Aaron Judge played a baseball game Tuesday night for the first time since May 31, and the box score line was ugly. Zero for three with two strikeouts.
Nobody in the Bronx cared. The Yankees beat the Rockies 5-3 with Judge hitting third and playing right field, and that alone changes the shape of their September.
The absence lasted 99 days, which happens to match the number on his back. He missed 84 games with a broken rib, an injury that traces back to an April 26 diving attempt in Houston where he tried to avoid a collision with Jazz Chisholm Jr.
The numbers he brings back
Judge is hitting .244/.370/.525 with 17 home runs and 38 RBIs in 60 games this season. The batting average is low by his standards. The on-base percentage and slugging are not.
That .370 OBP is the part that matters most right now. Even at reduced power, Judge forces pitchers to work around him, which reorganizes an entire lineup. Every hitter behind him sees better pitches. That effect shows up immediately, before he collects a single hit.
He is 34 now, coming off a rib fracture, and there will be rust. Two strikeouts in three at-bats on night one is what rust looks like. The swing timing comes back in a week or two.
The math the Yankees are facing
New York guaranteed itself a winning season with Tuesday’s victory, its 34th straight year without a losing record. That streak is a nice trophy and completely beside the point.
The Yankees entered Wednesday four games behind Tampa Bay in the AL East with 18 games left. Four back with 18 to play is not a comfortable position, but it is a live one, particularly with a healthy MVP-caliber bat rejoining the middle of the order.
They need Tampa Bay to stumble. They also need Judge to be something close to Judge for roughly three weeks. Those are the two conditions, and only one of them is in their control.
What he said about it
Judge was asked about the pressure of returning to a division race and gave an answer that was pure him.
“I get paid to do this, so I gotta go do it. That’s the end of it. I get paid to go out there and give my best to the New York Yankees and these fans.”
No drama, no excuses about the rib, no managing expectations. He has never been the type to build in an alibi, and he did not start Tuesday.
My read
The Yankees are better with him and still probably not good enough to catch Tampa Bay in the division. Four games in 18 requires the team ahead of you to cooperate, and there is no guarantee they will.
Where Judge changes everything is October. A wild card team with a healthy Aaron Judge in the three hole is a different animal in a short series than one without him. Postseason baseball rewards the single terrifying hitter more than the regular season does, because managers start making decisions around him in the sixth inning.
Getting him back with 18 games to rebuild timing is close to the ideal scenario. Not so late that he arrives cold in a playoff game, not so early that the rib was rushed.
The 0-for-3 will be forgotten by Friday. The fact that he is standing in right field again will not.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.