Yankees' medical staff deserves blame for botching handling of Aaron Judge's injury
The Yankees' Aaron Judge is out indefinitely with a fractured rib, according to manager Aaron Boone. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.
On Sept. 18 of last season, Aaron Judge felt a “crack” and “pop” as his right shoulder crashed into the outfield grass at Yankee Stadium.
It then took the team nearly six months to figure out what was wrong with the franchise’s biggest star: a stress fracture of the first right rib, an injury that is likely to keep him sidelined beyond Opening Day — and might even require surgery that could put his season in jeopardy.
Judge knew there was damage back then, but he did what players do at that time of year on playoff-bound teams. He got whatever pain-dulling, anti-inflammatory shots he could get and gutted his way through the end of the ALCS.
Fighting through injuries is expected of players. They’re told it’s part of the job.
Fixing them, however, is what the team’s medical staff is supposed to do.
Or in the Yankees’ case, how about just finding them? Would that be too much to ask?
It’s mind-boggling that Judge is the third Yankees player to suffer an injury last season that wasn’t correctly diagnosed or treated until February or March the following year.
One, we’d say fine. It’s medicine, and everybody is different; there are exceptions to the rule.
Two, you start to think, hmm, a disturbing trend, but maybe the Yankees are just very, very unlucky.
But three? There’s no logical rationale for a third.
The first was James Paxton, who was bothered by back issues from September through the playoffs and didn’t have surgery to repair a disc issue until Feb. 5 after he initially was assured the problem would resolve itself.
Next, Luis Severino complained of forearm discomfort during the ALCS, was tested all winter, then showed up at spring training — only to later be subjected to more thorough tests that revealed a need for Tommy John surgery, a possibility that was never even mentioned in the months leading up to it.
And now Judge, who by his own admission Friday has felt discomfort in the right shoulder area since that September night in the Bronx, yet worked out all offseason anyway because the MRIs never found a problem.
Of course there was an issue, because the pain persisted, but no one seemed all that interested in uncovering it. So Judge unknowingly went through his entire winter regimen with a fractured rib.
“I think the consistent swinging and weightlifting throughout the whole offseason really didn’t give it the chance to [heal],” Judge said Friday. “If somebody breaks their leg and they’re in a cast, they’re immobilized for a couple of weeks or months . . . You give the bone a chance to heal.”
Of course, Judge would have done that with the right diagnosis, and he’d be fine right now instead of anxiously waiting to see if the rib needs to be removed, a procedure akin to thoracic outlet syndrome.
Again, the fact that all this is happening at such a late date on the spring training calendar feels inexcusable.
And it’s a repeat of what went down with Severino, whose MRIs were negative, over and over, until the Yankees’ docs finally took their testing to another level — months later — with a dye-contrast MRI that revealed his UCL tear.
Judge’s early exams were clean, too. But it wasn’t until these past few days that he was sent for more tests — close to a dozen, by Aaron Boone’s estimation — and a CT scan taken Thursday showed the stress fracture.
“My understanding is it’s a hard thing to find because you’re not going to find it in MRIs or different scans,” Boone said Friday. “And it was this particular CT scan that ultimately found it. It was just, for whatever reason, an injury that’s difficult to spot in the normal battery of tests that you’d have.”
Then why not just do all these other super-tests from the jump, like back in November, when Judge and Severino still were hurting for unknown reasons? The winter is the time to get this stuff taken care of so you don’t have to sweat Opening Day or the first half or maybe wiping out an entire season.
Instead, the Yankees let this stuff snowball right into spring training. In retrospect, Severino wound up being a lost cause for 2020 regardless. But punting on Judge’s health until early March already is shaping up to be a costly mistake for the Yankees — and the full impact on this season remains unclear.
“At least now we have some answers and a plan of attack in place,” Boone said. “It’s not necessarily the news we wanted, but at least we know where this aggravation’s been coming from.”
Finally. But the handling of Judge, like the others, just leaves us with more questions. What’s it going to take for the Yankees to get one of these right?
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
