NEWS
The Yankees Bet Aaron Judge Can Skip the Minors
Aaron Judge returns Tuesday against Colorado with no rehab games after 84 missed, as the Yankees chase Tampa Bay over the last 19.
Aaron Judge will play Tuesday night against the Colorado Rockies after 84 games out, and he will do it without a single minor-league at-bat. The Yankees reinstated the 34-year-old outfielder from the 60-day injured list Monday night, clearing him for a 7:05 p.m. ET series opener at Yankee Stadium.
New York is 81-62, four games behind the Tampa Bay Rays in the AL East, with 19 games left. The bet is that a three-time MVP coming off a stress fracture in his first right rib can help immediately, in a race that no longer has a Triple-A runway.
He Told Them Not to Waste At-Bats
Judge last played on May 31. He has said for weeks that he did not want a rehab stint, and the club took him at his word after he spent Monday afternoon at the Stadium facing live pitching for the first time since late May.
I don’t see a point. Why waste at-bats?
Aaron Judge, Yankees outfielder, to reporters
He added that he saw no reason to burn swings in a minor-league game, because he already knows how his body reacts and how to manage it. On Aug. 27 he put it more bluntly: if he tells them he is ready, they should be ready, because he is not a pitcher and he can take his reps in the cage while sitting in the dugout every night.
Today, the Yankees made the following roster moves:
• Reinstated OF Aaron Judge (#99) from the 60-day injured list.
• Designated RHP Chase Hampton for assignment.— New York Yankees (@Yankees) September 8, 2026
The injury started on April 26 in Houston, on a diving catch as he tried to avoid second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. It was first treated as a bone bruise. Later scans showed a stress fracture in the first right rib, with pain that ran into his throwing shoulder. He tried to play through it for a month, then stopped.
FROM THE DIVE IN HOUSTON TO THE ACTIVE ROSTER
- April 26, 2026: Dives for a catch in Houston and suffers the rib injury he later traced to that play.
- May 31, 2026: Plays his last game, after batting.263 with 7 home runs and 20 RBIs in 31 games following the dive.
- June 4, 2026: The club announces a fractured first right rib and a four-to-six-week reimaging window.
- July 18, 2026: New York moves him to the 60-day injured list.
- Mid-August 2026: He resumes playing catch, then running, throwing, and cage work.
- Sept. 7, 2026: He takes live batting practice at Yankee Stadium and is activated that night.
He wanted to be back June 1, he said, and that did not happen. One hundred days after his last game, the club is sending him into a pennant race on the strength of cage work, machine velocity, two on-field batting practices in San Diego, and that Monday session against a right-hander and a left-hander.
Colorado Is Tonight’s Rehab Assignment
The first test is not a playoff starter. It is Rockies right-hander Gabriel Hughes, who is 0-6 with a 6.19 ERA and a 1.43 WHIP. Colorado is 55-88. A night against that club, in a game that counts, is the tuneup Judge would not take at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
New York can cushion the rust. Right-hander Cam Schlittler, 25, starts for the Yankees with a 2.04 ERA and 210 strikeouts in 171.2 innings over 29 starts. On Sept. 2 in Anaheim he threw eight innings of two-hit, one-run ball with 9 strikeouts and no walks. The staff is why the Yankees are still 81-62. The wager Tuesday is whether the lineup can start catching up to that pitching.
Judge is hitting.248/.375/.533 this season, with 17 home runs and 38 RBIs in 261 plate appearances. That is not last year’s batting title, when he hit.331 with 53 homers and 114 RBIs in 152 games. In the final 18 games before the injured list he had one homer, a two-run, game-ending drive that beat Tampa Bay 2-0 on May 24, and he had just come out of an 11-game RBI drought, the longest of his career. Rest was supposed to heal the rib. It is also being asked to reset a bat that had already gone quiet.
What the Yankees Hit Without Him
New York was 36-23 (.610) in 59 games through May 31. It went 45-39 (.536) in the 84 games he missed. The record held because the pitching held. The lineup did not.
YANKEES OFFENSE WITH AND WITHOUT JUDGE
| Split | Games | Record | Average | Homers | OPS | wRC+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Through May 31 | 59 | 36-23 | .243 | 86 | .770 | 116 |
| Without Judge | 84 | 45-39 | .227 | 107 | .681 | 90 |
The 116 wRC+ through May 31 ranked second in the majors, and the club had scored the fourth-most runs. After he came out, the Yankees’ 90 wRC+ ranked 29th, ahead of only the Los Angeles Angels (86), and they ranked 26th in runs. Their .227 average in that stretch ranked 29th, ahead of only Seattle at.225. They still hit 107 homers in 84 games, down from 86 in 59, which is a drop from 1.46 homers a night to 1.27. The average and the OPS fell harder than the long ball.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone said the club has had long stretches where the offense struggled, and that a big part of that was not having Judge. He also said the bats had ticked up in the past couple of weeks. First baseman Ben Rice is hitting.358 with a.943 OPS over his last 13 games. Cody Bellinger has hit.293 with a.662 OPS in 14 games since coming off the injured list after a left hamstring strain. Spencer Jones has an.828 OPS in 39 games since a July 26 promotion. Boone wants Judge in the two-hole, with those left-handed bats around him, because a right-handed hitter in that spot changes how clubs pitch the rest of the order.
The run differential still favors New York, 646 runs scored and 529 allowed, plus-117. That is a pitching club that has been waiting on a middle-of-the-order bat, not a team that collapsed when he left.
Judge Skipped the Minors in 2023 Too
This is not the first time he has refused the bus ride. In 2023 he missed 42 games after tearing a ligament in his right big toe crashing into the right-field fence at Dodger Stadium. He skipped a rehab assignment then as well, came back as the designated hitter in Baltimore, and went 0-for-1 with three walks in a 1-0 loss. Over his final 57 games he posted a.965 OPS, slashing.245/.408/.557.
That return had two months of runway. This one has 19 games. The absence is twice as long, and a rib that stopped him from overhead work, and from the weight room, is not a toe he could hide in a DH role. The Yankees still intend to start him in right field, not park him at designated hitter, because of how the roster is built. On Saturday in San Diego he one-hopped a throw to third from medium-depth right field. Boone has already said they have to be smart about diving, the play that caused this in the first place.
The last time he did go to the minors, in 2019, he played five games at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre after a strained left oblique cost him two months. He has that contrast in his own file: an oblique got a rehab stint, a toe did not, and a rib is being treated like the toe. In 2025 he missed 10 games from July 26 to Aug. 4 with a right elbow flexor strain from a throw home in Toronto, took a platelet-rich plasma injection, and avoided surgery. The body has been asking questions for a few years. Tuesday is another one, on a shorter clock.
The Division Still Runs Through Four Games in the Bronx
Tampa Bay is 85-58. New York is four back, and the Rays hold the season series 6-3, with four games left against the Rays in the Bronx from Sept. 22-24, including a doubleheader. Only a four-game sweep would flip that tiebreaker. The Yankees are a virtual lock for October, sitting nine games into the wild-card field, but the higher wild-card seed hosts every game of the best-of-three Wild Card Series, which is set to start Sept. 29.
Boston is 80-65, two games behind New York for that top wild-card slot, and the Red Sox have won five in a row. The Yankees already own the tiebreaker after taking three of four from Boston from Aug. 28-30. Boston has 17 games left. If New York stumbles through Judge’s first week back, the hosting edge is the thing that moves, not the playoff berth.
WHAT IS LEFT ON THE SCHEDULE
- Sept. 8-10: Three home games against the Rockies, the first of a six-game homestand.
- Sept. 11-13: Three home games against the Mets to finish the homestand.
- Sept. 14-16: Three games at Minnesota.
- Sept. 22-24: Four games against Tampa Bay at Yankee Stadium, the AL East series on the calendar.
- Sept. 25-27: Three home games against Baltimore to close the regular season.
A six-game homestand against Colorado and the Mets is the softest runway the club could have drawn for a hitter who has not seen a big-league pitch in 84 games. The Rays series is the one that still decides whether Judge’s return is a wild-card story or a division story.
Chase Hampton Comes Off the 40-Man to Make Room
To open a 40-man spot, New York designated right-hander Chase Hampton for assignment Monday night. Hampton, 25, was a 2022 sixth-round pick out of Texas Tech, 190th overall, signed for $497,500, and he entered 2024 as one of the organization’s better pitching prospects. He had Tommy John surgery in February 2025 and missed that season. In 2026 he has posted an 8.18 ERA in 17 minor-league games, with 56 strikeouts in 55 innings and a 1.78 WHIP, splitting time among Tampa, Hudson Valley, and Double-A Somerset.
The club has a few days to trade him or run him through waivers. After Sunday’s 4-3 loss in San Diego, New York also optioned right-hander Elmer Rodríguez to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Center fielder Trent Grisham went on the 10-day injured list Sept. 5 with a Grade 2 right hamstring strain that could keep him out through the regular season, and the Yankees recalled outfielder Jasson Domínguez the same day. Judge comes back to a right-field job and a lineup that is already missing Grisham, with Giancarlo Stanton still on the 60-day list with a left calf strain.
How Boone Plans to Ease Him In
Boone said over the weekend that Judge was close to the endgame of being ready to play, then tightened it: he is physically at the finish line, and the remaining problem is volume, the three-hour grind of sitting down and standing up for nine innings. One plan Boone has called “on the table” is a five-to-seven-inning outing, then an exit. That is a spring-training ramp on a September calendar.
HOW THE CLUB CAN USE HIM THIS WEEK
- Right field, limited innings: Start him in right, pull him after five to seven innings, and keep the bat in the 2-hole while the legs catch up.
- Designated hitter first: Park him at DH for a night, the way they did in Baltimore in 2023, if the rib or the throw is the worry.
- Full game if the live BP holds: Trust Monday’s session and the San Diego work, and play him nine against Hughes.
Judge is not sweating the power or the bat speed. Even if it is a tick off, he said, it is still better than nothing. He stood in against Max Fried last week in Anaheim, and he has been hitting off the Trajekt machine that throws video of big-league deliveries. What he has not done is take an at-bat that counts since May 31.
Boone will write a lineup Tuesday. Hughes will throw the first pitch Judge sees in 100 days. Schlittler will try to make the scoreboard quiet enough that rust is a subplot. The Yankees already survived the summer without him. The wager they placed Monday night is that 19 games is enough time for the version of Judge that hit.331 a year ago to show up before the Wild Card Series does.
