Judge is days away from a swing test
NEW YORK — Aaron Judge took a seat in the back of the Oakley Store in Manhattan on Friday morning to promote his new endorsement deal for its eyewear.
But this was Day 15 of the Aaron Judge wrist watch, as in: When will his chip fracture be healed so the New York Yankees right-fielder can start swinging again?
So the first question from the media was about the state of the Judge’s right wrist. It’s still out of order from the errant pitch thrown by the Royals’ Jakob Junis at Yankee Stadium on July 26, but Judge appears to be getting closer to picking up a baseball bat. The Yankees originally said it would be about three weeks before he could swing again in a game situation.
“The wrist, it’s feeling all right,” Judge said. “It could be better. But I’m still right on track. Hopefully, I’ll swing the bat here in the next couple of days, next week, at sometime. We don’t have a timetable on that yet. But I know pretty shortly we should start ramping it up and get going, get swinging again.”
Judge had a .285/.398/.548 batting slash line with 26 homers and 61 RBIs in 99 games when he went down. The Yankees dropped six of their next nine, capped by getting swept across four games in Boston.
But they have won four in a row after opening an 11-game homestand with a win against Texas on Thursday night to move back to 30 games above .500 at 72-42 entering Friday.
That Boston massacre seemed to take the Yankees out of Major League Baseball’s American League East race. They were eight games behind the Red Sox heading into Friday night’s games. But Judge refuses to concede the division.
“August just started,” Judge said. “We’ve still got August and September. A lot of crazy things can happen. So for us, our goal has always been the division. It doesn’t matter how many games we’re back. We’re going to keep still fighting for that because we’ve got a good team.”