Who is this guy, anyway?
Yankees giant rookie sensation Judge goes from awesome to awful in second half, and it’s unclear why
NEW YORK — Who is Aaron Judge?
On the morning of July 14, the opening day Major League Baseball’s second half, the answer was easy. Judge, the New York Yankees’ six-foot-seven, 285-pound mountain of a right fielder, was the best, most exciting slugger in baseball, the majorleague home-run leader with 30, the newly crowned Home Run Derby champ, the focal point of the just-concluded all-star game in Miami, the player widely referred to that week — perhaps with premature certitude and an overwrought narrative — as the new face of baseball.
And, on Wednesday afternoon, some six weeks later, it was also an easy answer, at least on a micro level.
Judge, 25, is now a struggling rookie with a .181 batting average and 67 strikeouts in 149 at-bats in the second half, a slugger who still possesses massive power but who also has large holes in his swing that have been exposed in recent weeks.
He is an everyday player dealing with everyday-player injuries: a banged-up shoulder and a sore knee. He is a guy in need of a break, which is why Judge rode the bench for a third straight game Wednesday, as the Yankees played the first game of a doubleheader against the Cleveland Indians, before being back in the lineup for the second game.
“I’ve been going stir crazy,” Judge said Wednesday morning of his unsolicited, three-game breather.
He is also an important part of the Yankees, a foundational player, a cornerstone, as the team moves into a critical point in their season.
After being swept by the Indians on Wednesday, the Yankees’ once sizeable lead for the first American League wild card is down to one game over the Minnesota Twins, and two games over the Los Angeles Angels. They are one more bad series away from falling out of a playoff spot, as the season heads into its final month.
Four days before, the Yankees had cut the Boston Red Sox lead in the American League East to 2½ games but, after dropping three straight to the surging Indians this week, the Yankees find themselves 5½ games behind their division rivals, as the Red Sox arrived at Yankee Stadium on Thursday for the first of four head-to-head games. The series will have the air of last chances for the Yankees — unlike many past seasons, when the rivals would meet a couple of more times in September, these four games over Labour Day weekend will conclude New York’s 19-game season series with the Red Sox.
“At this point in the season, you’re going to be able to say those are the most important games of the season,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said of the Red Sox series, “because we won’t run into them, and (with) where we are in the standings.”
Since the start of the second half, the Yankees have averaged just 4.5 runs per game, down a full run from their first-half production. Not all of that is Judge’s fault, of course. Veteran designated hitter Matt Holliday, a middle-of-the-order stalwart in the first half, has been on the disabled list for much of the second half but is expected back this weekend. Third baseman Todd Frazier, a trade-deadline acquisition from the Chicago White Sox, has not contributed much to the offence since his arrival. And outfielders Aaron Hicks and Jacoby Ellsbury have both slumped in the second half.
“Everyone has to carry their weight,” Girardi said, separating Judge’s struggles from that of the entire offence. “If you’re relying on one guy, it’s going to be a long year.”
But few players have ever experienced the highs of Judge’s first half and the lows of his second half all in the same season. The dichotomy has been striking: an OPS of 1.139 in the first half, .691 in the second. A homerun-to-flyball rate of 41.7 per cent in the first half, 17.5 per cent in the second. A batting average on balls in play (BABIP) — an indication of both a batter’s luck and the quality of his contact — of .426 in the first half (among the highest in the game), .263 in the second (among the lowest in the game). At one point this summer, he struck out at least once in 37 straight games, a major-league record for position players.
“I’m missing my pitch,” Judge told reporters last week.
“They’re leaving some over the plate. Earlier in the year, I wasn’t missing those. I was putting those in play. I’d put it in the gap, put a good swing on it. The past four weeks, I’m fouling those pitches off. … Before you know it, you’re always (behind in the count), instead of being on the attack. So I just can’t miss my pitch. That’s the biggest thing.”
The extreme fluctuations — which actually go all the way back to Judge’s awful, abbreviated 2016 call-up, when he hit just .179 and struck out in half of his 84 at-bats — have made it much more difficult to answer the elemental question posed above: Who is Aaron Judge as a baseball player?
Perhaps the real answer lies somewhere in between the extreme highs and lows, at right about his career numbers to this point: a .264/.390/.541 slash line, and 41 homers and 218 strikeouts in 154 games. (Remember, too: Those were the first 154 games of his big-league career. Few players are a finished product at that point.)
The Yankees would probably take those numbers for eternity, as only 12 players in the game (minimum: 500 plate appearances) have a higher OPS than Judge’s .931 over the past two seasons combined. Despite hitting just three homers so far in August, and none in the past two weeks, he still leads the AL with 37.
He remains the likely winner of the AL rookie of the year.
But Judge’s youth, his highly regarded makeup, and the way he adjusted after his struggles of 2016 to become the most feared hitter in the game for the first half of ’17, also gives the Yankees licence to be greedy when it comes to his future — to hope he will ultimately be closer to the Judge of June ’17 than the Judge of September ’16 or August ’17.
“I still believe in him,” Girardi told reporters last week.
Wednesday also brought additional insight into Judge’s health, raising the possibility his second-half struggles have been at least partly injury related. After weeks of insisting he is physically fine, while making no attempt to hide the frequent postgame ice pack on his shoulder, Judge finally confirmed the obvious: He is banged up, with his shoulder in bad enough shape to have warranted internal discussions — but so far only that — of a cortisone shot to deal with the pain.
“You can go around this whole clubhouse and ask everybody — they’re all kind of beat up. Everybody’s beat up,” Judge said. “We’ve been playing every day since April. … My whole body’s just kind of beat up. I think it’s just part of the grind of the season, just kind of your body wearing down. You have to make adjustments and fight through it.”
Girardi confirmed the internal discussions about a cortisone shot for Judge’s shoulder, but added: “I believe his struggles are mechanical (and) have nothing to do, in our mind, with his shoulder. … He feels pretty good about it, so I feel pretty good about it. The couple days off probably helped that.”
On Wednesday afternoon, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of the first game of the doubleheader — and the Yankees trailing by a run — a wave of applause washed over Yankee Stadium when Judge was announced as a pinch hitter, his first trip to the plate since Sunday.
After getting ahead in the count 3-1 against Indians closer Cody Allen, Judge chased a low curveball, then a high fastball, both out of the strike zone, and struck out to end the game. When the Yankees’ lineup for Game 2 was posted, Judge was in it, batting fourth.
The late-afternoon shadows had begun to creep across the infield when the game got underway, and by the time the sky was dark, the Yankees had lost another game and Judge, 1 for 3 with a single, a walk and a strikeout, had come no closer to answering the question on many peoples’ minds: Who is he at this point?
With the Red Sox in town and the Yankees’ division-title hopes on the line, this would be a good time for Judge to provide the answer New York wants to hear.