Aaron Judge is still weeks away from reimaging on his right rib, and until then, he will not even publicly share how he is feeling.
“I’ll give you a good update when we get some imaging and we’ll go from there,” Judge said Wednesday morning inside the Yankees clubhouse.
“There’s no need to talk about this now. I know it’s an important topic and a big issue, but I want to give you guys the full story, so why give you guys something now when we can get you everything here soon?”
How soon “soon” is, though, remains very much in question.
When the Yankees first announced that Judge had been diagnosed with a stress fracture in his first right rib, they said he would get further imaging in “approximately four to six weeks to determine level of healing and appropriate next steps.” Thursday marks four weeks since the diagnosis, but there are no plans for reimaging at least in the immediate future, making it likelier that it will be closer to six weeks.
“I got nothing for you until then,” Judge said. “You know how it goes around here, guys can feel good, feel bad, but you got to wait on imaging.”
And that would just be to clear him to start ramping back up, which would still take weeks once he does get the green light.
The captain has always been guarded about specifics whenever he is dealing with an injury, which dates back to 2018 when he fractured his wrist and felt burned by the original timeline the Yankees gave after it took him longer to return.
“It feels like this last week he’s been feeling a lot better, which is good,” manager Aaron Boone said. “But still not able to do enough to where, ‘Let’s go reimage because we’re ready to take another step,’ or anything like that.”
In the meantime, the Yankees entered Wednesday in the midst of an awful stretch, having lost six straight games and played poorly in all facets of the game – with Judge saying he sees “just a little lack of focus” that he would be addressing with the group soon.
They had survived the first few weeks of Judge’s absence, but over the past week, the Yankees have looked like a team feeling the weight of not having the back-to-back AL MVP in its lineup – recording four total hits or fewer in each of its last five games.
“Probably in the next couple weeks sometime, they’ll determine based on what he’s doing and when it’s time to go take another peek at it,” Boone said. “I don’t know when that date is.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
