Yankees left guessing on trade deadline plans with Aaron Judge's reimaging weeks away
Yankees’ Aaron Judge looks on from the dugout against the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The Yankees’ needs in advance of this season’s trade deadline – exactly one month from Friday – haven’t changed.
They are, really, what collectively the Yankees felt they would be pretty much from the time they left spring training at the end of March.
Those areas are: a reliable lockdown arm (or two) for the back end of the bullpen, and a righthanded-hitting catcher.
The regular season has only backed up those thoughts – and that was before the Yankees’ current seven-game losing streak, a particularly inept stretch in which they’ve neither hit nor pitched nor fielded.
It’s been the baseball embodiment of one of legendary Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach John McKay’s comments after watching his team get dusted early in the expansion 1976 season: “Well, we didn't block, but we made up for it by not tackling.”
Defeat No. 7 in a row, Wednesday’s 6-2 loss to the Tigers in 11 innings, in many ways was its own embodiment of the importance of the aforementioned needs.
Lefthanded-hitting catcher Austin Wells continues to be a disaster at the plate, his batting average dipping to .153 after going 0-for-2 Wednesday (the lefty-swinging Spencer Jones pinch hit for Wells in the eighth).
And there was yet another meltdown by Camilo Doval, a deadline acquisition last year who continues to flash electric stuff that keeps the Yankees tantalized and, in equal measure, reliably shows he can’t be trusted in the late innings.
Again, when the trade deadline market begins to heat up – and that won’t occur for another few weeks – it will come as no surprise the Yankees being linked to any and all relievers and the same for righty-hitting catchers (the options for the latter will be much smaller in number).
But a specter hangs over these next few weeks as one more area of need could declare itself.
And that is the specter of Aaron Judge.
The three-time American League MVP is in his fourth week of shutdown from baseball activities as he, and the Yankees, wait for his broken rib to heal.
Part of the Yankees’ bombshell of a press release they sent out the night of June 4 announcing Judge’s official diagnosis – and that the outfielder would be shut down for 4-6 weeks before undergoing reimaging on the affected area – was a line stating Judge was expected back “at some point this season.”
But what if Judge isn’t back this season? And, if the organization feels that’s increasingly becoming a possibility in the coming weeks, how much does that affect their plans for the deadline?
First, to be clear: the expectation remains that Judge returns this season.
But it is a fair question.
The Yankees’ including that line in their June 4 statement stemmed from the assumption that the fractured rib would heal in the 4-6 week timeline.
Judge currently is in week No. 4 of his shutdown and Boone, on his weekly spot with Jomboy Media on Tuesday, said the player is “a couple weeks” away from perhaps getting a second MRI.
Though he couldn’t say for sure.
If the reimaging comes back clean in say, two weeks, Judge would likely need at least a few weeks – and maybe more as it essentially would be a second spring training for him – to be ready for big-league games.
But whenever the reimaging is done, if the results show the fracture hasn’t properly healed, that puts into play the possibility of Judge missing the rest of the season.
The uncertainty surrounding this kind of injury is why from the start, organizationally the Yankees would have signed on the proverbial dotted line for a mid-August return.
Judge did not disclose much on Wednesday, other than to say: “I’ll give you a good update when we get some imaging and we’ll go from there. There’s no need to talk about this now. I know it’s an important topic… but I want to give you guys the full story, so why give you guys something now when we can get you everything here soon?”
Most of the headlines from Wednesday’s pregame meeting with reporters related to Judge’s comments about the club, now 12-15 without him, experiencing a “lack of focus” on the field.
Judge didn’t specify, but it left one to wonder if the captain was at least in part referencing second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. taking the field last week in Detroit with a Blow Pop in his mouth, then subsequently getting himself unnecessarily ejected from Sunday’s loss in Boston disputing a check swing.
The uber-talented Chisholm, who very much could be a trade deadline chip, is among a slew of Yankees slumping at the plate. That ever-growing list includes Ben Rice, Cody Bellinger, Anthony Volpe and, of course, Wells.
It’s not a coincidence that this recent Yankees freefall has corresponded with slumps by the team’s most consistent hitters the first two-plus months of the season in Rice and Bellinger.
Bullpen help theoretically might arrive before the deadline as the missile-throwing Carlos Lagrange, his starter-to-reliever conversion well underway in Triple-A, probably will get a chance within the next month. But the prospect isn’t guaranteed success in that role, so the Yankees will still aggressively look at the reliever market. Ditto when it comes to righthanded-hitting catchers.
But the true wild card is where the organization feels it stands with Judge in a few weeks and how confident it is of a return before September.
If that becomes a real question, that presents needs for the club far more difficult to address than reliever and catcher.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
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