“Jacob, buddy, we’ve got a lot of great Yankees on this team. There are a lot of great Yankees who will be here for a long time, so don’t be upset. Hopefully you’ll be a Judge fan for life.”
jews from Queens are the only ones arrogant enough to expect an all-star ballplayer to respond to them and say 'ok I'm not going to the marketplace.'
jacob is the kid from SNL who always talked about Jeter.
Best thing Judge could do for the Yankees is to sign elsewhere. I think he is overrated as a player, has an extensive history of injuries and missing significant playing time and that was before he was on the wrong side of 30.
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He had a great season, but there's a metric that no one really follows. I call it the Tough Out Metric.
The Yankees are full of guys who feast on middle of the rotation pitchers and middle relievers. They hit a ton of home runs and win a lot of games - enough to make the playoffs most years. They have trouble with aces and high end relievers, but many teams don't have an ace, much less two.
You know what they face in the post season? Teams with one stud ace and often two. Two aces in a seven game series pitch four of the seven games, and most teams that go deep in the playoffs have a number three who is an excellent pitcher.
Judge was exposed in the playoffs because he's not a Tough Out - guys with riding fastballs up in the zone and/or good off speed stuff make him an easy out.
I watch very little baseball these days, but caught a couple of the Yankees Indians division series. The Indians have a kid (Kwan?) who is a tough out. He works the count, fouls off tough pitches that would put Judge back on the bench, and puts the ball in play. He was the last guy I wanted to see up in with men on base.
Very well said and I agree on all counts. In giving him 9 years and $360 million, the Yankees seem to be relying in major part on his marketability.
I give him credit for having the guts to take an incredibly dangerous risk in turning down 7 years and $210 million at the start of the season. A bad injury could have taken money like that off the table forever, but he delivered the performance of a lifetime and cashed in.
Though I stand by my original comment, I am happy that it worked out for him. By all accounts, he is a good guy.
Many people actually do follow it and have made similar assessments about Judge, Stanton, and other slugger types in the Yankee line up over recent years. But I watch baseball religiously, and I saw every Yankee game aside from those few that aired on Amazon. Judge's season was achieved b/c he had made adjustments where he spit on good breaking stuff and handled the high fastball better, even on the inside (but he was never that bad with the latter to begin with).
https://nypost.com/2022/09/16/inside-aaron-judges-transformation-to-set-up-special-season/
Judge played way too much at the end, and pressed trying to hit those last two homers. He had post seasonish pressure, with a ridiculous amount of attention on the road and at home, once he was at 59 HR. He came out of his game at the end, desperately trying to hit those last dingers, and limped into the post season. Without the HR chase, he would've been rested a lot during those last 2 weeks, since the Yankees weren't playing for any positioning any longer, and would've had a serious crack at the Triple Crown. Instead, he was batting lead off every day, trying to make it happen. He wasn't the same hitter heading into the playoffs.
And give a little credit to Astro pitching, as they dominated both "tough outs" and sluggers, undefeated, right to a World Series, which they also won. 11-2 for the entire postseaon, .172 batting ave against their pitching. As they say, "good pitching beats good hitting." And Kwan hit .429 against the Yankees in the Division Series, but he hit .000 against the Rays in the Wildcard Series. Such is the nature of the post season and small samples.