2 reasons Yankees fans should immediately shut down overblown Aaron Judge 'concerns'

Editor's Note: This article was written before knowledge of Aaron Judge's injury. But the point still stands! It's clear he's being affected by that and he's not on "the decline".

Aaron Judge is one of the greatest players in the history of the New York Yankees — heck, in the history of Major League Baseball — and due to that greatness, as well as the tiresome opinions of thousands of Judge haters, Judge doesn't receive an iota of grace from the baseball fan community.

When Judge goes through a slump (he is human, remember), it's the end of the world, and his prime is "over" in the minds of so many shortsighted, reactionary fans who choose to completely ignore that some of Judge's most untouchable seasons have contained slumps.

But here's why it's objectively insane to actually entertain that thought, and why fans need to simply stop doing this at the first sign of something appearing off.

Aaron Judge might simply be stabilizing (at an MVP level!) for Yankees

A "bad" month for Judge would still be a career-best month for plenty of other big leaguers. Rather than marvel at this unfair precedent as a reflection of Judge's singularity, people dig their heels into the notion that Judge is "declining".

And, by the way, "declining" is a word that will one day be used to describe Judge, just as it was once used to describe Babe Ruth and every other human baseball player who has touched the loftiest heights of the sport.

Judge has probably already touched his ceiling, but now, he's bound to keep living up there for another year or two ... not falling. To think that an athlete must be diving towards their decline just because they are no longer rising is to ignore the commonplace situation wherein a player stabilizes at a given level and is just that (give or take) for X number of years before, yes, trending downward.

Are Judge's increased strikeout numbers this season a sign of his stabilizing? If we want to be ultra-critical and err on the side of pessimism in estimating the window size and shape of Judge's prime, you could argue that.

But to suggest that there are real concerns about Judge, who has won the last two AL MVP trophies (and three of the last four), who is on pace for 46 home runs this season, and who — despite the "slumping" — is still logging promising expected stats (see below), is to dive headfirst into delusional waters and purposefully stay under.

Aaron Judge's expected Yankees stats reveal that his slump isn't too severe

It takes active, unhealthy levels of effort and self-sabotage (and/or self-hatred) to consistently argue that there are problems with Aaron Judge. It's a wonder that so many people willingly burden themselves with that effort.

The much easier and more rewarding approach with Judge is to appreciate what you're watching. It's really that simple. We spend so much time discussing the legends of the past and wondering what it might have been like to experience Ruth or Ted Williams or Ty Cobb with our own eyes.

What on Earth, then, prevents us from properly experiencing the living legends of the current game? Do we expect them to be literal gods? And with any show of bloodshed we are no longer intrigued? That would be a terrible development for sports fandom, but Judge's reception always seems to be pointing in that direction.

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