World Series: Yankees anchor Aaron Judge has been weighing them down lately
LOS ANGELES
Aaron Judge occupied the far corner locker in the visitor’s clubhouse at Dodger Stadium, a dressing room more cramped than a Manhattan studio apartment, so the Yankees’ captain barely had space to breathe, never mind explain what’s wrong as the media crowded him after his team’s two World Series losses.
To his credit, Judge was among the first to address reporters and spoke extensively late Saturday night after the Yankees’ 4-2 loss to the Dodgers in Game 2. But while Judge was long on conversation, he provided little in the way of answers after again being a non-factor for the American League champs.
Judge whiffed three more times Saturday and is 1-for-9 with a single and six strikeouts in his first World Series appearance, making him far more of a problem than a solution as the Yankees return to the Bronx trying to rebound from an 0-2 deficit. The odds already are stacked against them, as teams in such a hole, for any seven-game series, have only a 16.3% success rate when it comes to rallying back to win.
The last World Series team to do so? The 1996 Yankees, who dropped the first two games in the Bronx before taking three straight in Atlanta and winning the title in six.
Historically speaking, there is precedent for the daunting task the Yankees face. But their percentage chance of pulling it off definitely plunges if Judge continues to be a zero in this series, just as he’s mostly been all October and for too much of his playoff career.
And Judge hasn’t provided any significant evidence that he’s on the verge of a turnaround. On the contrary, he looked even worse Saturday night, striking out twice against Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto and once against closer Blake Treinen.
He is 6-for-40 with 19 strikeouts in this postseason, far more than his 13 total bases through 11 games. Including Saturday, his career 34.3% strikeout rate is the highest among players with at least 210 plate appearances in the postseason.
“At times, I think it’s trying to make things happen instead of letting the game come to you,” Judge said Saturday night. “I think that’s what it really comes down to. You see Gleyber out there on base, Juan’s getting on base, making things happen, you want to make something happen. But if you’re not going to get a pitch in the zone, you’ve got to just take your walks and set up for Big G. Just plain and simple, I got to start swinging at strikes.”
This postgame ritual has become a painfully familiar feeling for Judge, who’s had too much experience dealing with brutal postseason defeats in his nine-year career and, before this October, premature exits by the Yankees. Many of those times, the conversation has involved Judge’s puzzling complicity in his team’s demise.
On Saturday night, in the first inning, Judge waved at Yamamoto’s full-count slider below the strike zone. In the sixth, he missed a splitter inside, off the plate. Finally, in the ninth, Treinen got him on another sweeper, and Judge was the first out of an inning in which the Yankees cut their deficit to 4-2 and left the bases loaded to end the game.
Judge not only is failing to chip in but has become the lineup’s easy out, the safe harbor for opposing pitchers. That’s hard to digest, both for him and the Yankees.
“Everybody wants to go out there and do their job,” said Clarke Schmidt, who’s no doubt hoping for the old Judge back when he takes the mound for Game 3 in the Bronx. “So when you feel like personally you might not be getting the job done, then maybe you want to try to do a little bit too much. I have full faith in him that he’s going to turn it around.”
But this isn’t June or July. The Yankees don’t have an abundance of time for that to happen. They’re two losses away from their title drought being extended to a 15th year. That’s got to be weighing on Judge’s mind, especially when he’s coming off such a brilliant season.
“It definitely eats at you,” he said. “You want to contribute and help the team, but that’s why you got to keep working, why you got to keep swinging. I can’t sit here and feel bad for myself. Nobody feeling bad for me, so you just gotta show up and do the work.”
Judge is almost certain to win his second American League MVP trophy after leading the planet in nearly every offensive category, including 58 home runs, 144 RBIs and a 1.159 OPS. But that’s a regular-season award, and it could not feel more insignificant this month, when even the tiniest postseason contributions attain legendary status.
And this October malaise is hardly a small sample size, as he s hitting .199 through 55 career postseason games. Judge does have 15 homers, tied with Babe Ruth for the fifth-most in Yankees history, but that total still feels empty when measured against his total postseason production.
And now that it’s happening again, with the Yankees in the World Series for the first time since 2009 and only the second time in two decades, Judge has become an outsized target for the team’s October failings. For a Yankee, never mind the five-ring Derek Jeter’s successor as captain, there’s no greater curse. And Judge seemed to be feeling it Friday night after tripping on the sport’s biggest stage.
“Just got to keep swinging,” he said.
Swinging hasn’t been the problem. Making an impact is the issue, and the Yankees are going to have trouble winning this World Series unless he bucks that trend.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.