Ruh-roh

Here we are, less than two weeks into the 2020 season and the Yanks already have two major injuries.  Exactly how it is that our boys go off to rest for the winter and come back with sucking chest wounds is beyond me, but there it is.

Are they all secretly trying out for the U.S. Olympic ski-jumping team?  Auditioning for that show on the (No) History Channel where people go out and fish in the Bering Strait?

At this point my main worry is that our black swan will stroke out from overwork.


 

The latest, of course, is that Aaron Judge, pictured above, needs "shoulder maintenance."  Those of us who are veterans of Yankee Kremlinology (Bronxology?) understand that this is most likely Cashman -speak for "shoulder bursitis," to be followed shortly by "shoulder tendinitis," and then, "torn rotator cuff, requiring season-ending surgery."

I hate to keep harking on this because I myself love Aaron Judge with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.  But if we'd had a really shrewd and ruthless general manager—a Branch Rickey, say, or a Gene Michael—we'd have dealt off Judge at his peak value, probably sometime in 2018, when it became evident that the injuries would be chronic, and the big man just too fragile to stay on the field.

Judge was good enough, sunny enough, and cheap enough that we probably could have flummoxed some other GM into handing over a brace of true prospects, plus a couple of decent, day-to-day players or pitchers already on a major-league roster.

Well, that's so much blood under the bridge, as Mr. Albee wrote.

Flip the glass to half-full and you see that at least this might make the Mr. Smithers we DO have running our front office reluctant to touch the trigger he's been itching to pull since last summer and trade The Red Menace.  Hell, maybe, just maybe, it will even incline him to go after Mookie Betts—be still, my heart!—in the free agent market next year.

In the meantime, though, get that swan up and waddling back to the pond.

Ken Davidoff in the Post the other day—quoting Ma Boone, who seems to have mastered the 21st-century version of Stengelese—gave us a broad hint that Judge is unlikely to be the only oversized slugger on the DL for long:

"Despite his considerably shortened season, Stanton reports to camp a “fully healthy” player, Boone said. 

"The manager elaborated: “I go through his routine with him probably as much as I do with anyone. Matter of fact, I was just talking to him about it. [He] might not play those first couple of games, but I would expect him probably that second home game [Feb. 24 against the Pirates] and then we’ll just decide if we’ll let him go [to the] outfield right away or if it’s some kind of DH role to start.

“But no, he’s good to go. I fully expect him to hit it running.” "

Or, as it were, "sitting."

So glad Cashman did that thorough investigation of the Yankees' training and rehab methods.  Without it, who knows what we'd have?  Probably plague.