Yankees: The not so hidden value to the team of Aaron Judge

The Yankees have a 25-year old right fielder with a little more than 500 at-bats in the big leagues, who is so obviously a different player in the season’s second half compared to his first half. Are you sure about that, though?

Yankees right fielder, Aaron Judge, has disappointed in the second half of the season, right? His strikeouts are back again, and he is the proud owner of the major league record for fanning at least once in whatever number of consecutive games.

His batting average has dropped sixty points since the All Star game when, supposedly, he altered his swing to majestically win the Home Run Derby. And instead of going on to challenge Babe Ruth‘s 60 home runs, Judge has hit only a handful in the second half and is still tied for the American League lead with 38.

A pretty miserable performance from a guy who was supposed to be baseball’s next Mike Trout, if you ask me, right? Well, not so fast my friends.

Aaron Judge is still the MVP of the New York Yankees. This just happened yesterday. Judge went one-for-one, drew four bases on balls, giving him 100 for the season, and scored a run in the Yankees 9-4 win over the Orioles. It happened that he didn’t strike out in the game, but so what?

Judge has already scored 100 runs for the Yankees and driven in 85. And he could easily become the first player ever to hit .270 or better while striking out more than 200 times in a single season.

Judge is also a nemesis for opposing pitchers who still defer to him by not giving him anything to hit. Much like Alex Rodriguez with his power and Derek Jeter in clutch situations, Judge is the guy pitchers don’t want to see in the on-deck circle.

And this, mind you, is a player who was initially drafted by the Oakland A’s in the 31st round of the Amateur Draft way back in 2010. Aaron Judge has learned a lot since then and, most of it, he has taught himself by adapting to failure, and not the success he enjoyed in the first half.

Intangibles, not numbers, matter

Aaron Judge is not yet a complete ballplayer. He does, however, have all the tools including speed and a powerful arm (five assists this year) to make himself one.

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But the most meaningful trait Judge owns has nothing to do with numbers. And that’s character, something that can’t be measured or acquired. You either have it as we see with Judge, or you don’t, as we see in a underachieving player like Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig, or Jacoby Ellsbury.

At the moment, Judge is also underachieving, and he knows it. And that’s the separation that makes all the difference in the world between Judge and any number of players in the big leagues today, or even yesterday. The ones who sleepwalk through their career collecting the big paychecks, and no matter what they tell us, we know they are lying and not giving their team a full effort.

And it doesn’t seem to matter where Joe Girardi puts him in his ever-changing lineup (yesterday he hit fifth), Judge always shows up at the ballpark prepared and ready to play.

These days, with all the money on the table, we can expect that, but we don’t always see it.

And with everything that has gone wrong for Judge in the second half, he is still the one player on the Yankees who, if he gets hot again, can carry the team all the way to the World Series. And wouldn’t that be something?

Yankees history footnote (2007)

Brought to you by National Pastime.

Unknown at the time, Bob Sheppard works his last game at Yankee Stadium, a task he has performed over 4,500 times since becoming the team’s P.A. announcer in 1951. The 96-year-old ‘Voice of God’ is replaced by his longtime sub Jim Hall and Paul Olden, who will fill the position when the team moves to the new ballpark in 2009.

Next: Please, let's not start this with Aaron Judge

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