The New York Yankees dominated the American League all season and had no problem dispatching the Kansas City Royals and Cleveland Guardians to punch their ticket to the World Series. However, Aaron Boone’s squad appears to have met their match against the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Bronx Bombers' captain has been no help.
Aaron Judge has been ice-cold all postseason and especially during the first two games of the Fall Classic. The Yankees and Dodgers are pretty evenly matched on paper, but if Judge doesn’t break out of his slump, things could get real ugly, real fast for the Yankees in the World Series.
It’s clear that something needs to change, and there has been talk of dropping Judge in the batting order. That would be a major indictment of the player, and it could possibly be a dangerous misstep that destroys Judge’s confidence even further. The team needs to get him going rather than trying to hide him lower in the lineup, and there’s a better move that the team could make. The analytics points toward Judge hitting behind Juan Soto, but Boone should throw out the numbers and trust his gut for once by flipping judging Soto in the lineup.
Aaron Boone must find a way to jumpstart Aaron Judge
All due respect to Soto, but Judge is the best hitter on the Yankees roster. The team cannot realistically expect to win the World Series if Judge remains as ice cold as he has been in the first two games, and really dating back to the ALCS series against Cleveland.
It’s gotten to the point where Judge has been struggling so much that teams are even electing to intentionally walk Soto, because they would rather face Judge with a man on base. That would have been unthinkable at any point during the past three regular seasons when Judge absolutely destroyed the baseball with regularity and terrorized pitchers all across the league.
It might be unrealistic to expect Judge to regain his MVP and home-run king form during this series. He doesn’t need to be an All-World player, though. The truth is that if he was even a league-average player, the Yankees would have won at least one of the first two games in the World Series.
The Yankees must return to familiar territory
What Yankees manager Aaron Boone must do is have Judge and Soto switch places in the batting order. During the time immediately after the Yankees acquired Soto before the 2024 season began, there was plenty of discussion about where each of the two superstars would hit in the lineup.
For much of his career in pinstripes, Judge hit in the two-hole, where he would get plenty of at-bats without hitting leadoff. The Yankees did occasionally try him out at leadoff but too many of his home runs were essentially wasted as solo shots. The team needed him to hit with runners on base, and batting him second afforded them the best of both worlds.
Judge was clearly comfortable hitting second, and Juan Soto had publicly expressed his level of comfort hitting third, which is what he did for most of his career prior to coming to the Bronx.
However, when both players were in New York, the analytics indicated that it made more sense to put Soto’s 42% on-base percentage ahead of Judge’s 62-home run power. Both players accepted their new rules and for almost all of the regular season, this approach worked like magic.
This approach makes the lineup harder for pitchers to navigate
One goal of every manager is to have a lineup that alternates between left-handed hitters and right-handed hitters. That’s because left-handed hitters have an advantage against right-handed pitchers and vice versa. That philosophy is a large part of why the Yankees often went with Austin Wells or Anthony Rizzo as the cleanup hitter. In the postseason, though, both of those bats have been nearly silent while righty slugger Giancarlo Stanton has been lighting the world on fire and working like prime Barry Bonds.
By flip-flopping Soto and Judge, Stanton could stay in the cleanup spot while maintaining the lefty-righty-lefty combination throughout the heart of the order.
How this move helps Judge and Soto
Right now, it’s clear that Judge is all out of sorts and struggling immensely. He’s also mentally in his own head and guessing wildly at pitches. He’s swinging at bad pitches and letting good pitches go by. Moving him ahead of Soto would have two distinct advantages.
First, it would take some pressure off Judge. This would help him to stop pressing and trying to play hero ball. He would be able to lay off garbage pitches and take his walks if the pitcher didn’t give him anything worth swinging at. He wouldn’t be so amped up to swing that he takes a stab at a curveball in the dirt or a slider a foot off the plate, and he would be able to focus on hunting mistakes and punishing a middle-middle fastball or a hanging breaking ball.
However, the reality is that most pitchers would give him something over the plate. That’s because they wouldn’t want to put him on first and get themselves into a jam where they had to get through Soto and Stanton with nowhere to put them. This is even more true if Gleyber Torres is already on base ahead of Judge, and Torres has done a great job of setting the table by getting on base out of the leadoff spot.
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Judge may be struggling right now, but he is still one of the most dangerous power hitters in the game, and it’s always a gamble to give him something over the plate. Putting him in a spot where he’s more likely to see good pitches would go a long way toward helping him lay off the garbage that pitchers are currently having success getting him to swing at. Once Judge makes good contact and sees a ball fly into the bleachers, his confidence will soar and he can get back to being who he is.
Likewise, if Soto is hitting third, the days of intentionally walking him will be over. Especially if Judge or Torres are on, and even more so if both of them are, no pitcher is going to want to face Stanton with two men on or with the bases loaded. Even if nobody is on, Stanton has been so dangerous this postseason that it would be a major risk to put anybody on base ahead of him.
Yankees move helps shake things up without feeling like a demotion
The worst thing that the Yankees can do is to destroy Judge’s confidence even further by publicly demoting him to the sixth or seventh spot, or even lower. This would be a brutal public display of no confidence, and if the team doesn’t have confidence in Judge, it’s even less likely that he’ll regain his confidence in himself.
What Aaron Boone needs to do is find a way to switch things up and give Judge a clean slate. With less pressure on him and a fresh start at a place in the batting order that he is familiar with and comfortable in, it could quickly feel like a new series for Judge. This could help the star slugger put his struggles behind him and ignore the pressure. He would see better pitches to hit, and if he didn’t, he would be able to take his walks. Either way, he would be contributing to the team’s success.
Judge would be able to get back to the basics and focus on punishing pitchers’ mistakes. It’s likely that if he gets one mistake that he can put a good swing on and drive the ball into Monument Park, he might just find his form again as the best player in the world. If that happens, the Yankees have a great chance to win their 28th championship.
Even if he just has a couple of good swings and plays like an average player, the Yankees would still have a good chance to fight back, and at least make it a competitive seven-game series. In Game 7, anything can happen. Even a victory and a parade through the Canyon of Heroes.
