Aaron Judge is off to a slow start. But maybe, just maybe, it's just that. A slow start.
“What’s wrong with Aaron Judge?”
“Where is the consistent power?”
“Is he hiding an injury?”
Frequent questions surrounding the All-Star outfielder — back in April 2022.
You, as Casey Stengel’s now well-worn cliché goes, could look it up.
Judge, then entering his walk year and having just before the season opener turned down the Yankees' seven-year, $213.5 million contract extension offer, came out of the April gate slow.
After 13 games, Judge, who in a forgotten part of that season heard from his share of hecklers in the rightfield crowds at Yankee Stadium, was hitting .255 with one homer and a .744 OPS.
Judge soon enough was on his way to a historic season, one that saw him hit an American League-record 62 homers while making a legitimate run at the Triple Crown and winning the MVP in a runaway.
He parlayed that into his current nine-year, $360 million contract.
Another forgotten part of 2022?
In 30 games from June 12-July 15, Judge also wasn’t very good, going 23-for-115 (.200) with seven homers, but also with a .287 on-base percentage and a .704 OPS.
All of which — and this is not the popular way to go for creating click-bait headlines or offering knee-jerk hot takes on social media — is to put into perspective an established player’s struggles not even 20 games into the 162-game season and the foolishness of trying to draw grand conclusions from them.
“You just can’t look at that stuff,” Judge told Newsday of his early numbers on Wednesday morning in Toronto.
Good or bad.
Even after his two-out, two-run single in the ninth Wednesday that snapped a 4-4 tie and helped lift the Yankees to a 6-4 victory, Judge was hitting .183 with three homers and a .710 OPS through 19 games. But, he wasn’t being flippant.
The Yankee captain said it was a lesson learned in his first big-league camp in 2015 from Carlos Beltran.
Beltran, then 38 and a player Judge has said he was “star-struck” by when he met him the first day of spring training, wanted the 22-year-old outfielder to understand the vagaries of the marathon that is a major-league season.
Beltran talked about his 1999 Rookie of the Year season with the Royals, a year in which he started hot and hit .293 with 22 homers and a .791 OPS.
But the veteran also told Judge about many other seasons when that wasn’t the case, such as his third. Beltran slumped out of the gate in 2001, taking a .257 batting average and a .677 OPS into early June.
And he ended up with better numbers than in his Rookie of the Year campaign, hitting .306 with 24 homers and an .876 OPS.
The point, Judge said, was regardless of how a given year starts, putting emphasis on positive or negative results from a small portion of a six-month season is counterproductive. Because, by the end of most summers, Beltran generally was en route to ending the year hitting in the .270-.300 range with 20-plus homers.
Though he didn’t use the phrase, Beltran more or less was channeling former Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira, known for regularly going through tough starts to his seasons in his 14-year career.
And Teixeira, who recorded eight straight seasons (2004-2011) in which he hit at least 30 homers and drove in at least 100 runs, had a stock answer during those slow starts.
“Look at the back of my baseball card,” he would say.
Meaning, by season’s end, the numbers would be there. Judge, more or less, said the same.
The caveat with Judge, of course, is health and whether anything is bothering him.
“Haven’t seen any red flags,” one NL talent evaluator said. “For me, it’s [his] timing. He’s a bit off and, especially with a guy that size, it doesn’t take much to get you out of whack.”
Judge battled an oblique injury in spring training and suffered a torn ligament in his right big toe last season — an injury he’s said will require “maintenance” the rest of his career. But he has insisted that, physically, he’s fine.
No surprise.
As was the case with the club’s previous captain, Derek Jeter, you have a better chance of getting Judge to engage in public self-aggrandizement than acknowledge any kind of an ailment.
But by all accounts, Judge is healthy, his rough start nothing more than that.
And while it’s true that at some point a bad start to a season simply becomes a bad season, regardless of some of the over-the-top discourse on the subject, the Yankees aren’t there with Judge.
Not even close.