Aaron Judge might break the American League home run record again.

The New York Yankees slugger belted his 40th home run of the season Friday, becoming the first player to do so in the majors this season.

He did it in grand style, launching it 477 feet into the left field bleachers at Yankee Stadium.

It was a two-run blast off Kevin Gausman, the sixth he’s hit off the Toronto Blue Jays right-hander, to drive in his 100th and 101st runs of the season.

Since May 3, Judge is hitting .377 with 34 home runs and a 1.338 OPS.

It’s quite a turnaround for Judge. On May 2, he was hitting just .197, and Yankee fans were clamoring for him to be benched.

The New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge celebrates hitting a home run during the first inning against the Toronto Blue Jays Friday, Aug. 2, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)

DODGERS STAR FREDDIE FREEMAN ANNOUNCES SON, 3, BATTLING ‘ESPECIALLY RARE’ NEUROLOGICAL CONDITION

Despite that pitiful start, he still leads the major leagues in homers, RBIs, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+ and total bases. His .318 batting average is also third in baseball.

Judge is on pace for 58 home runs this season, and he is likely to join Babe Ruth, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Alex Rodriguez as the only players in MLB history to hit 50 homers in three different seasons.

But his 162-game pace since May 5 is 72, so the record he set in 2022 with 62 homers is within reach. 

Judge is in the second year of a nine-year, $360 million deal he signed after that season. His $40 million annual average value is the most ever given to a position player, although teammate Juan Soto might surpass that this offseason.

That contract looked scary last year because Judge missed a chunk of the season due to a toe injury after crashing into a concrete portion of the outfield wall at Dodger Stadium. He was hitting .291 with a 1.078 OPS at the time of the injury, but he hit just .238 after returning.

New York Yankees center fielder Aaron Judge (99) celebrates his two-run home run against the Toronto Blue Jays with right fielder Juan Soto (22) during the first inning at Yankee Stadium.  (Brad Penner/USA Today Sports)

But it doesn’t seem like fans need to worry much anymore.

The Yankees have won five straight after going on an 11-24 skid to follow a 50-22 start. Entering Friday, they were tied with the Baltimore Orioles, who are on a skid of their own, for the AL East lead.

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The Chargers will get their first chance to test their kickoff and kickoff return approach to the NFL’s dynamic rule change in live action Sunday against the Rams during their joint practice.

“We’re going to get work in … whether that be against the Chargers, the Rams or whoever it may be,” special teams coordinator Ryan Ficken said. “We want to make sure we are working our technique. Otherwise, we won’t get a good look.”

The new rules have required some adjustments throughout the offseason, but Ficken’s approach is to keep the techniques simple as players adapt to the new format.

The kicking team is lined up on the opposing team’s 40, and the receiving team can line up five to 10 yards away. Nobody along the lines is permitted to move until the return team touches the ball or it hits the ground.

“Right now, we’re feeling good in terms of technique and laying the foundation, continuing to work on the fundamentals,” said Ficken.

Ficken emphasized that the goal for the kickoff and return units is to allow the players’ athleticism to shine, enabling them to execute without worrying too much about the new rules.

“We want to make sure it’s natural,” Ficken said.

This offseason, Ficken had the team watch film of the XFL, which ran a version of this kickoff rule, as well as Thursday’s preseason opener between the Chicago Bears and Houston Texans.

“I thought the kickoffs were a lot faster,” Ficken said. “It was good to see two different teams go at it and observe what they’ve been working on, what works and what doesn’t work.”

Kicker Cameron Dicker said he has adjusted to the new dynamic kickoff rules, changing his approach to kicks throughout camp. Instead of high deep balls with maximum hang time, he focuses on placement for the cover team to pursue.

Ficken praised Dicker’s adaptability, hinting at a bag of tricks unlike anything he has seen.

“He can execute all types of kicks, whatever you need him to do,” Ficken said. “He can be a weapon.”

Kicking under the new format feels more like “shanking” a kickoff than doing a squib kick, as Dicker put it.

“That’s almost the goal,” Dicker said. “Get it to land early so the returner can’t get to it, and hopefully, it dribbles through.”

Dicker added, “Try to drive it out there and hope for the best.”

While not experimenting with different kicking styles, Dicker does enjoy miss-hitting the ball, “almost hitting it off the ankle for fun and seeing what happens.”

“It’s going to be interesting once Week 1 comes around to see the first person who tries something strange,” Dicker said.

On the return team, Derius Davis will again handle kick returns, coming off a season in which he returned 17 kicks for 374 yards, ranking 11th in the league.

Davis, an All-Pro rookie punt returner last season, likens returning kicks under the new rules to playing running back. He noted the new rules don’t allow for much hang time, and anticipates seeing more kicks on the ground than in the air.

“It’s definitely different,” Davis said, “because everything happens much faster since the return teams’ drops aren’t as deep.”

The first time Janet Evans watched her good friend Katie Ledecky swim away with the Olympic 1,500 meter race, she cried her eyes out like a broken-hearted teenager whose first love had run off with someone else.

This was back in 2021, the first time women got to swim “the mile,” as Evans and every American swimming nerd calls it, at the Olympics.

Evans, a gold medalist in the 400 and 800 in 1988 and the 800 in 1992, was Ledecky before Ledecky, so much better at distance races than everyone else it was a joke. On that night in 2021, she watched Ledecky race at the spectator-free Tokyo Games alone at her home in Laguna Beach, Calif.

Why the tears?

For decades, she and every other world-class female distance swimmer had gotten blown off when they pushed to swim the longest race in the pool, just like the men could. Always, there was another excuse. No room in the program. Not enough beds for additional athletes.

They heard something else — a barely veiled message that most women couldn’t race that far within a time worth watching, even though they did it in college, at other international meets and all the time in practice.

There is little doubt that Evans would have won two or three more gold medals had the 1,500 been a part of the Olympic program when she was at her peak, or even after it at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, where she handed the torch to Muhammad Ali before he lit the flame during the opening ceremony, a signature moment of the modern Olympics.

“The mile was my best race,” Evans, 52, said Wednesday night at a bar outside La Defense Arena, where she had just watched Ledecky demolish the field to win her second consecutive 1,500 gold in 15:30.02, breaking her Olympic record and finishing 10 seconds and nearly half-a-pool faster than Anastasiia Kirpichnikova, the silver medalist.

“I had that world record for like 20 years,” Evans said.

Evans didn’t cry this time as she watched Ledecky from a few rows up from the deck of the Olympic pool. Her 17-year-old daughter, Sydney Willson — she’s a distance specialist, too, a rising high school senior already committed to Princeton for 2025 — sat beside her, capturing her mother’s ear-to-ear smile and arm-pumping as they watched Ledecky tear through the final lap.

Evans looked up at the scoreboard when it was done and did some quick swimming math. Her best time in the 1,500 was 15:50.

“I would have gotten fifth tonight,” she said at the bar, a little more than 36 years after that world record.

Once a swim racer, always a swim racer.

Janet Evans swims at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. She almost certainly would’ve added to her gold-medal haul if a 1,500-meter race had been offered for women in her time. (Dennis Paquin / AP)

Evans is in Paris for a couple reasons.

Reason No. 1: She’s a self-confessed swim freak and an Olympic addict.

This is her 18th Olympics, including the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, which she attended as a fan. She is a true believer. Her daughter chimed in that her mother teared up during the opening ceremony Friday night, as the boats headed up the Seine.

Reason No. 2. She’s working.

Evans, who served on the athletes commission for World Aquatics for 14 years, from 1992 to 2006, chairing the body at one point, is one of the leaders of LA28, the organizing committee for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

She is the chief athlete officer, essentially responsible for every inch of the athlete experience in Los Angeles, from the moment they land at the Games, to what they eat, where they sleep, and how they get to and from the competitions.

And making sure women get treated the same as men.

“I’m here to observe, to take it in, to see what we want to do similarly, what we want to do different, what we can do better,” she said.

Her early impressions of Paris? “The backdrops are spectacular, the arenas are great, and the stands are full,” she said.

That last past may be the most important one, because it has been 12 years since there were packed houses at the Games. Tickets cost too much for the vast majority of Brazilians and stadiums were mostly half full at best in 2016 at the Rio de Janeiro Games. Then came Tokyo. Covid. Enough said.

Evans said she wants to withhold judgment on what can be improved until after the Games are over and she can check in with athletes to figure out what could be done better. She noticed that the American track star, Noah Lyles, said he was having some trouble finding a safe and quiet space in the Olympic Village. She made a note of that.

The athletes will live on the campus of UCLA in 2028. Some peace and quiet seems doable there.

As a child of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that encouraged federal funding for girls and women to play sports in the U.S., Evans is chuffed that at the Paris Games there are finally an equal number of male and female athletes competing.

She’d been a part of the supposed “Games of the Woman” in 1996, when the U.S. women’s soccer team and other female stars broke through. But there was still a long way to go, and there still is.

Recently, her 14-year-old son asked her why women play shorter tennis matches at the Grand Slam tournament than men do. She liked hearing that plenty of boys today think inequity in sports is just plain odd.

As she spoke, her eyes kept drifting up to the television in the bar. Léon Marchand, the French swimming sensation, was ripping through the water for his second individual gold medal of the night. Everyone in France is obsessed with him. Inside the arena, the roars of the crowd and choruses of the national anthem left ears ringing.

An ocean away in the United States, Marchand is still relatively unknown. He trains in Austin, Texas, she noted. The Los Angeles star-making machine will get churning on him soon. “What we’re trying to do is hard and we need athletes to help,” she said.

Katie Ledecky and Janet Evans have known each other since 2012, when they both competed at U.S. Olympic trials — Ledecky at 15, Evans at 40. (Ian MacNicol / Getty Images)

At the top of that list is her friend Ledecky, who at 27 has already said she wants to swim in Los Angeles, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to compete in a home Games.

And why not?

She went wire-to-wire in winning the 1,500 Wednesday, building her lead methodically, about a half body length for every lap of the pool, seemingly cruising through her 41-stroke lap with such ease. She barely kicks, takes in a breath every other stroke, like a weekend warrior out for a workout at the local YMCA. She turned it on during the final lap, blasting a little harder. She slapped the water after she touched the wall, ripped off one of her caps and let out a roar.

Later, she said the win was for all the women who never got to swim in this race.

Women like Evans, who helped land Ledecky a spot on the board of LA28. They have known each other since 2012, when Evans, then 40 and already a mother of two, decided to see if she could qualify for the Olympic trials. She did, and raced in the same events as a 15-year-old Ledecky.

Soon after, they became texting buddies. Ledecky is something of a mentor to her daughter, the three of them a little tribe of distance specialists who understand one another like no one else does.

Evans’ eyes drifted up again to the party unfolding inside La Defense, where more than 20,000 fans had packed into a rugby stadium to watch swimming, and spilling out onto the plaza. At the Los Angeles Games, swimming will take place at SoFi Stadium, the home of the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers in nearby Inglewood, Calif.

Plans are to have room for 38,000, the largest crowd ever to watch Olympic swimming, but there’s a chance that could grow given the expected demand for tickets in the heart of America’s swim culture.

“Should be pretty great,” Evans said, a little hint of FOMO sneaking into her voice.

Seems like there is a decent chance of that, especially if Ledecky dominates “the mile” once more.

Evans will be there, of course, a true circle of life moment, from fan to star to organizer.

And she’ll no doubt be doing some quick swimming math when the race is finished.

GO DEEPER

Léon Marchand, Katie Ledecky and a night worthy of Olympic swimming lore

(Top photo of Katie Ledecky with her 1,500-meter freestyle gold medal: Ian MacNicol / Getty Images)