Aaron Judge: Yankees’ struggling offense needs to ‘jump’ teams early in games
MINNESOTA — With the Yankees’ offense struggling, Aaron Judge doesn’t just want to see his team score more. He wants the Bombers to score sooner.
The Yankees have plated just six runs over four games since Friday, April 21, a stretch that includes three losses. Five of those runs came in the eighth inning or later, and three came in the ninth.
“We tried getting a little rally there going late,” Judge said after the Yankees scored once in the final frame of Monday’s loss to the Twins. “But we couldn’t really get it firing. We got to try to just jump out early on teams, score early and kind of put the pressure on them. Right now, we’re kind of taking a while getting into the game, feeling it, and just not doing the job. So we gotta jump on ‘em early.”
The Yankees have been playing catch-up in recent days, but the lineup’s woes date further back.
The team has scored less than four runs in nine of the last 11 games, and the Yankees are middle of the pack or worse when it comes to several key offensive stats. They rank 28th in hits and BABIP; 27th in average; 22nd in runs scored, RBI and on-base percentage; 21st in K%; 20th in wRC+; 19th in WAR; 18th in wOBA; and 17th in slugging percentage.
“We’re the Yankees,” Aaron Boone said after ex-pinstriper Sonny Gray shut the offense down on Monday. “We gotta find a way to do a little better than that.”
The manager said that the Yankees’ chilly streak at the plate is part of baseball’s “ebb and flow” — we are in the early stages of a long season, after all — but Boone admitted that his team needs to “kick it in” and “figure it out.”
Boone has also noted that the Yankees are missing some injured hitters right now, but Giancarlo Stanton is the only one the club can count on for serious offensive production when he’s in the lineup. Josh Donaldson hasn’t swung the bat well since joining the Yankees last season, and Harrison Bader has been slightly above or below league average throughout his career, depending on one’s preference between OPS+ and wRC+.
It’s not like there are guaranteed reinforcements coming.
In the meantime, most of the Yankees’ active hitters are scuffling, outside of Anthony Rizzo. Even Judge is hitting .146 over his last 49 plate appearances and 12 games, though he’s hit two home runs over that stretch.
“Gotta keep swinging,” said Judge, who logged the Yankees’ only extra-base hit on Monday with a double. “Gotta keep having productive team at-bats. The most important thing in a situation like this is trying to do the little things.”
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