Jazz Chisholm Jr. was getting “overrated” chants rained down on him from the Progressive Field upper deck all night, so he picked up Aaron Judge’s bat and answered with a go-ahead solo homer in the 8th inning. That’s Jazz Chisholm. That’s all of it.
The Guardians crowd had been riding him from the jump. That tarped-off section on the third-base line was loud, and in the 5th inning, Chisholm swung over a high Slade Cecconi fastball for a strikeout. He knew it was the chants. “I swung above a high fastball, that never happens,” he said afterward. Which, honestly, is the self-awareness you want. He heard them, let them in, and paid for it.
Then he grabbed Judge’s bat.
Not a metaphor. Not a coincidence. Jazz Chisholm literally walked into the dugout and picked up Aaron Judge’s bat — one ounce heavier, slightly longer than what he normally swings — and went back out there. This is the second time in three days he’s done it. June 7 against the Red Sox, he hit a three-run homer with Judge’s bat in a five-run 8th-inning comeback. The Yankees won 6-1. Now he’s done it again in Cleveland, turning on a Tim Herrin slider that caught too much plate, 360 feet to right field, go-ahead run, Yankees 3 Guardians 2 final.
The trot took 32 seconds. He said it himself: “That trot was really for the fans.”
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There’s something clarifying about what Jazz Chisholm is doing here. On a team where Aaron Judge is the gravitational center of everything, where every third story in our MLB coverage eventually circles back to whether Judge is having the best season a Yankee has ever had. Jazz Chisholm is carving out a different lane. He’s not trying to be Judge. He’s borrowing Judge’s bat to silence “overrated” chants because the symbolism is too perfect to pass up, and Jazz Chisholm does not pass up perfect symbolism.
“I love it, kind of,” he said about the chants. “I feel like those were the loudest chants we heard all day. It was great.” And then: “That fuels me.” You can hear the grin through the quotes.
Jazz borrowed Judge’s bat to silence “overrated” chants and hit the go-ahead homer off Tim Herrin in the 8th. The stat line for 2026 (.231 average, .709 OPS, 9 homers in 63 games) doesn’t scream MVP. It doesn’t have to. Since May 1st he’s slashing .265/.331/.460 with a 120 wRC+, Camilo Doval and Fernando Cruz locked down the final five innings, and the Yankees are 40-26. The moments are compounding. Every Jazz Chisholm thing is peak Jazz Chisholm until the next Jazz Chisholm thing happens.
Compare it to what Ohtani’s tier-of-one season looks like: singular, almost clinical in its excellence. Jazz is the opposite of that. Jazz is chaotic and reactive and occasionally too big for the moment right before he’s exactly right for it. That’s not a bug.
Thirty-two seconds on the trot. On purpose. For the fans in the upper deck who’d been chanting at him all night. I cannot explain why this is so funny and good at the same time, but it is.
The Yankees fly home at 40-26. Jazz Chisholm hit a go-ahead homer with his teammate’s bat in front of a crowd that called him overrated. Somewhere in Cleveland, that tarp section is quiet.
