The Yankees announced Friday that new imaging this week of Aaron Judge\u2019s injured rib showed healing, but not enough for the three-time MVP to resume baseball activities. The club said Judge, who suffered a stress fracture of the first rib on his right side earlier in the season, will undergo more imaging and progress with his rehab in the meantime.<\/p>\n
Judge and manager Aaron Boone, speaking before the Yankees faced the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night, said they were optimistic he\u2019ll return this season.<\/p>\n
But as the Yankees prepared to play their first game after the All-Star break, and with two and half weeks until the Aug. 3 trade deadline, it remains unclear when \u2014 or if \u2014 their captain will be back.<\/p>\n
Judge, 34, hasn\u2019t played since May 31. He believes he suffered the injury while trying to make a diving catch and avoid crashing into second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. during an April 26 game in Houston. He attempted to play through the injury, but the pain became too much to bear during a weekend series in Sacramento, Calif.<\/p>\n
Since going on the injured list June 5, Judge has had to pause most workouts, though lately he\u2019s been able to do some lower body exercises in the gym, Boone has said.<\/p>\n
MLB cracks down on using AI in dugouts<\/p>\n
In 59 games, Judge hit .248 with 17 home runs, 38 RBIs and a .907 OPS. His production dropped significantly starting on May 7, though. In his final 22 games, Judge hit just .207 with two home runs.<\/p>\n
Talking to reporters on June 5, Judge said he had no regrets about playing through the pain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, (Giancarlo Stanton) is hurt,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cMax Fried\u2019s hurt. We had a lot of guys banged up. You\u2019ve got to be out there. That\u2019s what they\u2019re paying me to do, is go out there and play.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Yankees have struggled in Judge\u2019s absence. They\u2019re 18-19 without him and entered Friday three games back of the first-place Tampa Bay Rays in the American League East.<\/p>\n
Most Yankees hitters have slumped without Judge around. Only Ben Rice (139 WRC+) and Paul Goldschmidt (107) have registered wRC+ marks of at least 100 (league average) since he\u2019s been sidelined. Cody Bellinger (81 wRC+), in particular, has struggled.<\/p>\n
Judge endured a similar injury when he fractured the same rib on a diving play in September 2019.<\/p>\n
This story will be updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Yankees announced Friday that new imaging this week of Aaron Judge\u2019s injured rib showed healing, but not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[21850,363,369,99],"class_list":["post-768907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-fantasy-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-new-york-yankees","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}