Yankees: Aaron Judge’s latest interview unfortunately more fuel for haters

Yankees star Aaron Judge gave more lip service to their World Series goals this week, and it’s unfortunately growing stale for the haters.

The Yankees followed Aaron Judge’s lead throughout the 2020 season; unfortunately, despite a scorching start by their early MVP candidate, the team looked largely rudderless when he went down with a strange leg injury and lost his rhythm.

Unfortunately, this led to vocal calls that Judge was more trade bait than Thurman Munson, and needed to be dealt or deemphasized to give the team a spark. Crazy, but hey, that’s frustration boiling over.

Judge spoke with MLB.com this week, and his latest interview was another exercise in boredom, revealing very little while praising the Yankees for the position they’re in, and claiming he feels “very good” heading into the winter workouts.

If you’re even-keeled, you won’t get angry reading it. But if you’re fed up with the franchise’s past decade, it’ll have you rolling your eyes.

"“I think we’re going to be adding a couple of guys free agent-wise to our team,” Judge said. “They’re going to help give us that boost to get to the next step. Every year I’ve played, we’ve been in the playoffs and had an OK run here and there, but it’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to bring a championship back home to New York.”"

Yes, this is innocuous. And of course we’d rather be optimistic then enter the 2021 season with our captain-in-waiting saying, “Yeah, last year was as good as it’s going to get. Sorry!”

But you know that unsatisfied Yankees fans are going to tune out quotes like these until the team has the hardware to justify their reputation as world-beaters. And, to be honest, even the most rah-rah among us are getting sort of sick of these treacly quote-fests following another dispiriting playoff loss.

What are reporters supposed to do, though? Not ask Judge if he likes his team’s chances? Ask him to walk them through his offseason training regimen bit-by-bit so all the world’s Twitter doctors can pick it apart and decide if his muscles will benefit?

It can be frustrating to read these semi-weak postmortems, sure, but there’s nothing to them, and they shouldn’t make you angry. Then again, when you have Judge attempting to sell the fanbase on solutions to the team’s holes coming from within the farm system, then we might have a problem here.

"“That was a crazy thing about 2020, is we got a chance to call on some rookies that normally might not have been called up, might not have made it to the big leagues,” Judge said. “With the guys we’ve got in our farm system … the next couple of years, we’re going to be doing something special in New York.”"

The Yankees won’t be a dynasty unless they continue to get creative in importing talent, fit be damned. No, the solutions are not readily apparent at Triple-A; there’s a reason New York lags in the farm system rankings behind the Rays, the franchise that literally holds the No. 1 spot.

This is, ultimately, a puff piece, and nothing to get angry about. But it’s safe to say fans aren’t complacent with this level of success anymore, and don’t need to read platitudes from the media’s favorite superstar.

More Luke Voit interviews, less Judge stuff maybe?

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