Aaron Judge is finally ready to rejoin the Yankees, and the bigger question now is how New York manages his return.
Judge is expected back Tuesday night against the Colorado Rockies after missing time since May 31 with a fractured right rib. He skipped a minor league rehab assignment and is set to jump straight into the lineup against Rockies right-hander Gabriel Hughes, who is 0-6 with a 6.19 ERA.
That puts Aaron Boone in a delicate spot: get Judge enough at-bats to shake off the rust, but not so many that the club pushes him too hard before October.
ESPN’s Buster Olney framed the next stretch as a tune-up of sorts.
“What’s going to play out over the next 19 games is effectively a spring training for Aaron Judge,” Olney said Tuesday on SportsCenter. “He’s got about 19 games to get his swing back before the start of the postseason, and they’re going to handle it like spring training where they’re going to keep him in the game for 5 or 6 innings, pull him out, make sure that he’s OK. Check with him on a daily basis, see how many plate appearances he needs because they’re looking ahead.
“There’s about an 80 percent chance they’re going to face the Red Sox in the first round of the playoffs. With all that left-handed pitching, they could use Aaron Judge to help balance out their lineup.”
That read differs from what Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal said over the weekend. Rosenthal suggested Boone may prefer to keep Judge in the lineup more regularly rather than trimming his innings in a strict pattern.
“Talking to Aaron Boone, he doesn’t sound inclined to play him three innings one night, five innings the next, he wants to play Judge as much as he can and maybe give him a day off the game after he plays,” Rosenthal said. “So it’s going to be really interesting to see how the Yankees handle this but all signs point to him coming back this week in the series at home against the Colorado Rockies.”
Judge was also at Coco Gauff’s U.S. Open match Monday night.
However Boone chooses to handle it, the calendar is tight. Judge has roughly three weeks before the AL Wild Card playoff begins Sept. 29, and Olney said the timing has put the Yankees in a difficult spot.
“It’s felt like a race against time because on the one hand the Yankees needed the time to get Aaron Judge as healthy as possible,” Olney said, “but on the other hand they have to get him back soon enough to get his swing back and we don’t know if that’s gonna happen.”
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