Bullet point summary by AI
- Yankees fans are expressing frustration over their star’s recent performance despite it still being elite by typical standards.
- The team’s historic expectations and a 17-year championship drought amplify any dip in production, even when the player remains among the league’s best.
- This season’s deeper lineup gives the franchise more flexibility to absorb any temporary slumps without jeopardizing its playoff goals.
Aaron Judge closed the month of May with an .805 OPS and five homers across 28 games. For most players, that would be pretty good production. For fans of the New York Yankees, it’s apparently cause for a five-alarm fire. All over social media in recent days, from Reddit to X and everything in between, the tristate area has been trying to figure out what’s wrong with Judge: Is he secretly hurt? Is this the beginning of the end of his time atop the sport? Is it proof that this team is doomed?
In fairness, Judge has never been treated like any other player. When you win three MVPs in a four-year span and put up numbers we’ve rarely seen from a right-handed hitter in MLB history, the bar gets set a bit higher. And that’s doubly true when you’ve been tasked with ending a 17-year World Series drought for the most prominent and neurotic team in the sport.
As a Yankees fan myself, I empathize with the specific strain of insanity brought on by repeated, high-profile failures to meet the highest of expectations. So please know that I say the following with love: Everyone needs to get a grip.
No, Yankees fans shouldn’t be worried about Aaron Judge
Yes, Judge is in a bit of a funk. His strikeout rate is up, and his approach at the plate is off right now — not attacking pitches he can do damage on while chasing ones he can’t. And it makes a certain sense to be monitoring for signs of decline: Judge is an outlier body type who just turned 34; we have no idea how he’ll age or how long he’ll be able to hold up physically.
Two things here, though. First: Extrapolating from a few weeks worth of data is bad process, to be blunt. Judge posted an .824 OPS across a 40-game span from mid-July through early September last season. He was downright bad to start 2024, with a .754 OPS and 38 strikeouts in his first 31 games. In both years, those slumps proved to be just that: blips on the radar of what wound up being historic MVP campaigns. Judge has earned the right to work through some rough patches, especially when those rough patches still involve an OPS over .800.
Which brings us to the second point: Even if Judge has slipped a bit from his peak, that peak was so lofty that even 80 percent of it would comfortably be an All-Star-caliber player. If this is the worst things get for Judge in 2026, he’s still getting on base a ton while with solid defense in right field. And that’s not even to mention the fact that his batted-ball data is still elite, that his fluky-low .286 is some 60 points under his career average.
It would be one thing if the Yankees were totally dependent on Judge to score runs, if there were no margin for error in his production at the plate. But the truth is that New York has surrounded No. 99 with more offensive talent than he’s ever seen before, allowing Judge to age gracefully and ride out the occasional dry spell.
Yankees’ newfound lineup depth means Aaron Judge no longer has to be superhuman
Yes, I am aware that Judge not too long ago shared a lineup with another historically great hitter in Juan Soto. But go back and look at that 2024 lineup in its totality. Judge and Soto were the only two regulars to post an OPS above .800; heck, the only other Yankee who ran an OPS above .750 was Giancarlo Stanton, who only appeared in 114 games during the regular season due to injury.
In 2026, on the other hand, the Yankees are not hurting for firepower. Ben Rice has emerged as one of the very best hitters in the sport, full stop. Cody Bellinger is looking more and more like he did when he was an MVP candidate with the Dodgers. Jazz Chisholm Jr. has turned it on after a slow start (.800 OPS in May). According to Ryan Garcia of Empire Sports Media, New York would still rank in the top 12 in wRC+ even if you removed Judge and Rice from the equation entirely.
This offense is deep, and it is dangerous. I understand why Yankees fans don’t want to fully embrace that idea; lord knows they’ve been burned before. But panicking amid what all available evidence suggests is just a normal slump for the best hitter on planet Earth isn’t helping anything. Judge will be just fine, and in the meantime, you can simply enjoy the fact that he’s just one more very good hitter in a lineup full of them.
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