Aaron Judge and the Yankees settled their arbitration dispute just before the planned hearing on Friday, Judge getting $19 million (the midpoint between the two sides’ filed figures) plus $500K in possible incentives for winning AL MVP or World Series MVP.
And when asked about it prior to Friday’s game against the Astros, Yankees manager Aaron Boone was glad the saga was over.
“I’m pleased getting that news today,” Boone said. “I spoke to him briefly on the phone a couple hours ago just to make sure he was good, but excited that that’s behind us and we can leave that portion of the show alone.”
Judge was always quite tight-lipped about the subject, all the way up until Friday night, when he said he was “glad we got this done.” However, his performance on the field has clearly not been affected by the looming arbitration situation – which is no surprise to the Boone-dog.
“At this point knowing him as long as I have, I’m not surprised at all. If I didn’t know him or the situation, maybe, but it’s who he is,” Boone said. “I think it’s easy for him to separate [the game from the business]. He loves to compete between the lines with his teammates. That’s why he’s so revered in there. He’s about winning, he understands there’s a business side to it, but when he puts his uniform on and is in the clubhouse with these guys it’s about winning and that’s where his focus begins and ends.”
And to a man, while very few if any Yankees have been through the hearing process, they understand how it can be – just ask Luis Severino, who saw Dellin Betances go through it prior to the 2017 season, and signed a four-year extension in February 2019 that helped him avoid the process completely.
“That's not good to go in that room. It's not good to go with your team and talk about what you did or why you're not worth it, why you're not worth $20-something million,” Severino said Friday. “But I’m real happy for him. We have him at least for this year, and hopefully next year we’ll have him back.”
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