The Yankees are about to get Aaron Judge back, and their first request is that he play a little less hard.
Manager Aaron Boone told reporters over the weekend that he expects Judge to “do a good job of protecting himself” in the outfield when he returns, per Gary Phillips of the New York Daily News. Boone added that Judge should be “selective” about when to dive and when to put his body into a wall.
That is a strange thing to say about a three-time AL MVP. It is also completely correct.
Three months on the shelf
Judge has been out since late May with a stress fracture in his first right rib. That is more than three months missed, and rib fractures are the kind of injury that lingers in a swing long after the bone heals.
He is expected to face live pitching for the first time since landing on the injured list, which typically puts a return within a week or so. The Yankees have less than 20 games left, so the runway is short.
The numbers before the injury were a warning
Judge was hitting .248 with 17 home runs and 38 RBIs when he went down. For a normal All-Star, that is a fine season. For Judge, it is a red flag that the injury was affecting him well before anyone diagnosed it.
Now 34, he is at the age where the body stops absorbing the way he plays the outfield. Judge is 6-foot-7 and 280 pounds running full speed at fences, and physics eventually wins that argument.
New York survived without him, which changes the calculus
Here is the part that makes Boone’s caution smart rather than soft. The Yankees went 45-39 during Judge’s absence and sit at 81-62, holding the first AL Wild Card spot. They did not collapse.
That means Judge does not have to carry September. He has to be healthy for October. Tampa Bay leads the AL East by several games and New York’s most realistic path is through the Wild Card round, where you need your best hitter upright, not heroic.
Asking a competitor to hold back is difficult, and Judge has never been that player. But there is history here: he missed extended time a few years ago after an incident at the outfield fence in Los Angeles. The Yankees remember. So does he.
What a healthy Judge changes
A Yankees lineup with Judge in the middle is a different postseason opponent. The teams ahead of them in the AL have been building around the assumption he would not be back in time.
He is coming back. Whether he can be productive on a few weeks of ramp-up is the open question, and it is the one that will decide how far this team goes.
Sources
- https://larrybrownsports.com/baseball/yankee-want-aaron-judge-change/769087
- https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/09/05/yankees-aaron-judge-face-live-pitching-monday-return-near/
- https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/mlb-standings-2026-updated-playoff-133827776.html
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.
