KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The Yankees finally got the game they were waiting for from Aaron Judge. It just wasn’t from Aaron Judge.

It was from the original mammoth edition: ‘I can’t believe how hard and far he just hit that ball’. Because while Judge continues to try to figure out how to rise again this month, Giancarlo Stanton is showing – regardless of the long injury history and extended slumps he may experience from April through September – that there is a certain Mr. October is in him.

“This is what I came here for,” Stanton explained why he delivers this time of year.

Judge had better at-bats in Wednesday’s Game 3. He hit a liner in the first inning at 114.4 mph with an expected batting average of .860, but Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. caught him with a jump. The right just missed a ball that still shot to deep left. He should have walked in the seventh, but a check swing that wasn’t a swing was called a strike. And he did run in the ninth.

But at the end of the day, Judge is still 1-for-11 in this series and hitting .203 in 47 career playoff games. Additionally, he was part of a top four lineup – with Gleyber Torres, Juan Soto and Austin Wells – that went 0-for-15.

It further burdened the No. 5 hitter. Stanton responded with a 184.1 mph RBI double in the fourth. He singled and – seriously, don’t go for an eye exam – stole a base in the sixth. And with the game tied and one out in the eighth, he crushed a 450-foot Kris Bubic slider.

That was the difference in a 3-2 Yankees win over the Royals that pushes them within a win of advancing to the ALCS.

“From his first at-bat to his last at-bat, I could see how locked in he was,” Jazz Chisholm Jr. said.

Stanton started closing in long before his first at-bat. In an empty stadium, Stanton came out alone to get extra work out of a machine that can deliver MLB-style fastballs and sliders, something coach James Rowson touched on saying he likes to do occasionally. Stanton said he wanted to get a good feel for the batting background at Kauffman Stadium and also practice spraying it around the yard.

“I’m telling you, one of the biggest things that has hit me this first year working with (Stanton), from the beginning, is seeing how much he cares,” Rowson said.

Stanton, with an MVP and a contract worth over $300 million and (at least) an outside chance of 500 home runs, has nevertheless been relegated this season with so much focus on the Soto-Judge duo. Additionally, Stanton served more IL time and sometimes looked like an older jogger while protecting his oft-injured legs while running the bases.

What remained the same was that when his bat hit the ball squarely, he moved at speeds and distances that perhaps only Judge can truly comprehend.

And now he’s back to his time of year. Stanton has a .964 OPS and 12 home runs in 30 playoff games.

“He’s so good at locking in these big plays,” Aaron Boone said. “He has done it with us his entire career. He can just really concentrate from field to field. I thought that at bat off Bubic was simply phenomenal. I think he went there to cause damage and wanted to do exactly that.”

The consequences of that swing were great. The Royals had spent most of this series beating the Yankees. The best-of-five was tied at 1-1 in games and 2-2 in the eighth inning of Game 3. The Yanks were on their way to going 4-for-4 among the upper seeds in the Division Series and lost by 1- 2. And that would take a loss away from the Yankees as they could account for more failures in October.

But they conquered. It certainly looked like Torres had dumped a hit that hit the foul line in right field, which should have made it two with two outs in the third inning. But a real right-field umpire missed it and the replay center upheld it with what seemed like unclear, cluttered replays that made your family’s old home movies play like Spielberg.

Chisholm, for the offense of calling the Royals “lucky” after a Kansas City Game 2 victory in The Bronx, was booed as someone who got an illegal hit on Patrick Mahomes, a minority owner of the Royals who was at Game 3.

The Yanks actually had a lot of good at-bats – especially Anthony Volpe and Oswaldo Cabrera – and a successful sac-bunt from Alex Verdugo and Stanton’s shocking steal. But they went 1-for-13 with men on base, reaffirming that these Yankees simply have trouble scoring when they’re not hitting the ball out of the park.

So Stanton knocked it out of the park.

“You come into the game and understand that,” Stanton said of understanding the swing between 2-1 ahead or 1-2 behind. “And then I just have to focus, laser focus on the at-bat, and good things will happen from there.”

Good things happened again for Stanton in October. He’s been here before and excelled. So when he meets the moment – ​​and the ball with ferocity – you know it’s not one thing:

Happy.