Aaron Judge currently leads the Yankees in OPS by nearly 100 points, posting a mark of .859 with a team-high four home runs, but that mark is not up to his typical standards, which most of the Bombers can say about themselves of late.
The Yanks are in desperate need of a spark, having been shut down once again in Wednesday night’s 4-1 loss to the Braves, and Judge has seen a domino effect through the lineup in the first 17 games of the season, though the opposite of what he’s used to seeing from this normally stacked lineup.
“We’ve had opportunities but we’re just not producing as a whole,” Judge said. “One night one guy will have a great game and the rest of us are not doing our job…it’s about getting us clicking on the same page and getting us back to what we do best, which is wear down pitchers…I think it’s the same thing as ‘hitting is contagious.’ When one guy gets a hit, you kind of feed off of that and get rolling, and sometimes when nobody is getting hits, you kind of feed off of that too.”
The Yankees as a whole have been dreadful offensively, where the team was expected to once again be among the league’s elite. They have a collective OPS of .630, the worst in all of baseball, and are 23rd in home runs, an area which the team usually finds itself at the top of the league.
Judge doesn’t care about those numbers, only the one that those stats have led to: a lot of losses.
“Forget about the numbers, forget about slugging, on-base, any of that,” Judge said. “It comes down to ‘Did we win or did we not win?’ Right now we’re not getting the job done.”
Judge said he doesn’t sense the vibe has changed for the Yanks in terms of their preparation, but once the game begins and the hits don’t arrive, he’s noticed himself and his teammates taking those failed at-bats with them through the rest of the game.
Gleyber Torres appeared to do just that when he slowly trotted up the first base line after tapping a check-swing grounder back toward the mound on Wednesday night.
“You can kind of see it from the very get-go,” Judge said. “If somebody doesn’t get a hit their first at-bat…you can sometimes see people carrying it over to their next at-bat or on defense…it’s about trying to do the little things to stay locked in on the game and keep that intensity up.”
The Yankees have time to resurrect their normally powerful offense and climb back toward playoff contention, but with April nearing a close, there is almost a full month of evidence that the Yankee offense is not what it used to be. But the Bombers remain confident that they will live up to that nickname once again, and hopefully soon.
“Each team, every great team goes through a stretch like this throughout the season,” Judge said. “Especially playing 162. We’d be talking about the same team if this happened in June, if we started hot in April and had a rough patch of 5-10 games in June…but you never want to start off that way. We just need to get back on track and take it one pitch at a time.
“We have to turn this ship around.”
Follow Ryan Chichester on Twitter: @ryanchichester1
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