It's Now or Never for the Yankees and Aaron Judge

The best hitter in baseball is ice cold in October once again.

Aaron Judge reacts to striking out in Game 2 of the ALDS (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)

There’s been a lot of pearl clutching over how MLB teams that earn BYEs are the victims of totally unfair discrimination against Baseball’s Best Teams. How could grown men on first place teams take a week off to rest their aching bodies and be expected to compete against objectively worse teams that have spent the past two weeks on planes and buses and living out of hotels while fighting for their playoff lives every day?

The myth of the BYE cursing baseball teams to early playoff exits was challenged immediately this year as three of the four BYE teams won Game 1 in their division series. (The Phillies were the only team that lost, but their starter Zack Wheeler pitched the game of his life and there’s no way to argue the layoff made him rusty).

Anyway, for the first time in the divisional era, every team that won Game 1 went on to lose Game 2, which means we now have four series tied at one game apiece. Every division series is now best-of-3, and nobody has any idea what will happen next.

These 2024 playoffs have been the most exciting since probably 2017, and have a chance to be among the most exciting ever if the parity continues. If all four of these division series go five games I may permanently ascend to the realm I briefly visited on Saturday night after Shohei Ohtani homered and bat chucked 2 Heaven:

All these series being competitive is the good news.

The bad news is that three of the game’s best hitters haven’t done squat to help their teams so far, and I don’t like it.

Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, and Bobby Witt Jr. are a combined 1-for-23 with 10 strikeouts so far through their division series games. Now, this is a two-game sample size. And nobody would freak out if any of these guys stunk for two games during the regular season. Hitting a baseball is hard, especially when you have to face Gerrit Cole, Cole Ragans, Dylan Cease, Yu Darvish, and a smattering of relievers who all throw 98 with late cut.

But when October hits, Major League Baseball flips on its axis from a large sample size marathon to a small sample size sprint. All three of these superstars are only guaranteed two more games. They might go 1-for-their-next-23 as well.

I’ll exclude Witt from this narrative if he continues to stink this week. He’s only 24 years old and this is his first postseason. One bad series will not impact to his legacy.

The same can’t be said for Betts and Judge, whose playoff slumps now go back years. I wrote about Betts’ problems yesterday, and now it’s time to turn to Judge.

Here’s the deal: the Yankees have the easiest path to the World Series that they’ve had since the Phillies caught the swine flu in 2009.

This is a 100% true story that reporters (like me) knew about at the time but were prohibited from writing because of health privacy concerns. I just need to be clear here: the last time the New York Yankees won the World Series, they were playing a team dealing with a swine flu outbreak. Pedro Martinez said he couldn’t breathe on the mound.

And look, the Yankees had the better record that year, so it’s not like their beating Philadelphia wouldn’t have happened had the Phillies not come down with the plague. But the reality is that baseball is random and stupid and one team being populated with guys too sick to stand up GREATLY benefits their opponent.

Anyway, I mention all this because the Yankees caught a break in 2009, and they caught another one this year when the Astros and Orioles were both upset and eliminated in the wild card round.