NEW. YORK — New York Yankees star Aaron Judge didn’t want to speculate on when he might be able to return to the lineup in his first time speaking publicly after he was diagnosed with a stress fracture in his right first rib.
“I don’t like talking timetables,” Judge told reporters in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse on Friday afternoon. “That stuff’s all made up. You never know what’s going to happen.”
Judge is expected to undergo reimaging in four to six weeks and return at some point this season.
“We’ll take a little time,” he said, “get back healthy and get back to it.”
Manager Aaron Boone added that the Yankees don’t know when to expect Judge back, but that once the fracture has “shown a point off healing,” Judge will “get ramped up, and then we go.”
The injury occurred when Judge went for an “awkward” diving catch while also trying to avoid a teammate in Houston on April 26, Judge said.
The pain became too much to handle over the past weekend in Sacramento, when he was limiting himself to just two swings pregame and felt pain while at the plate. The “biggest thing” was that “I wasn’t swinging the way that I wanted to.”
Since the end of the series in Houston, Judge has hit .263 with seven home runs and a .888 OPS in 31 games. But his production fell off a cliff after May 10, and he batted .206 with a home run and a .613 OPS since then.
Judge said he was never worried about potentially having thoracic outlet syndrome, even though the Yankees sent his tests to Dr. Gregory Pearl, who specialized in TOS.
“I don’t think thoracic was ever involved in this at all,” Judge said. “You go to a specialist who is a rib specialist to say, ‘Hey, take a look at this.’ So, I don’t know where thoracic got thrown around because it was never thoracic outlet. I don’t know where that came from. But I think the worst thing that I had in my eyes was a fractured rib, which is what we had.”
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The 34-year-old said the injury feels much like when he fractured the same rib on a diving play in September 2019.
But he added that he has no regrets about playing through the pain.
“Well, (Giancarlo Stanton) is hurt,” he said. “Max Fried’s hurt. We had a lot of guys banged up. You’ve got to be out there. That’s what they’re paying me to do, is go out there and play.”
