exposure. It’s the perfect Halloween horror programming.

The Emus barely edged out Northern Ill-ugh-noise in a #MACtion showdown for the Not So Coveted Tenth Spot. But that was merely a virtual showdown. This weekend they will meet in an actual showdown, kicking off 1½ hours before the UMass-Kent State game. Let’s call it the Throw Pillow Fight of the Week, because it’s the slightly smaller pillow we have to move to get to the actual pillow.

Waiting list: UCLA Boo-ins, Northern Ill-ugh-noise, UTEPid, Bah-stan Cawledge, UNC Chapel Bill, Georgia State Not Southern, Stanfird, My Hammy of Ohio, South Alabama Redundancies, Give Me Liberty Or Give Me 1-4, the definition of a catch.

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Jets lock up forward Connor with $96M extension

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October 8, 2025

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Jets lock up forward Connor with M extension

  • Kristen ShiltonOct 8, 2025, 10:24 AM ET

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      Kristen Shilton is a national NHL reporter for ESPN.

The Winnipeg Jets took care of business ahead of their regular-season opener, signing top forward Kyle Connor to an eight-year, $96 million extension on Wednesday.

It’s the richest contract in Jets franchise history, earned by one of their most consistent performers. Drafted by Winnipeg 17th overall in 2015, Connor has scored 30 or more goals in seven of his eight full NHL seasons to date and surpassed the 40-goal mark in two of his past four campaigns.

In 2024-25 he collected a career-high 56 assists and 97 points in 82 games and ranks top 20 among all NHL skaters in goals (153) and points (331) since 2021.

Winnipeg finished atop the league standings last season with a 116-point effort that only carried them to a second-round playoff defeat against Dallas. Keeping Connor in the fold was critical for the Jets to maintain their position as a contending team in the Western Conference. Winnipeg’s core includes Hart and Vezina Trophy-winning goaltender Connor Hellebuyck, top center Mark Scheifele and blueliner Josh Morrissey.

Connor, 28, is now one of four Jets — including Scheifele, Gabriel Vilardi and Neal Pionk — locked in through 2030.

This could be the start of a big year for Connor. He represented Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off in February and was part of their Olympic orientation camp over the summer ahead of NHL players returning to participate in the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games.

Winnipeg hosts its first game of the season on Thursday at home against the Stars.

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Oilers follow McDavid extension with Ekholm deal

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October 8, 2025

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Oilers follow McDavid extension with Ekholm deal

  • Greg WyshynskiOct 8, 2025, 10:39 AM ET

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      Greg Wyshynski is ESPN’s senior NHL writer.

Days after signing superstar Connor McDavid to a two-year extension, the Edmonton Oilers have locked up one of the most important championship players around him in defenseman Mattias Ekholm.

Ekholm, 35, signed a three-year, $12 million extension Wednesday that starts in the 2026-27 season. Ekholm is in the final season of the four-year contract signed with the Nashville Predators in 2021 that carries a $6 million average annual value. He would have been an unrestricted free agent next summer.

Entering his 15th NHL season, Ekholm had 33 points (9 goals, 24 assists) in 65 games last season for the Oilers. His 22:11 in average ice time was third on the team. One of Edmonton’s primary penalty killers, Ekholm also sees time on the power play.

The Swedish defenseman’s comportment and facial hair also inspired a group of Edmonton fans called “The Dancing Ekholms,” who attend games in horned helmets, kilts and war paint to honor their “Viking Warrior.”

Ekholm’s signing comes two days after McDavid agreed to a two-year contract extension with a $12.5 million AAV, a steep hometown discount that gives general manager Stan Bowman cap flexibility to build a winner around the star center.

Bowman immediately went to work, signing Ekholm and defenseman Jake Walman (7 years, $49 million) to contract extensions. The Oilers now have nine players signed through the end of McDavid’s deal in 2028.

Edmonton is coming off its second straight defeat to the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup Final. The Oilers have played in the postseason in six straight seasons.

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