For the second time in the past eight days, the Yankees popped champagne bottles and celebrated — but this time, on Thursday night following their 10-1 victory over the Orioles, the party in their clubhouse followed an AL East title.
The Yankees won the division for the second time in three years with the win against Baltimore, but unlike last week, when their victory and celebration for securing a playoff berth on Sept. 18 occurred on the road, they were in The Bronx.
So, with a familiar backdrop, the Yankees popped bottle after bottle — with the boxes tossed into a garbage container in a hallway underneath Yankee Stadium — of champagne and Budweiser.
At one point during the celebration, Juan Soto — celebrating a division title in his first, and potentially lone, season with the Yankees — and Gleyber Torres jumped next to one another and poured bubbly on their heads.
In another clip shared by the team, manager Aaron Boone appeared to say, “Go get after it” before the bottles were popped and Yankees players, with goggles on, sprayed each other.
“We’re gonna party hard, so I might take a day off,” Aaron Judge, who hit his 58th homer of the season during the win, told MLB Network on the field while cracking a smile. “We’ll see.”
Then, the Yankees took their celebration back onto the field for a team photo, donning T-shirts that read “We own the East” as the scoreboard behind them reflected that they were, in fact, AL East champions.
After the Yankees won the AL East title in 2022, barely holding off a late-season push from the Rays, they failed to make the postseason altogether last year.
But they used another strong start in 2022 to overcome a midseason lull and enter the final weekend of the season with a chance to clinch the AL’s top seed.
The Yankees have a magic number of two to clinch that best record, with their three-game set against the Pirates beginning Friday.
