Yankees Face Judge Dread

When Aaron Judge is healthy, he’s the most dangerous hitter in baseball. Sometimes I get alarmed at how uncontroversial a statement that is; ours is a sport that so frequently humiliates those who make such sweeping, unequivocal judgments as those.

But the empirical evidence is what it is. Judge has played 150 or more games in a season four times in his career. In those four seasons, he’s led all position players in WAR four times and led the league in wRC+ three times. He’s been named AL MVP three times and finished second once, ahead of some real doozies: Cal Raleigh’s 60-homer year, Bobby Witt Jr.’s 10.5-WAR campaign in 2024, Shohei Ohtani’s best pitching season — in fact, a healthy Judge is the only thing that’s ever trumped a healthy Ohtani in an MVP race.

So again, it’s not uncontroversial to say that when Judge is healthy he’s the best hitter in the world. He has not, however, always been healthy. Least of all this season, when he missed three months with a broken rib. And now, the single-season AL home run king is back on the IL with a calf strain. The timing could not be worse.

Judge last played on Wednesday, leaving open the option to activate him on Sunday for the final game of the regular season. That seems like a theoretical concern at the moment rather than a practical one. Our Matt Martell was at Yankee manager Aaron Boone’s pregame media availability on Tuesday morning, where Boone illustrated the inadequacy of a return-to-play timeline at this point in the season.

“We’re planning on [Judge] not being a part of [the Wild Card Series],” Boone said. “You hear all the time with injuries, we give ranges: two to four weeks, four to six. They’re ranges for a reason. We’re at a point in the year where, obviously, we’d push it a little bit if that was in play, but that’s a week away. I’m not expecting it, but I’m not ruling it out either.”

That’s the problem. A range of two weeks in recovery time isn’t a big deal in a six-month season, but even one week is twice as long as the Yankees’ entire first playoff round. And muscle injuries can be finicky to begin with — you go to bed one night feeling fine and wake up the next morning with weakness or stiffness.

For what it’s worth, the Yankees are technically still alive in the AL East race as of this writing, but you can forgive Boone for speaking as if the division is already lost.

Either way, in order to speed things along, Judge received a platelet-poor plasma (PPP) injection on Monday, not to be confused with a platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injection.

Now, apparently having read The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body as a child is not a sufficient qualification to perform surgery on live patients. At least, that’s what the police told me. But anyone who’s read that book can tell you the makeup of human blood: Red blood cells, which carry oxygen; white blood cells, which fight infection; platelets, which stop bleeding and heal wounds; and plasma, which is the broth all the other stuff floats around in.

PRP injections are a pretty common treatment for sports injuries, but taking the healing bits out of plasma seems kind of counterintuitive. Sort of like a vodka-poor screwdriver. But evidently PPP contains high levels of fibrinogen, which is itself a healing agent. Ms. Frizzle didn’t cover fibrinogen, but sure, I’ll buy it.

Unless the PPP works an actual miracle, though, it looks like the Yankees are going to have to navigate at least the first round of the playoffs without their best player.

And even if Judge does return — either in the Wild Card round or later, if the Yankees advance — I’d caution against assuming that we’d be seeing the best of him right off the proverbial bat. For starters, 99% of star athletes in history are going to try to force their way into the lineup for the playoffs regardless of whether they’re actually healthy.

To say nothing of the fact that Judge can be streaky. This is the nature of Judge’s unusual skill set; there are 1,073 hitters in major league history with at least 5,000 career plate appearances. Judge is the only one of those who’s produced one of the three true outcomes (home run, strikeout, walk) in more than half of his career plate appearances. (I’d like to express my immense gratitude to Adam Dunn, who has a career TTO% of 49.9, for making this fun fact possible.)

Living on the extremes, as he does, Judge will have weeks where he homers every night, and others where he goes 1-for-20 with 12 strikeouts. But you live with it because, over a long enough timeline, it works out heavily in his favor. Among hitters with at least 5,000 career plate appearances, Judge has the third-highest career wRC+, trailing only Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. If you wanted to go further than “best hitter now” and anoint Judge the best hitter ever, leaning heavily on the argument that quality of competition increases over time, you’d have a credible case.

But that’s not what the Yankees got out of Judge this year. In 66 regular-season games, he’s hit .241/.360/.511, with his highest strikeout rate (29.8%) since 2019 and lowest wRC+ (141) since 2020. In seven games since he returned from his rib injury, Judge was just 4-for-23 with one home run, one walk, and 13 strikeouts.

I’ve done enough of these injury reaction posts to figure out that they’re not really about the guy who got hurt, but about the teammates he’s leaving behind.

And I don’t want to underrate the value of Judge — even the version of Judge that has a 141 wRC+, rather than a 200 wRC+ — but the Yankees have done OK without him.

In the weakest American League field in decades, the Yankees are one of only two teams with a winning percentage of .550 or better. Entering their doubleheader with the Rays on Tuesday, the Yankees are still first in the AL in home runs (216) and second in runs scored per game (4.60). Even without Judge (or Giancarlo Stanton, for that matter), their lineup has plenty of beef.

Ben Rice in particular has been absolutely terrific this season. He’s fourth among qualified AL hitters in wRC+ and third in both home runs and runs scored. The Astros have AL MVP frontrunner Yordan Alvarez in their lineup; apart from him, is there any hitter in the AL bracket who’s been Rice’s equal this year? Maybe Junior Caminero? Willson Contreras, if you value OBP over raw power? Even if you’re being charitable, it’s a short list.

Now, past Rice, things get interesting, because if you want to talk about the Yankees’ offensive depth, you have to be able to hold multiple ideas in your head at once.

As of Tuesday morning, the Yankees have 11 hitters with double-digit home runs this season, which is tied for the most in the league. That’s just counting players who have hit 10 or more home runs in pinstripes, and the Yankees brought in substantial reinforcements midseason. Luis García Jr. has just seven homers for the Yankees but 30 overall. Heliot Ramos has four home runs in 32 games and 13 overall, with 20-plus in each of his previous two seasons. George Lombard Jr. has just five home runs in 37 major league games, but he hit 12 dingers in 78 minor league games before he got called up.

Count all this up and the Yankees have more hitters with at least decent pop than they can fit on the roster at once.

At the same time, Rice is the only Yankee with 20 home runs in pinstripes this year. So while this lineup is short on automatic outs, if Judge is out, there’s a massive drop-off after Rice.

If you take Judge out of the picture, Cody Bellinger is second on the Yankees in wRC+, at 119. The Rays don’t have anyone with 100 or more plate appearances and a better wRC+ than Rice this season, but they have four hitters (Caminero, Yandy Díaz, Jonathan Aranda, and Victor Mesa Jr.) with 100 or more plate appearances and a better wRC+ than Bellinger. So do the Rangers (Justin Foscue, Josh Jung, Joc Pederson, Wyatt Langford). The Astros have Alvarez, plus Isaac Paredes and Jeremy Peña. The White Sox have Miguel Vargas, Munetaka Murakami, and Tristan Peters.

As good as Rice has been, the Yankees’ lineup looks concerningly pedestrian without Judge. If you aren’t already a FanGraphs Member, please consider becoming one; it’s the only way to get trenchant original analysis like this.

The good news is that Judge’s calf injury runs counter to the rest of the team’s injury luck. Carlos Rodón, who missed almost three months with an elbow injury earlier this year, dominated the Rays in eight scoreless innings in Game 1 of a doubleheader on Tuesday. The same day, the Yankees activated Chisholm, who’d spent two weeks on the IL with a sprained thumb. Clarke Schmidt just returned from Tommy John surgery last week, and while he suffered biceps cramping in the bullpen on Sunday, it appears to be a minor setback. Trent Grisham remains a question mark for the start of the playoffs as he recovers from a hamstring injury, but his prognosis also looks good.

Judge is as important to the Yankees as any two or three other players put together, but with a healthy and deep rotation and Rice leading the way offensively, they’re not in bad shape. The remainder of this roster could easily survive and advance through a weaker AL bracket, setting the stage for a dramatically timed Judge return in mid-October. Like Kirk Gibson, only bigger.