The AL single-season HR king is staying in the Bronx…for nine more years. Aaron Judge has official put pen to paper and resigned with the New York Yankees for a 9 year, $360M contract, though it’s doubtful that he’ll ever put up such great stats again.
Aaron Judge had a once in a lifetime season (for everyone not on steroids…cough…Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa…cough) as he broke fellow Yankees icon Roger Maris’ AL single-season home run record by posting 62 HR last season.
Fans from all across the baseball world showed up to every single Yankees game towards the end of that season in eager anticipation for the moment that Judge would smash a pitch out of the park and break the 61-year-old record. It was a great time to be a baseball fan.
Yet, for all of the fan fair and excitement over Judge’s terrific season, there’s no way that the right outfielder will have another season even remotely as good as last year. It’s just statically impossible for Judge to follow up a once-in-a-lifetime season with another once-in-a-lifetime season on a team that has not only regressed this offseason but has also proven that it has a weak mentality.
Obviously, as a Red Sox fan, nothing gave me more joy than to watch the Yankees fumble another chance of winning their long-awaited 28th World Series title, though I still feel bad for Yankees fans (somewhat) as they watched their team fail again. Under the Aaron Boone and Brian Cashman era, the Yankees have shown that they lack any fight or character during the toughest moments.
Yes, Cashman has proven his talent as he’s won four World Series titles for the Yankees during his entire tenure (since 1998) as GM, and Aaron Boone has also proven that he is a good coach with his .603 winning percentage, but neither one of these guys has shown the leadership required to lift the Yankees back to the World Series in recent years.
They have constantly come up against the Houston Astros (four times, in fact) and lost in humiliating fashion each time.
Sure, the Astros did cheat on one of those occasions, but they weren’t cheating last year when they smashed the Yankees in the ALCS in four straight games. It was embarrassing to watch Judge, Stanton, and Torres strikeout time and again with Boone doing nothing but watching on with a bewilder look on his face.
The Yankees organization has developed a losers’ mentality during the Cashman-Boone regime, which is not something I would ever have thought capable of a team that has won 27 World Series.
Nevertheless, as for Aaron Judge, the real reason why I’m so skeptical about the Yankees chances of winning a World Series this year is because of how hard they fall off during the summer. If Judge didn’t have a record-breaking season, the Yankees would not have made it into the playoffs. That’s how bad this team was from July-August.
Not only are they lacking pitching depth after Gerritt Cole, but they also have no one (apart from Harrison Bader) who can get on base. All of the Yankees ‘big hitters’, and Aaron Judge is the biggest of them all, are sluggers that suffer drastic hitting slumps a few times a season, which is a recipe for disaster when all of these hitters hit a slump at the same time.
If the Yankees don’t go out and pick up some base hitter who can fill out the bottom of the lineup, this team is destined to suffer another massive drop off in the middle of the season again.
And, once that happens, the Yankees are bound to suffer another humiliating playoff defeat to one of their AL rivals…if they even make the playoffs this time around.
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