Two future Baseball Hall of Famers went toe to toe on Monday and produced one of the most memorable games of the still-young 2026 MLB season, as Los Angeles Angels star Mike Trout and New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge traded blows and answered each other’s home runs at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, N.Y.
Fans will be talking about that duel for a long time, and it’s one Trout will remember as well, even though the Angels ended up losing the contest, 11-10.
“It was definitely a battle,” Trout said following the game, via Rhett Bollinger of MLB.com. “A fun one to be part of. The loss is disappointing, but we fought throughout the whole game and we battled back and had great at-bats all game from up and down the lineup. To go blow for blow like that back and forth with both teams, it’s pretty cool.”
Judge started the show with a monstrous 456-foot 2-run home run in the first inning. Trout would get his in the top of the sixth inning, tying the score at 7-7 with a 421-foot, 3-run dinger.
It did not take long before Judge responded to it with a solo homer that went 398 feet deep to put the Yankees in front, 8-7. Trout stepped up in the clutch again in the eighth frame with a 2-run blast to get the Halos a 10-8 lead.
Judge and the Yankees got the last laugh, however, with an anticlimactic walk-off win on a wild pitch by Angels closer Jordan Romano.
Trout and Judge surely lived up to the billing, and it’s what most of the fans could have asked for in a game like this on a random April night.
