On the eve of Friday afternoon’s home opener, Yankees captain Aaron Judge started to set the tone.
“He sent us a text late last night, saying, ‘Hey, [wear] suits tomorrow,’” first baseman Ben Rice said. “Everybody was fired up.”
So the players all showed up to Yankee Stadium dressed in suits, then handled their business with an 8-2 victory over the Miami Marlins.
True to form, it was Judge who set the tone for the Yankees (6-1) on the field, too.
After the Marlins scored a run in the top of the first inning, Judge responded with a two-run home run in the bottom of the frame, sending a hanging slider from Miami’s Eury Pérez deep into the left-field stands.
The 387-foot blast put the Yankees up, 2-1 — a lead they never relinquished.
“The biggest thing was just answering back,” Judge said. “They came out swinging, got a run on us. [Trent Grisham] had a great at-bat in front of me [and walked], and I’m just trying to do my job, which is try to get him over, or if you get a good pitch, to drive it.”
It was the third home run of the season for Judge, the back-to-back American League MVP.
Judge finished 2-for-3 with three RBI, a walk and a stolen base. It was his first multi-hit game of 2026 after a season-opening six-game road trip in which Judge went 3-for-24 with 11 strikeouts.
“Really good answer to them putting a run up on the board there in the first,” manager Aaron Boone said of Judge’s homer. “Grabbed the lead right back, and I think it allowed Will [Warren] to get in a good rhythm, too.”
In his second start of the season, Warren limited the plucky Marlins (5-2) to two runs in 5.2 innings and struck out six without a walk.
Between solo home runs by Xavier Edwards and Owen Caissie, the 26-year-old Warren retired 12 batters in a row. Warren improved to 1-0 with a 2.70 ERA.
“Solo homers aren’t going to beat us,” Warren said after his first-ever start in an MLB opener, home or otherwise. “I think if we attack early, the odds are in our favor.”
Yankees starters have allowed two runs or fewer in each of their first seven games, marking the second such instance in team history — and the first since 1911.
Opponents this season have totaled only eight runs against the Yankees, an average of 1.1 runs per game.
“Clean baseball and great starting pitching,” Judge said. “It’s a pretty easy recipe right there when you’ve got those two things working for you.”
The eight runs marked a season high for the Yankees’ offense, which scored twice in the bottom of the second despite not recording a hit in the inning.
Pérez issued four walks in the frame, including one to Grisham with the bases loaded. He also plunked Judge with the bases loaded to force in another run.
The Yankees stole five bases Friday, including three in that second inning.
“Pérez is really good, and we made him work,” Boone said. “We were able to manufacture a couple of runs. We got the running game going a little bit. But it was our patience today that really served us well.”
Rice helped the Yankees pad their lead late, hitting a solo home run in the seventh inning and adding a two-run double in the eighth.
Those hits came after Rice struck out in his first three at-bats.
“We’re finding different ways to score runs,” Judge said. “Especially when our pitching staff is doing what they’ve been doing the past couple of games, it makes it easy on us as an offense. … If we do that over 162 [games] and into the postseason, good things are going to happen.”
Friday’s win served as a continuation of the Yankees’ season-opening road trip, on which they swept the San Francisco Giants and took two out of three from the Seattle Mariners.
They’ll look to continue their winning ways on Saturday night, with hard-throwing left-hander Ryan Weathers (0-0, 2.08 ERA) scheduled to make his second start for the Yankees.
The Yankees acquired Weathers — a former first-round pick and the son of David Weathers, who pitched for their 1996 championship team — from Miami in the offseason for a package of four minor-leaguers.
Miami is set to counter with right-hander Max Meyer (0-0, 5.40 ERA), a former top prospect.
“It’s early, but you love the fact that you get off to this kind of start,” Boone said. “Because wins are precious.”
