Yankees Rain Delay: Aaron Judge's bizarre dropped fly ball clouds outcome

UPDATE: As of 9:45 PM EST, the tarp is coming off the field. We'll have baseball again on this funky evening. Probably a lot of it.

The New York Yankees, sitting pretty having taken the first two games of their home set with the Minnesota Twins, opted to use Thursday's finale to both experiment and give a breather to some of their key pieces.

DJ LeMahieu, heavily taxed since returning from the IL, gave way to Oswaldo Cabrera at third base. Made sense. Cabrera might be an upgrade anyway, at the moment, despite residing on the bench.

More bizarrely, Alex Verdugo found himself out of the lineup for the first time in forever, one night after sprinting towards the wall to corral a deep fly ball and clattering into it just a touch. Was he feeling it the next day? Not according to Aaron Boone. Either way, he opted to slot Trent Grisham into center field and move Aaron Judge into left field, a position he's played three times in his career (never at Yankee Stadium).

How'd it go? Some good; he caught the first out of the game, cosmically. Unfortunately, he also let a ball bounce in the top of the fifth inning, giving up on a fair ball a la Aaron Hicks. Reliever Ian Hamilton then let up an additional run with two outs, meaning that Judge's blunder led directly to an unofficial "unearned" run. If he'd caught it, the fourth run would've scored on a sac fly regardless. The third run of the inning, sadly, never would've seen the light of day.

Yankees Rain Delay: Aaron Judge's dropped fly ball clouds outcome

Hamilton knifed his way out of the inning, and the Yankees even tacked one on in the bottom of the fifth on a Trent Grisham (that guy!) sac fly.

Unfortunately, the strangeness of the Judge moment was too powerful, and the rains came ... immediately. When the camera panned back from commercials in the top of the sixth, the tarp was being unfurled on a storm-filled day in the Bronx.

Updates to follow as we get them. The timing was fairly unfortunate for Judge, who probably didn't want to stew on his strange blunder any longer.