Aaron Judge still hasn’t picked up a bat, and the Yankees keep handing over receipts on exactly what that costs them: a 19-21 record without their captain against a 36-23 mark with him in the lineup, according to Fox Sports.
Forty games worth of baseball, split almost evenly, and it plays out like two completely different teams wearing the same uniform.
That’s the surface problem. The deeper one is what this gap actually reveals about the roster underneath Judge — the Yankees don’t have a slump, they have a system problem, because nobody built a real answer for what happens when the best player in the sport can’t play. Take him out for seven weeks and you find out how much of this roster was just Judge, and then a cliff.
Since June 18, the Yankees have scored the second-fewest runs in baseball and struck out more than anybody else in the league, hitting .203 with runners in scoring position, 27th out of 30 teams. A lineup doesn’t fall off that hard by accident. It falls off like that when the guy hitting .248 with 17 homers, 38 RBI and a .908 OPS before he got hurt was doing more heavy lifting than anyone wanted to admit.
Judge is trying to sound optimistic about it. “It’s feeling better,” he said, via Fox Sports. “There were a couple of weeks that were tough, where I really couldn’t do a lot. Now we’re feeling ten times better.”
Good for him. But re-imaging at the All-Star break showed healing, not clearance, and Judge still can’t swing a bat or throw a ball, according to Yahoo Sports, which put it about as plainly as anyone has: “August remains possible, but it is only a possibility until Judge begins baseball work.”
https://twitter.com/FiresideYankees/status/2075249439564812770
Chris Kirschner’s been tracking every scan and update since June, and even he’s not circling a date on the calendar, because there isn’t one to circle.
Yahoo went further, and it’s the sentence Cashman has to actually operate around: “The Yankees cannot build their deadline around the optimistic version of an injury timeline.” Empire Sports Media used blunter language for the same idea — the front office has “no clean timetable” for Judge’s return.
Cashman’s own quote gives it away. “Clearly, you miss him,” he said. No kidding.
The fixes are sitting right there. New York’s catchers have combined for a .519 OPS this season, one of the worst marks in the league, and Ryan Jeffers of the Twins is a pending free agent who’d fix that overnight.
Land a bat like that and the Mason Miller rumors stop sounding like a pipe dream and start sounding like a front office that actually read its own record without Judge.
Cashman himself complicated that math this week. “There are so many teams in it, even sub-.500 teams,” he said. “Everybody’s in it, which creates, in theory, a paralysis. No one wants to trade from their big club.” A seller’s market with no sellers is a genuinely real problem, and it’s sitting right between the Yankees and August 3rd, with New York at 57-45 and the Rays ahead at 59-42.
Judge says he’s playing again this year. “Yeah, definitely. I don’t see why I wouldn’t,” he told MLB.com.
I want to believe him the way I want to believe the Jets when they’ve supposedly fixed the offensive line. Belief isn’t a roster move, and a 19-21 record without him doesn’t care how anybody’s feeling in late July.
