Former Yankees manager Joe Girardi sees Aaron Judge's continued growth as a hitter

When it comes to Aaron Judge’s professional career, Joe Girardi was there pretty much from the start.

Not just being in uniform as the Yankees’ manager at the Stadium on Aug. 13, 2016, when Judge homered off Rays righthander Matt Andriese in his first big-league at-bat.

No, Girardi was there a little more than three years before that — at the true start — when Judge put on a Yankees uniform for the first time on June 11, 2013, at Oakland Coliseum.

It was about a week after the Yankees made Judge their first-round pick (32nd overall) in the 2013 draft, and the outfielder from just outside the Bay Area joined the Yankees on the field for batting practice.

“I remember how respectful he was and then just watching him hit, how the ball jumped off his bat,” Girardi told Newsday this past weekend at the Stadium, where he was working the Yankees-Blue Jays series as an analyst for YES Network. “I remember thinking, ooh, this could be something.”

After Judge’s debut late in the 2016 season, one short-circuited in mid-September by an oblique strain, he really became something in 2017.

Judge hit a then-rookie- record 52 homers — a mark broken in 2019 when the Mets’ Pete Alonso hit 53 — en route to unanimously earning American League Rookie of the Year honors and finishing second in the AL MVP voting to Houston’s Jose Altuve.

But as good as Judge was in 2017, hitting .284 with 114 RBIs and a 1.049 OPS, Girardi said he’s noticed from afar his year-by-year growth at the plate.

“In 2017, he batted .212 on breaking balls with a .429 slug,” said Girardi, who managed the Yankees from 2008-2017. “He’s hitting .263 with a .609 slug [this year]. What I’ve seen is that he’s learned to lay off the chase breaking ball and swing at the hanger. And he’s very dangerous. He’s always hit fastballs, but to me that [adjustment to breaking balls] has been the biggest improvement.

“And what you’ve seen is that in 2017, his whiff rate on breaking balls was 50%. This year it’s 41%. But that’s a substantial difference. Because that means for every 100, he’s hitting nine more of them. And if he hits it, it’s damage . . . because he has learned to lay off pitches. This is the lowest his strikeout rate has ever been. And that’s scary. A guy with his power to have almost average strikeout percentage, that’s a scary thought.”

Scary for the rest of the league, certainly.

Judge typically is pitched to carefully, but Blue Jays manager John Schneider took it to another level during the past weekend, intentionally walking the 2022 AL MVP three times on Sunday.

On Saturday, Judge hit a two-run homer in his first at-bat, and Schneider wasn’t about to see it happen again in the next inning.

“I honestly didn’t feel like seeing him swing,” Schneider said on Saturday after intentionally walking Judge with the bases empty and two outs in the second. “That was kind of it.”

Understandable.

After going 1-for-2 on Sunday, Judge entered Monday’s off day hitting .322 with 41 homers, 103 RBIs and a 1.157 OPS in 111 games.

Through the same amount of games in his MVP season, Judge was hitting .301 with 46 homers, 100 RBIs and a 1.076 OPS. He had 125 strikeouts and 66 walks (eight intentional) through 111 games in ’22 compared to 123 strikeouts and 92 walks (11 intentional) this season.

Other than the homers, Judge by all objective measures is having a slightly better season than he did in 2022, which is saying something. After all, he did hit an AL-record 62 homers that season.

But for Girardi, it isn’t always the home runs that stand out in charting Judge’s growth as a hitter. The last Yankees manager to win a World Series (2009) focused on an eighth-inning at-bat on Saturday in which Judge swung at a 2-and-1, 96-mph fastball from righthander Yariel Rodriguez and smoked it at 104.4 mph for a single to centerfield.

“I mean, I don’t think he had the ability when he first came up to necessarily hit a fastball down and away for a line drive over the second baseman’s head like he did,” Girardi said, shaking his head with a smile. “But he does now, and you’re like, ‘Come on, man. Really?’ ”