The Yankees have done everything possible to welcome Juan Soto short of showing him where his plaque is going to be in Monument Park someday. They don’t just want to rent him for a year. They want to keep him. They want Soto to be happy in pinstripes, like he’ll be thanking the Good Lord for making him a Yankee the way Joe DiMaggio did. You sometimes get the idea that there will be people assigned to covering how happy Soto looks at a given moment.
And you better believe he could turn out to be tremendous here, he has that much talent. But even with him next to Aaron Judge, in the batting order, in the outfield, Soto isn’t The Guy, for the Yankees, and in New York.
That is still Judge’s job.
He is the captain of the Yankees and the face of the Yankees. He is the greatest single-season home run hitter in the history of the Yankees, at the head of a long line that started with Babe Ruth and included Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and even Alex Rodriguez, another kind of captain, just for the Biogenesis All-Stars.
The season before last, No. 99 hit all those home runs and made it look and feel like he’d hit a perfect score of 100. He was a great Yankee in all ways, and by September, his at-bats had become the single most exciting moment in his sport. When he is healthy, he is still the most exciting at-bat in his sport. Now he has to do that for a full season again, or the Yankees have no chance to be great, not with Gerrit Cole gone for at least the next 60 days because of a sore elbow, 60 not always being a magic number around the Yankees.
This isn’t Cole’s team, though. It isn’t Soto’s team. It’s Judge’s. He is their star, he is the home run guy, he is the most popular player they have, he has gone out of his way to be a team leader (even getting everybody’s attention by speaking up about analytics), he is making more money on a single contract than any Yankee has ever made, until Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman, the cash men, may have to throw even more Soto’s way.
Nobody is saying that he has to go for 62 homers again. What he does need to do is stay off the injured list himself. If he can’t, the Yankees really do have no chance, not without Cole not back until June at the earliest. They have a right to expect Soto to post up, in Buck Showalter’s words, just about every day. Soto played all 162 games for the Padres last season. The Yankees don’t need that many from Judge. But they can’t have this be another year when he misses 50 or even 60 games.
“I can sit here and explain a lot of things, but I think it comes down to us going out there and doing it,” Judge said. “I can sit here and talk about our new offense and the guys we got, the new pitchers we got. But it really comes down to us going out there and doing the job.”
Of course, the injuries he’s suffered aren’t his fault. He had the extreme bad luck of running into that outfield door at Dodger Stadium last June. Another time he got hit in the hand. It’s baseball. Things happen. They just have happened a lot to a guy who looks like he could be catching passes from Patrick Mahomes and running over people and not into walls after he does.
Judge has essentially played three full seasons out of the seven he has played with the Yankees starting in 2017. He missed 50 games in 2018, 60 in 2019, 32 (out of 60) in 2020. The next two seasons, including the 62-homer season, he only missed a total of 19 games. Then he missed 52 last year after that moment in Los Angeles.
You know why Yankees fans expected the worst when he missed a few games in spring training because of an abdominal issue? Because he’s Aaron Judge, that’s why. In so many ways, and for different reasons than Mickey Mantle’s, he has sometimes looked as fragile as The Mick does. There has just been all those times when All Rise sat down.
There have been so many other big Yankee injuries, to big players, over the past several years. There just have. It happened to Anthony Rizzo in 2023, because of what turned out to be a concussion. It has happened to Giancarlo Stanton again and again. And again. Luis Severino kept getting hurt when he was still a Yankee. So did Carlos Rodon and Nestor Cortes last season. Now DJ LeMahieu is hurt again and the kid, Jasson Dominguez, isn’t expected back from Tommy John surgery until mid-season, if then.
Maybe the Yankees can somehow pass the teams in the AL East that finished ahead of them last year, the Orioles and Rays and Blue Jays. But a lot of things would have to break right for them even after they do get back Cole, the true ace of the sport in ’23. More likely, they will be one of the Wild Card teams in their league.
But if something happens to No. 99, they will finish out of the money again, even with the addition of Soto, one of the most complete left-handed hitters anywhere in baseball, one who doesn’t turn 26 in October, when the very-best-case scenario for him and all the Yankees is that they’re still playing.
As gifted as he is, Soto doesn’t make it that far without Aaron Judge. More than any of them, he is the one who gets them back to where they want to be, and who they still want to be: THE YANKEES. All caps. Starts with the captain.