Spencer Jones walked into the visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field on Tuesday afternoon, found a corner locker, pulled out an iPad and spent his pregame studying video on Cleveland starter Slade Cecconi.
The 6-foot-5 right-hander throws six different pitches to left-handed batters, four-seam fastball, cutter, curveball, sinker, sweeper and changeup, and Jones wanted to know the motion, the release point, the sequencing. How a pitcher looks when the ball is coming out of his hand.
Then Cecconi threw him an 87 mile-per-hour cutter over the heart of the plate in the second inning, and Jones did exactly what he described doing when asked about his approach at the plate: nothing, really. "It's all instincts, baby!"
The ball left Jones's bat at 112.2 miles per hour, traveled 443 feet to dead center field and landed where deep shots to dead center at Progressive Field tend to land, far enough away from where the play started that the at-bat is over before the outfielder takes three steps.
It was a solo home run in the second inning, giving the Yankees an early 2-0 lead. It was the longest home run hit at Progressive Field all season.
It was the third-longest home run hit by a Yankee all season, behind Aaron Judge at 456 feet and Giancarlo Stanton at 446 feet. It was the first home run Spencer Jones has hit in 14 career major league games.
MLB.com's headline described it with the word that the scouting community has been using around Jones since he was in college: Judgian.
The Kid They Called Up Because The Real Judge Is Hurt
Spencer Jones is 25 years old and was the 25th overall pick in the 2022 MLB Draft out of Vanderbilt. He played for the Brewster Whitecaps of the Cape Cod League, the same program that Aaron Judge played for roughly a decade before him, and he drew the Aaron Judge comparison the moment scouts got a look at what he could do with a bat. He is 6-foot-5. He hits left-handed.
He has prodigious raw power, at the 2022 draft combine in San Diego, Jones averaged 103.6 mph exit velocity across 10 swings and hit the day's hardest ball at 112.2 mph, which happens to be the exact number that showed up on the Statcast readout Tuesday night in Cleveland.
He was first called up in early May, when the Yankees wanted a look at what they had. Ten games. He went 4-for-24 with two RBI. All four hits were singles.
The power that made him a first-round pick, that made scouts use the word Judgian before he had ever worn a big-league uniform, was not showing up. He was sent back down to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
Then Aaron Judge landed on the injured list with a stress fracture of the first rib on his right side. Jasson Dominguez was still rehabbing a shoulder injury. The Yankees needed outfield help and Spencer Jones was the best available option. He was called back up.
The second stretch has been better. Tuesday's home run, his 14th career game, his first career home run, was the game in the second stretch that made everyone start paying attention.
What 443 Feet At 112 MPH Looks Like
The Statcast system measures exit velocity, launch angle, projected distance and a collection of other data points that together describe what happened between a pitch and a batted ball. The 112.2 mph exit velocity on Jones's homer Tuesday is not a routine hard-contact number. Most home runs leave the bat in the 100-105 mph range.
Hard-hit home runs in the 105-110 range are the ones that get distance. A ball leaving a bat at 112.2 mph is in the range of the hardest-hit home runs the league sees in any given season, the category of contact that makes scouts write notes immediately regardless of what the count was or where the pitcher was trying to throw the ball.
The distance, 443 feet to dead center, confirms that Jones put the full force of a 6-foot-5 frame with a bat speed of 83.3 mph behind it.
Dead center is the hardest part of a ballpark to reach because it requires both carry and distance without the benefit of the pull angle that allows left-field and right-field home runs to work with the foul lines.
A ball hit 443 feet to dead center is a ball that needed to travel every one of those feet in the most demanding direction.
The 87-mph cutter Cecconi threw him was a hitter's pitch, a well-placed pitch that ran away from a left-handed batter, but it was not a mistake in the sense of being grooved down the middle with no movement.
It was a pitch that got over enough of the plate that Jones recognized it, decided in whatever milliseconds the decision requires, and drove it to a place that required 443 feet of carry. Cecconi throws a cutter to lefties.
Jones studied the cutter. He saw the cutter. He hit the cutter 443 feet.
Why It Matters Beyond The Home Run
The Yankees are going to be without Aaron Judge for weeks at minimum. The stress fracture of his first rib requires rest and re-evaluation in four to six weeks, which puts his earliest realistic return somewhere in August.
Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger have been productive in the interim. The Yankees are deep enough to stay competitive in a relatively weak American League.
But the specific void Judge leaves, the at-bat that can change the game with one swing, the threat that defensive alignments have to account for, the presence in the lineup that affects what pitchers do to every other hitter, is not something a team simply fills from its depth chart.
It requires someone to step into the legitimate power hitter role and perform, and that someone right now is supposed to be Spencer Jones.
Tuesday was four games into his second stint with the Yankees. The first stint produced all singles. The second stint, four games in, produced a 443-foot home run at 112.2 mph to dead center that the MLB.com headline compared to Aaron Judge by name.
The Yankees' No. 6 prospect, studying Slade Cecconi's release point on an iPad before the game, instincts carrying him the rest of the way, hit a ball further than anyone has hit one all season at Progressive Field.
The Yankees needed that. The timing of the home run was not accidental in the narrative sense, it happened because Spencer Jones prepared for it and then executed. The Yankees will need more of it, because Aaron Judge is not coming back for a while and the best available replacement just showed the organization what he can do when the moment arrives.
It went 443 feet. It came off a 25-year-old with an iPad and a corner locker and a description of his own batter's box approach that nobody could argue with.
Instincts, baby.