NEW YORK — Upon arriving at Yankee Stadium for Opening Day, Nestor Cortes Jr. wasn’t sure where to go. Maybe, considering his historically dreadful performance on Saturday in his Brewers debut, he should have stayed lost.
Facing his old club, Cortes surrendered back-to-back-to-back home runs on the first three pitches he threw in the bottom of the first inning. It was the first time in MLB history that a team went deep on three consecutive pitches to begin a game. Cortes allowed two more long balls before he was removed with no outs in the third.
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In all, the Yankees hit nine home runs during a 20-9 bludgeoning of the Milwaukee Brewers, breaking their franchise record for homers in a game. Aaron Judge, who went deep in his first three at-bats, missed becoming the 19th player in MLB history with a four-homer game by about 2 feet when he doubled off the wall in the sixth.
It was a momentous drubbing, a thorough dismembering, a home run derby disguised as a ballgame. And for Cortes, the afternoon was an embarrassing homecoming of epic proportions.
The former Yankee, dealt to Milwaukee in December, entered this Bronx ballyard no fewer than 300 times during his four-year stretch in pinstripes. Over that eventful tenure, Cortes went from anonymous fill-in reliever to cult-hero All-Star starter to postseason scapegoat. Undersized, with a slight paunch and a magic fastball, the crafty Cuban endeared himself to both clubhouse and fan base.
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But as the Brewers filed off the team bus Thursday morning, Cortes realized he was turned around; he hadn’t entered Yankee Stadium as a visitor since 2018. With his new club serendipitously beginning its 2025 season in the Bronx, this very familiar setting, suddenly inverted, proved perplexing.
“I didn’t know whether to turn right or left in the tunnel,” Cortes admitted to Yahoo Sports on Thursday, his short buzz cut dyed a striking hue of metallic silver.
If Cortes was disoriented on Thursday, the repeated exercise of contorting his neck to watch home runs zoom over his head on Saturday must’ve left him discombobulated beyond belief. The experience was so disheartening, in fact, that the pitcher left the stadium without addressing the media, a notable, frowned upon breach of postgame protocol.
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When Cortes allowed Freddie Freeman’s now famous walk-off grand slam in Game 1 of last year’s World Series, the bedraggled hurler owned it, answering question after question in the visiting clubhouse at Dodger Stadium. On Opening Day, wave after wave of Yankees reporters shuffled into the Brewers clubhouse to check in with Cortes. And for 20 minutes, he patiently held court, interacting with the people who used to cover him and explaining how bizarre it felt to be back in the Big Apple.
“Fun, competitive, exciting, all of the above,” Cortes responded when asked how he’d remember his time with the Yankees. “It was an honor to play for that team.”
Surely he’ll remember this most recent Yankees experience much, much differently.
During his stint with New York, Cortes succeeded thanks to the shape and command of his fastball. But from pitch one of his implosion Saturday, the southpaw had neither. His heater sat around 90 mph, down a few ticks from last year. More damningly, Cortes, who also walked five batters in the outing, failed to locate the pitch on the edges of the strike zone.
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“He’s a guy that’s gonna go out there and throw strikes and attack you,” Judge said after the game, “so we just tried to go out there and be aggressive in our zone.”
That aggression began with Paul Goldschmidt, leading off for the first time in his 15-year MLB career in his second game as a Yankee. The veteran first baseman pounced on an elevated heater and did not miss, cranking his first Yankees homer. Cody Bellinger, another offseason acquisition, followed suit one pitch later. A rowdy home crowd didn’t even have the opportunity to sit back down as Bellinger’s blast roared into the right-field bleachers.
And then Judge, the defending AL MVP, strolled to the plate.
“Goldie and Belli, they really set the table there and got things going,” Judge said afterward. “Man, the place was rocking once I walked up there.”
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Judge kept the noise coming, flattening a flat Cortes cutter 468 feet to left field for the seventh-longest homer of his career. It was the first of the three homers for Judge on the day and the third of the whopping nine for the Yankees, who came within one long ball of tying the all-time single-game record, set by the Toronto Blue Jays in 1987.
The most back-breaking blast of the afternoon was the fifth one. Milwaukee had clawed back into the game on a few Yankees errors and trailed just 4-3 entering the bottom of the second. But with two outs and two on, Cortes flopped a soggy cutter into Anthony Volpe’s wheelhouse. The young Yankees shortstop turned on the pitch, lofting it over the wall in left and ruining Cortes’ day once and for all. As Volpe rounded the sacks, Milwaukee’s demoralized pitcher strolled about the mound, frustratedly knocking dirt off his cleats.
Twenty minutes later, he was out of the game, headed toward the showers and who knows where. On Sunday, Cortes will trudge his exhausted self back to his house of horrors and face the music. Because while he would probably love to forget all about his catastrophic homecoming, that memory, much like his cherished time in the Bronx, will stay with him forever.
