Judge Not.

From the discombobulated computer - but combobulated mind - of HoraceClarke66. 

 

Aaron Judge missed Wednesday night’s game due to “general soreness.” It was the 150^th Yankees game he had missed since joining the club for good in 2018, and on Friday he missed his 151^st.

 

That’s 151 games by the very start of what will be his fifth full season with the Yankees, and if Covid had not canceled most of 2020 that total would undoubtedly have been much higher.  He was not ready to go in April of last year, laid up with the usual combination of battered ribs, strained obliques, aching muscles everywhere.

 

This is a great pity, for Aaron Judge is a smart and talented ballplayer when he can play, with a life story that would have led that noxious corporate entity known as MLB to make him the poster boy for all of baseball.

 

That’s highly unlikely to happen, now, as is what once seemed his great good chance of having a career as the next Yankee superstar, complete with his personal cheering section, leading the team to one World Series after another.

 

Judge has been compared unfavorably to Mickey Mantle of late, which is unfortunate, for who compares well with a dead god?  But the salient fact is that Mantle, through his own first five, complete seasons with the Yankees, missed only 58 games. 

 

In other words, Aaron Judge has already missed almost three times as many games in his first five as The Mick, the most famously injured ballplayer in history, brought up in a literal, Superfund toxic waste site, torn by the sprinkler head in the Stadium, ripped asunder by a fence in Baltimore, etc.

 

 

This is not meant as a judgement upon Aaron Judge.  Everybody has their own pain threshold, and their own point where they just can’t play effectively, whether they’re in pain or not.  Obviously, Judge is not going to be the player of our dreams, or America’s dreams, or MLB’s dreams and that’s all right, because he doesn’t owe any of us anything.

 

But his condition does speak, once again, to the sheer blindness and incompetence of the Yankees’ general manager.  Some of us have been saying since 2018 that Brain ought to face the reality of Judge’s physique and trade him while he could still get something worth the trading.

 

He didn’t, because Brian Cashman never does anything anyone advises him to do, even when they’re obviously right.  He never found a training regimen that could keep Judge on the field, and he didn’t trade him, and now he can watch him continue to decline.  And the same can be said for Sanchez, and Torres, and Andujar, and Severino, and who knows how many other players, along with those who have already gone ahead. 

 

Everyone gets hurt, and no one gets better.  That’s the reality of this oh-so-promising New York Yankees team over the last five years, and it’s Brian Cashman’s legacy.  It’s a pity, but such a stupid and needless one.