​For years, the Yankees have depended almost entirely on Aaron Judge. When Judge is healthy, there are few players in baseball who can lift an offense the way he does. He stands among the era’s greatest right-handed hitters, delivering seasons that echo the legends of the game. Lately, though, the Yankees feel lifeless without him. They aren’t merely in a slump; they’re careening out of control, letting their division slip away.
Judge has been out since May 31 with a right rib fracture. He had been lingering with the injury since late April, yet he still managed to slug 17 home runs in 59 games this season. Even if his overall pace wasn’t pure domination, the Yankees were 36-23 with him in the lineup. Since landing on the injured list, they’ve gone 14-17, and without him the offense looks completely adrift. An attack built to be carried on the shoulders of a single giant is crumbling before our eyes.
The worst part is that Judge’s return doesn’t appear imminent. ESPN’s Buster Olney, speaking on Just Baseball Media, suggested that Judge could conceivably return in mid-August or early September, and that wouldn’t be surprising. The team’s offense has deteriorated so drastically that it’s hard to ignore just how much they rely on his presence. Over the last two weeks, the Yankees have been the worst offense in baseball. Slumps happen, but fans are watching a team genuinely forget how to hit in real time.
Before Judge hit the injured list, the Yankees were mashing opponents. They averaged 5.32 runs per game and boasted one of the league’s best run differentials. Since the Reds handed them a loss on June 20, their offense has all but vanished, producing an average of only 2.88 runs per game. And they haven’t faced an onslaught of elite opponents to generate such a decline; in a 16-game stretch, they’ve faced just one winning team and still gone 4-12.
This 16-game skid places the Yankees at the bottom of nearly every important offensive metric. They own the worst averages across the board: batting average, on-base percentage, slugging, runs scored, strikeouts and weighted runs created plus (wRC+). They sit dead last in each of these categories. Even their most productive sluggers have vanished, with seven players among the 189 qualified hitters since June 20 sinking to the lower end of the wRC+ leaderboard.
The standout in that fragment of underachievers is shortstop Jose Caballero, who, despite a two-homer game on Monday, remains only 158th with a 70 wRC+. That boost aside, they haven’t had a single above-average hitter in more than a fortnight. Cody Bellinger is the softest echo of his former self, posting a 16 wRC+ and ranking 187th out of 189. The lineup also includes everyday players like Ben Rice, Jazz Chisholm Jr., and Anthony Volpe, all of whom have found themselves swept up in the team’s power drought.
Even in Monday’s win in Tampa, the Yankees struck out 17 times, underscoring how relentlessly their offense is stalling. Every game now feels like a countdown to a better showing that never arrives, underscoring just how crucial Judge’s presence has been—and how hollow the offense looks without him.