The Yankees Worst Nightmare: An Aaron Judge Injury

What a horrible series, what a horrible week for the Yankees. They lost five of seven games, plus their best player and as April comes to a close, are in dire straits. Warning: This is a cranky newsletter today, though you’re probably used to that. Hope you enjoy Chapter 4 of Hardball Hyperbole Wednesday.

Did I not tell you in last Thursday’s newsletter that bad news was likely coming on Aaron Judge? Listen to uncle Sal, he knows all. Then again, it really wasn’t much of a stretch, right?

There was never a doubt in my mind that when Judge walked off the field Wednesday in Minnesota after getting thrown out stupidly - and I do mean stupidly - trying to steal third base, he was hurt and he was going to miss time. Never a doubt. He’s a Yankee. Of course he was hurt.

And sure enough, after the momentary surprise of seeing him in the lineup Thursday to start this series in Texas, he struck out swinging in his second at bat, felt a problem with his hip - weird because it looked like he hurt his wrist or hand on that awful slide in Minnesota - and he had to come out of the game.

“It wasn’t until the second-to-last swing that at-bat, I kind of felt something grab,” Judge said. “They kind of thought it’d be best to shut it down and see how we feel after a couple days and then get back in there.”

Indeed, Judge sat out the rest of the series, during which he underwent an MRI to determine the extent of the problem. He said it’s not a big deal, and Aaron Boone said it doesn’t seem serious. OK, if you believe that, well, I have a war zone piece of property in Ukraine you may be interested in buying.

And now we have the ultimate nightmare. Judge is absolutely the one player they could not afford to lose because without him this team’s offense is hopeless, as we’ve seen. It was terrible even with Judge, but without him, it’s a bottom five lineup. It’s sad watching these games and knowing they’re not gonna score. If their pitching staff makes a couple mistakes, hell, even one mistake which is all Jhony Brito made Saturday, it’s game over.

How long Judge will be out remains a mystery because the Yankees haven’t put him on the 10-day injured list. They’re holding out hope that he’ll feel better and be able to play this week against Cleveland, so no IL as of Sunday, but I have my doubts. They’re not rushing him back, even though they are already on the verge of being irrelevant in the AL East one month into the season.

➤ If you don’t believe this team is cursed, I offer you poor Jake Bauers. With the Judge injury, plus the demotion of the truly horrible Franchy Cordero the Yankees needed a body, and Bauers had been raking down in Scranton. He was slashing .304/.448/.797 with nine homers and 20 RBI so he was called up and Cordero was sent down for what we hoped would be forever.

“What he’s doing at Triple-A right now has been phenomenal,” Boone said of Bauers Friday. “He’s earned that opportunity to at least be in this position to be truly considered and he’s done that with his performance.”

The 27-year-old outfielder/first baseman has spent time with the Rays, Guardians, and Mariners before signing as a free agent with the Yankees in December in the hope that he could rehabilitate his career after once being a top 100 prospect. This had the potential to be a good thing for the Yankees, until he stepped on the field for the first time Saturday and the baseball gods remembered what team he now plays for.

Before the first inning was even over, before he’d even had an at-bat, Bauers made a tremendous catch in left field but crashed into the wall and hurt his knee. Out of the game he came. Sunday, Cordero was back on the team and Bauers was headed to the IL. You can’t make this shit up with this team. Never in my life have I seen a baseball team incur more injuries than the Yankees of the last three or four years. No one is immune.

➤ Harrison Bader’s rehab stint is not going well. Between Double-A Somerset and Triple-A Scranton he’s 3-for-25, which means he’ll fit right in when he returns. The thing we need to remember with Bader, he’s a great defender, but he’s not a great hitter. His home run binge last year in the playoffs was highly unusual for him.

➤ The Yankees scored eight runs on 24 hits in the four games. They now rank 23rd in runs scored (116), 27th in hits (212), 26th in batting average (.226) and on-base percentage (.299) and 24th in OPS (.677).

➤ The last time the Yankees gave up 15 runs was on Aug. 15, 2019. That was a game that Chad Green started as an opener, and position player Mike Ford pitched two innings and gave up five runs.

➤ This is the first time the Yankees are in last place at the end of April since 2016. They have not won more than two games in a row yet this season. “Tough trip. Tough league. Adversity’s coming for us,” Boone said. “We know it and we will get through it. But the league waits for no one and no one’s going to feel sorry for us for what we’re going through.”

Here are my observations on the four games against the Rangers.

April 27: Yankees 4, Rangers 2

➤ Gerrit Cole has been incredible this season. He’s been so good that he survived yet another Aaron Hicks screw up in the outfield, dropping a ball almost anyone else in MLB would have caught. At this point, I can’t wait to find out what Hicks is blackmailing Hal Steinbrenner with in order to keep his roster spot. It must be something spectacular. When Hicks blew this latest play, Cole couldn’t hide his disgust as he just threw his head back as if to say, “Dude, what the living hell are you doing?”

➤ Back to Cole. He went 6.2 innings and the only reason he gave up two runs in the sixth inning was because he dropped a throw covering first base which, had he caught, would have completed an inning-ending double play. One run scored on that, and Ezequiel Duran’s RBI single right after made it 3-2 before Cole got out of the inning. He’s now 5-0 with a 1.11 ERA.

➤ The Yankees jumped on former Yankee Andrew Heaney for three runs in the second as Gleyber Torres and DJ LeMahieu hit back-to-back homers, and after they loaded the bases, Anthony Volpe singled home a run. Unfortunately, Judge and Anthony Rizzo both struck out with the bases loaded or it would have been a very big inning. And then, the Yankees didn’t get another hit until the seventh, and didn’t score again until the ninth when Jose Trevino hit an insurance solo homer.

➤ Michael King took over for Cole with two outs in the seventh and was great as he finished off a seven-out save allowing just a walk. King has been nails almost all year. Solid win, despite the dark cloud of the Judge injury which pretty much ruined the night.

BOX SCORE

April 28: Rangers 5, Yankees 2

➤ I’m not sure there’s been a game in recent memory where the Yankees had less of a chance to win than this one. Without Judge, plus with Volpe getting the night off, the lineup was just laughable. And then you factor in that it was facing Texas ace Jacob deGrom? I mean, are you kidding me? As if that wasn’t enough, Clarke Schmidt was pitching! Zero chance of winning. Less than zero, and I tweeted out before it started that deGrom could very well throw a no-hitter.

➤ I was looking prophetic for a while as deGrom retired the first 10 men he faced, but then he walked Rizzo and gave up a single to Willie Calhoun, and his night was over. He felt forearm tightness and they took him out, and now he’s on the injured list. If there is a player more fragile than Giancarlo Stanton, it’s deGrom. This guy could be a perfect Yankee with all the injuries he’s had. Anyway, even with deGrom out, the Yankees had no chance because Schmidt sucked once again. He gave up five runs on 10 hits and a walk in just five innings. He must have had whiplash watching the Rangers rip shots all over the place. Just brutal. The Yankees are now 1-5 in games Schmidt starts.

➤ By the end of the night Hicks and Cordero were a combined 3-for-47 (.064) with 19 strikeouts over the Yankees’ last 15 games. Unbelievable that they still have roster spots. A friend of mine who’s a Red Sox fan just learned that Cordero was on the Yankees and he said, “Good luck with that.” It’s bad enough how awful a hitter he is, but he botched two more plays in the outfield in this game. The Yankees outfield is the worst in MLB and it’s not even close. If I bothered to check, I’d probably find that it would be one of the worst in Triple-A, too.

BOX SCORE

April 29: Rangers 2, Yankees 0

➤ I guess I was wrong about which game the Yankees had less than zero chance of winning. It was this one because ex-Yankee Nathan Eovaldi dominated them, embarrassed them. He pitched a complete game three-hit shutout with no walks, eight strikeouts, and it took just 113 pitches. The Yankees got a man to second base once all night, and there might have been two balls that were hit hard. Two of the three hits were infield singles, and one of those was an error by Rangers second baseman Marcus Semien who must have paid off the official scorer to rule it a hit. Eovaldi’s ERA was 5.20 at the start of the night and 3.93 by the end.

➤ Brito pitched well, but he made one mistake, and that’s all it takes now for the Yankees to lose a game because their offense is so hopeless. He left a pitch over the plate in the fifth inning and Duran hit it 431 feet to left for a two-run homer, the only runs of the game. Does Duran’s name sound familiar? He was a Yankee prospect until last July when Brian Cashman sent him to Texas as part of the Joey Gallo trade. Nice, huh? I’m sure Duran enjoyed that trip around the bases.

➤ Besides Bauers’ great catch, believe it or not, Hicks - who replaced Bauers in left - made a great one, too. He and Isiah Kiner-Falefa tracked a ball to the wall in left-center, both reached up as they narrowly missed crashing into each other, and somehow the ball ended up in Hicks’ glove. Even the blind squirrel finds the nut every once in a while.

BOX SCORE

April 30: Rangers 15, Yankees 2

➤ There’s really nothing to say. Just a total meltdown, an utterly deplorable day to end a deplorable four-day stay in Texas where the Yankees lost three games and their best player.

➤ Nestor Cortes had his worst start since coming back to the Yankees in 2021 - seven earned runs in less than five innings. He had nothing, and you saw that right away. He loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the first and served up a grand slam to Josh Jung. And then in the fifth he walked his fourth batter of the game and then gave up back-to-back homers to Nathaniel Lowe and Adolis Garcia to make it 7-1.

➤ Albert Abreu then burst into flames as he gave up a solo homer to Jonah Heim, the third one of the inning, before saving his worst for the sixth when, with two outs, he was charged with four runs, helped by Nick Ramirez who relieved him and allowed three of the runs to score on his watch.

BOX SCORE

➤ April 27, 1982: Following the 1981 season when the Yankees lost the World Series to the Dodgers and his contract expired, Reggie Jackson left the Yankees and signed a free agent contract with the California Angels, ending a rather remarkable five-year tenure in the Bronx.

Always a man for the moment, Jackson returned to Yankee Stadium on this day for the first time as a visitor and he did it in dramatic fashion, homering off former teammate Ron Guidry to lift the Angels to a 3-1 rain-shortened victory.

Jackson was struggling mightily to start the ’82 season and entered the series against the Yankees slashing .173/.279/.173. But in the top of the seventh inning, he crushed a pitch from Guidry into the right field upper deck. The crowd, still smarting over the team’s decision to let him walk, gave Reggie a standing ovation and he responded with a curtain call. Chants of “Reg-gie’ soon gave way to “Steinbrenner sucks.” In later years, Steinbrenner himself would say letting Jackson leave was one of his biggest regrets as owner.

However, the business decision wasn’t a dumb one. Jackson was 35 years old at the time and the Yankees were clearly not interested in bringing him back, especially when he insisted that he remain as the regular right fielder. When the Angels promised to give him that opportunity he changed coasts and wound up spending six seasons in Anaheim and hitting another 123 homers to get to 563 for his career.

The Yankees are now 15-14 and tied for last place in the AL East, eight games behind the Rays.

➤ Tampa Bay 23-6: The Rays took two of three from the White Sox, but Sunday was sure a glorious day. Chicago, riding a 10-game losing streak, blew a 4-2 lead when the Rays scored five in the eighth. Ultimately, the Rays led 9-5 going to the bottom of the ninth when the Sox scored seven runs to win, the last three on an Andrew Vaughn walk-off homer. Tampa leads MLB with 61 home runs, and it leads MLB in just about every other hitting and pitching category. Next up for the most annoying team in baseball, three games against the Pirates who incredibly have the best record in the NL, so this is a matchup on paper of the two best teams in baseball.

➤ Baltimore 18-9 (4 GB): The Orioles took three of four from the Tigers, finishing it off with a 5-3 victory Sunday when they hen-pecked Detroit to death scoring one run in five different innings. I sure with the Yankees could do that! Baltimore has now won six straight series and is proving it is for real. Yennier Cano extended his streak of at bats without allowing a hit or a walk to 32. That’s unbelievable. “I can’t even describe it,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “Has anybody ever seen that? Nope, so it’s indescribable.” Their tour against shitty teams continues with three in Kansas City.

➤ Toronto 18-10 (4.5 GB): The Jays took two of three from the disappointing Mariners, but like the Rays, they blew a game Sunday. They were down 4-0 in the top of the first, rallied to go up 8-4 by the third, but then allowed Seattle to tie it in the ninth and win it in the 10th on Cal Raleigh’s second homer of the game. That loss snapped a six-game winning streak for Toronto who now goes to Boston for four games.

➤ Boston 15-14 (8.0 GB) : The Red Sox took two of three from Cleveland, walking it off on Saturday on an Alex Verdugo hit in the 10th, then rolling behind Chris Sale Sunday. Sale is starting to figure things outs so that’s not good. He gave up one run on three hits in 6.1 innings in a 7-1 victory while Verdugo homered and drove in three runs. They host the Jays for four.

The Yankees limp home after their 2-5 road trip to face the Guardians (13-14) for three games starting Monday. The defending AL Central champions haven’t exactly lit the world on fire either this season as they’ve lost nine of their last 13 games, and they’ve been outscored by 17 runs this season. The difference is they’re still in second place and are only 3.5 games behind Minnesota.

Their offense is even worse than the Yankees as they rank 28th in OPS (.664) ahead of only the Tigers and Royals and they have hit just 17 home runs this year, second-worst in MLB ahead of only the Nationals who have 15.

As of now, the pitching matchups: Monday at 7:05 p.m. on YES, it’s Domingo German (5.54 ERA) vs. Cal Quantrill (5.40). Tuesday at 7:05 on YES, Gerrit Cole (1.11) vs. Tanner Bibee (1.59) who just made his MLB debut last week and beat the Rockies. And Wednesday is a 7:05 Amazon Prime game pitting Clarke Schmidt (6.84) against Shane Bieber (3.11), so that should go well for the Yankees.