New York Yankees star right fielder Aaron Judge is ready to finally have an MVP season. The only thing holding him back is whether he can stay healthy all year.
In both 2018 and 2019, Judge missed a significant portion of the season with an injury. He broke his wrist getting hit by a pitch in 2018, and had a pretty serious oblique injury in 2019.
He only had 378 at-bats in 2019, but still bat .272 with 27 home runs and 55 RBIs with an OPS well over .900. The injury last season was early in the season, and it affected him a lot when he returned. He struggled for a while before finally getting all the rust off and finally killed it in the last two or so months of the year.
Judge was flawless on defense, literally. He didn’t have a single error in the 92 games he played in the field. One thing that stands out about his defense is his strong arm, and he had seven outfield assists.
Judge is a solid base runner and has sneaky good speed that allows him to steal a bag here and there, and the speed definitely contributes to his stellar defense.
In his three MLB seasons, Judge has won a silver slugger (2017), a rookie of the year award (2017), been selected to two all-star teams (2017 and 2018), and has a second place finish in the MVP voting (2017).
Now, all he’s missing is a first place MVP award. There’s no reason why he can’t do it as long as he stays healthy. He’s such a well rounded player, and that deserves to be recognized if he has an historic year.