MILWAUKEE (AP) — Aaron Judge should have been called for interference for his slide on a botched double-play attempt that sparked New York’s winning rally Sunday at Milwaukee, crew chief Andy Fletcher acknowledged after the Yankees’ 15-5 victory.
With the score tied 4-all in the sixth inning, Judge raised his left arm while sliding into second base after Alex Verdugo hit a bouncer to the right side of the infield. Brewers shortstop Willy Adames was attempting to complete the double play when his throw bounced off Judge’s padded hand and landed on the ground, enabling Verdugo to reach safely.
The Yankees went on to score seven runs in the inning, all with two outs.
“On the field, we got together and did the best that we could to come up with the correct answer,” Fletcher told a pool reporter after the game. “After looking at it off the field in replay, it appears that the call was missed. It should’ve been called interference because it wasn’t a natural part of his slide. It didn’t appear that way to us. We did everything we could to get together and get it right. But after looking at it, it appears that it should’ve been called interference.”
Fletcher noted the call isn’t reviewable.
Judge said he had no worries about getting called for interference even as the crew gathered to discuss the play.
“No, that’s never happened before in my life, and I’ve been sliding like that for years,” Judge said.
Brewers manager Pat Murphy had come out of the dugout to argue for an interference call. He continued pleading his case while speaking to reporters after the game.
“It’s hard to say that he wasn’t making an attempt at least purposely to obstruct,” Murphy said. “I don’t think he wanted to get hit by the ball, but I think he was trying to purposely obstruct. That’s my opinion. I don’t know what his intent was. He seems like a wonderful man, but very competitive also.”
Adames noted how Judge’s 6-foot-7 frame made it particularly difficult to attempt a throw to first.
“He’s like 7 feet tall,” Adames said. “He’s huge. I think when he puts his hands up, he’s taller than me even when he’s sliding to second base. It’s a tough space for me to throw the ball.”
Judge reached on a leadoff walk before Verdugo hit his bouncer to second baseman Brice Turang, who threw to Adames to retire Judge at second. As Judge raised his left arm on his slide to second, he was wearing a sliding glove on his hand. Judge, who said the throw hit him on the side of his fingers, noted he frequently slides that way.
“You can look back at any picture you want of me sliding into second base,” Judge said. “That’s always happened.”
It appeared the lack of an interference call wouldn’t make much of a difference in Sunday’s outcome after Abner Uribe retired Giancarlo Stanton on a pop fly for the second out of the inning. But everything fell apart for the Brewers from that point on.
Verdugo advanced on Anthony Rizzo’s walk and scored the go-ahead run on Gleyber Torres’ single to center. Oswaldo Cabrera walked to load the bases before Jose Trevino singled home two runs. Elvis Peguero replaced Uribe and threw a wild pitch that brought home Cabrera. After Anthony Volpe walked, Juan Soto hit an RBI single.
Volpe and Soto executed a double steal while Judge was at the plate receiving a chorus of boos from the American Family Field crowd. Judge capped the seven-run outburst with a two-run single that extended the Yankees’ lead to 11-4.
The Brewers never recovered from the missed call.
“They admitted they messed up,” Adames said. “We mess up sometimes. That’s how it goes sometimes.”
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Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy argues a call during the sixth inning of a baseball game against the New York Yankees Sunday, April 28, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
NEW YORK (AP) — The number of U.S. fatal overdoses fell last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Wednesday.
Agency officials noted the data is provisional and could change after more analysis, but that they still expect a drop when the final counts are in. It would be only the second annual decline since the current national drug death epidemic began more than three decades ago.
Experts reacted cautiously. One described the decline as relatively small, and said it should be thought more as part of a leveling off than a decrease. Another noted that the last time a decline occurred — in 2018 — drug deaths shot up in the years that followed.
“Any decline is encouraging,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. “But I think it's certainly premature to celebrate or to draw any large-scale conclusions about where we may be headed long-term with this crisis.”
It's also too soon to know what spurred the decline, Marshall and other experts said. Explanations could include shifts in the drug supply, expansion of overdose prevention and addiction treatment, and the grim possibility that the epidemic has killed so many that now there are basically fewer people to kill.
CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deb Houry called the dip “heartening news” and praised efforts to reduce the tally, but she noted “there are still families and friends losing their loved ones to drug overdoses at staggering numbers.”
About 107,500 people died of overdoses in the U.S. last year, including both American citizens and non-citizens who were in the country at the time they died, the CDC estimated. That’s down 3% from 2022, when there were an estimated 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.
The drug overdose epidemic, which has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, has had many ripple effects. For example, a study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry estimated that more than 321,000 U.S. children lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose from 2011 to 2021.
“These children need support,” and are at a higher risk of mental health and drug use disorders themselves, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped lead the study. "It’s not just a loss of a person. It’s also the implications that loss has for the family left behind.”
Prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, but they were supplanted years ago by heroin and more recently by illegal fentanyl. The dangerously powerful opioid was developed to treat intense pain from ailments like cancer but has increasingly been mixed with other drugs in the illicit drug supply.
For years, fentanyl was frequently injected, but increasingly it's being smoked or mixed into counterfeit pills.
A study published last week found that law enforcement seizures of pills containing fentanyl are rising dramatically, jumping from 44 million in 2022 to more than 115 million last year.
It's possible that the seizures indicate that the overall supply of fentanyl-laced pills is growing fast, not necessarily that police are whittling down the illicit drug supply, said one of the paper's authors, Dr. Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco.
He noted that the decline in overdoses was not uniform. All but two of the states in the eastern half of the U.S. saw declines, but most western states saw increases. Alaska, Washington, and Oregon each saw 27% increases.
The reason? Many eastern states have been dealing with fentanyl for about a decade, while it's reached western states more recently, Ciccarone said.
Nevertheless, some researchers say there are reasons to be optimistic. It's possible that smoking fentanyl is not as lethal as injecting it, but scientists are still exploring that question.
Meanwhile, more money is becoming available to treat addiction and prevent overdoses, through government funding and also through legal settlements with drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies, Ciccarone noted.
“My hope is 2023 is the beginning of a turning point,” he said.
AP medical writer Carla K. Johnson contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - A container of Narcan, a brand name version of the opioid overdose-reversal drug naloxone, sits on a table following a demonstration at the Health and Human Services Humphrey Building on Friday, Sept. 8, 2023, in Washington. The number of U.S. fatal overdoses fell in 2023 — for only the second time since the current national epidemic of drug deaths began more than three decades ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted the numbers on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
