I’ve written before about how Aaron Judge’s greatness has become weirdly easy to take for granted, even as he keeps producing seasons that belong in the same statistical neighborhood as Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. Part of that is because Judge looks like he was built in a lab to produce 10+ WAR seasons; part of it is because other superstars command as much or more of the sport’s attention economy; part of it is because the Yankees haven’t yet converted his peak into a championship. But whatever the explanation, Judge has rattled off one of the great primes in modern baseball history.
I’ve also written about how important his presence in the lineup seems to be for the New York Yankees specifically. From 2020 through 2025, the Yankees won at a 94-win pace per 162 games when Judge was in their lineup, but dropped to a 76-win pace when he was out — a massive difference over a sample that feels too big to be written off as mere noise.
So when Judge aggravated a rib injury (one he’d been managing for years) last month, landing him on the injured list for an indefinite period — he’ll reportedly be re-evaluated sometime in the first few weeks of July — the Yankees’ season felt threatened, despite the team’s 36-23 record through May.
Amazingly, though, all the Yankees have done (as of Wednesday afternoon) since Judge departed the lineup was increase their playoff/division/pennant/World Series odds across the board:
Despite facing the Guardians (a lot!), Red Sox, Blue Jays and White Sox — all teams who rank 18th or better in Elo at the moment — the Yankees entered Wednesday’s action with an 8-4 record sans Judge this year, scoring more runs per game (5.42 versus 5.17) with a higher batting average (.254 versus .243) and OPS (.773 versus .770), and even more home runs per game (1.67 versus 1.46), without Judge in the lineup:
Compare those splits to the usual Yankee fare since 2020 — which saw the team’s RPG drop from 4.87 to 4.32, AVG fall from .243 to .229,1 OPS fall from .754 to .715 and HR/game drop from 1.53 to 1.30. The general rule in recent years has been that the Yankees completely forget to hit when Judge isn’t around to remind them, in ways that even transcend what we would expect based his individual stats alone.
But this year’s Yankee lineup might be more resilient than usual. Each of New York’s 11 most-commonly used batters are either above-average by batting runs, or fractionally close to it in the case of Jazz Chisholm Jr., with Ryan McMahon and Austin Wells2 standing as the only holdouts. Along with Judge himself, three other Yankee hitters — Ben Rice, Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt — are tracking for 20+ batting runs per 162 team games, with Rice sitting at +56.9 despite cooling down some from his scorching early pace.
Unlike past teams who needed Judge to carry them, this group has enough bats left over to keep the whole offense from collapsing the moment he gets hurt. And if the lineup does still falter, the Yankees’ true secret weapon has nothing to do with Judge anyway: a pitching staff that ranks No. 1 in WAR, including Top-4 in both the rotation (Cam Schlittler!) and bullpen. Both that combination and the overall ranking are firsts for the Yankees in the Judge Era:
Judge was already on pace for his fewest WAR per 162 team games (6.0) since his injury-affected 2023 campaign through May 31, before he went to the IL, so the Yankees already needed to figure out ways to keep winning without Judge playing at his usual superhuman level. Now they need to maintain those solutions at an even higher level for a longer period of time, while they wait for their best player to come back.
For most of the Judge Era, an extended absence from their captain was exactly when the Yankees started to look less like a real contender than a team unhealthily dependent on one player. And maybe that will still happen if Judge’s absence stretches deeper into July than initially expected… or beyond. But for now, the 2026 Yankees are passing a test that used to send them into a death-spiral — and turning the loss of their generational superstar into merely a survivable problem to work around.
Filed under: Baseball
Despite batting average not always being Judge’s forte early in his career, it’s worth noting that he has gotten far better in the AVG column, to the point he won a batting title hitting .331 last year!
Who’s currently on the IL anyway.
The Yankees are one of four teams with a run differential of >100. And after those four (Atl, Mil, LAD), the next team is at about +20. So a huge, massive gap, and the Yankees are by this metric the only really good team in the AL.
OTOH, their offense reminds me of the Cubs last year, when a bunch of guys had big first halves and then came back to earth. We'll see.