“All in all, we got good news today,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters on Saturday. “I think all of us kind of feared the worst.” On Sunday, the good news Boone was referring to became official. The scuffling Yankees placed Aaron Judge on the 10-day injured list with a flexor strain in his right elbow, but not a torn UCL. Judge underwent an MRI on Saturday, and based on reports that the Yankees think Judge has a chance to miss only the minimum 10 days, it seems safe to assume that the imaging revealed only a minor strain. He has received a platelet-rich plasma injection and won’t throw for 10 days to two weeks. Crucially, returning after the minimum would also allow Judge to be back by the time of his bobblehead day on August 13. The Yankees also traded for utility player Amed Rosario on Sunday, but we’ll cover that move after addressing the news about Judge.
Concern about the elbow arose last Tuesday, when Judge was noticed grimacing after throwing the ball in to the infield. The right fielder did his best to tamp down concerns, telling reporters, “I make facial expressions all the time,” in his characteristic deadpan. He also downplayed the injury to the organization, trying to push off calls for an MRI. “You never want to go in the tube,” he said. But he DH’d on Wednesday and exhibited more discomfort on Friday. “Throwing is the main concern,” Judge said on Saturday. “Hitting happens too quick, and it’s not really the motion that I felt anything. I think the muscle that hurts is the muscle used to grip, so there might be some issues with that.” Over his past nine games, he’s batting .143 with a 35 wRC+. That stretch dropped his best-in-baseball 220 wRC+ all the way down to a still-best-in-baseball 208. According to Jon Heyman of the New York Post, the absolute best-case scenario is that Judge returns after 10 days, then needs just 10 days at DH before getting back to right field.
This is the paragraph where you pull some numbers in order to demonstrate how big a loss the injured player is, but when you’re talking about a player like Judge, it can be hard to even know where to start. He leads the league with 7.2 WAR. Only two other players have surpassed 5.0. Six entire teams haven’t received 7.2 WAR from all of their position players combined! This is quite simply the biggest loss that any team could suffer. Losing Judge is also just a bummer for baseball. Over the past four seasons, he’s been on one of the greatest runs the game has ever seen, and even the best-case scenario robs him of the chance to make history. The injury puts an abrupt end to Judge’s most recent march toward the 60-homer mark. He currently has 37 homers, and before missing Saturday’s game, he was on pace for 58. Over the past four seasons, Judge has 194 home runs in 524 games, an average of 60 per 162 games.
There’s no good time to lose a player like Judge, but the Yankees have lost seven of their last 11 games and 13 of their last 22. We have their playoff odds at 85.5%, but at 5 1/2 games back of the Blue Jays in the AL East, their chance of winning the division has fallen all the way to 23.7%. That said, the Yankees are better equipped than most teams to handle a loss in the outfield.
With Judge out, the Yankees outfield consists of Jasson Domínguez in left, Trent Grisham in center, and Cody Bellinger in right. With a 130 wRC+, Grisham is having a career year at the plate despite a downturn in his defensive metrics. Bellinger is right there with a 132 wRC+. Domínguez is still just 22, and due to injuries, he came into the season with just 100 career plate appearances. He’s running a 107 wRC+ with some very ugly defensive grades. That’s certainly not a bad outfield. Together, the three have combined for a 124 wRC+. The only team whose outfielders have combined to hit better this season is the Cubs, who have gotten a wRC+ of 131 from their outfield. When you factor in the defense, the three Yankees have combined for 6.1 WAR, which would rank in the top 10 among all outfields. Most teams would be happy to have this outfield. It’s just that any outfield populated by regular humans (and one Martian) represents a huge step down from one that includes Judge.
The injury could potentially open up space for the 24-year-old Spencer Jones. Like Judge, Jones is 6-foot-7, and he has a combined 205 wRC+ over 49 games at Double-A and 19 games at Triple-A this season. He’s hit an absurd 29 home runs in just 68 games while running a terrifying 31% strikeout rate. However, Jones hasn’t played since Thursday due to back spasms. For a while, rumors circulated that Jones could be on the trading block, but more recent rumors have the team determined to keep him. He may well find his way up to the Bronx one way or another in the coming months.
Once Judge returns, the Yankees will have a logjam at designated hitter. Boone mentioned that he has already spoken to Giancarlo Stanton about seeing some time in the outfield, which would not be ideal. Stanton hasn’t played the outfield at all since 2023, and he hasn’t put up a positive number according to either DRS or FRV since 2018. What he has been doing, though, is absolutely raking, so it makes sense that the Yankees would want to do what they can to keep him in the lineup while Judge is limited to DH duty. Stanton missed the first two months of the season with injuries to both elbows, but since his return, he is slashing .276/.355/.520 (143 wRC+) with seven home runs across 110 plate appearances.
That brings us to our second piece of news. After trading for third baseman Ryan McMahon on Friday, the Yankees kept adding, sending pitcher Clayton Beeter and outfield prospect Browm Martinez to the Nationals for Rosario. Rosario has now been moved at the deadline in each of the past three seasons, going from the Guardians to the Dodgers in 2023, the Rays to the Dodgers again in 2024 (but then being waived by the Dodgers and finishing the season with the Reds), and now from the Nationals to the Yankees. He came up with the Mets in 2017 and looked for at least a little while like the shortstop of the future, but he ran a combined 90 wRC+ with bad defensive numbers over four seasons in Queens. The Mets dealt Rosario to Cleveland as part of the Francisco Lindor trade before the 2021 season. In recent years, he’s appeared all over the diamond (and all over the league).
He’s made just 158 plate appearances this season, so we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, but with a 105 wRC+, Rosario is putting up the best offensive season of his entire career, and his .357 xwOBA says he should be doing even better. Rosario has spent nearly all of his time at second and third base this season, but he’s capable of playing the outfield in a pinch. While his glove hasn’t graded out all that well, the most logical guess is that he’ll largely serve as McMahon’s platoon partner at third. Rosario has a 126 wRC+ against lefties this season and a 75 wRC+ against righties, and those marks aren’t that far off his career numbers of 120 and 84. Combine that with McMahon’s splits – 99 against righties and 59 against lefties this season, with career marks of 95 and 75 – and you’ve got a third base position that should be a bit above average both offensively and defensively. Together, that represents a massive upgrade to one of the biggest holes on the roster.
With three more days to go before the trade deadline, the Yankees aren’t necessarily done either. According to Brendan Kuty of The Athletic, the Yankees are looking to bolster their bullpen, which ranks 22nd with a 4.28 ERA and 21st with a 4.15 FIP. Kuty specifically mentioned that the team has been looking at Rockies reliever Jake Bird.
As for Washington’s return, at this point, Martinez is something of a lottery ticket. The 18-year-old is 5-foot-10 and has just 209 combined plate appearances under his belt in the Dominican Summer League. He got off to an incredible start this season, slashing .404/.507/.632 for a 186 wRC+ over 18 games (69 PA), but he hasn’t played since July 3. His MiLB.com player page indicates that the Nationals placed him on the 60-day IL this morning, but we aren’t sure of the nature of the injury; we’ll update this post as we learn more. Whatever the injury, it clearly wasn’t enough to scare off the Nationals. In case you were wondering, Martinez is the first player in Baseball Reference’s entire database whose name features an M following a W (unless you count William Kidd, who went 2-for-4 for Hartford in the Atlantic Association in 1890, and who is listed as Wm. Kidd). Eric Longenhagen had this to say about Martinez:
Martinez isn’t especially toolsy; his surface stats are a caricature of his talent. This is a stocky, medium-framed guy with barrel skills and precocious ability to hit fastballs but limited physical projection (and maybe some looming issues with chase, the data sample is small because he’s been out) for a corner outfield prospect. He remains the kind of prospect who lines up in the honorable mentions section of a prospect list.
Eric ranked Beeter 13th among Yankees prospects back in January. The Dodgers drafted the right-hander out of Texas Tech in 2020, then traded him to the Yankees for Joey Gallo at the 2022 deadline. After spending most of professional career as a starter, Beeter missed three months to a shoulder injury in 2024 and returned as a reliever. He’s looked impressive in Triple-A this season, running a 3.10 ERA and 2.75 FIP while striking out 35% of the batters he’s faced, but command is his big issue, and it has looked even worse this season. Things did not go as well in his first taste of the big leagues. He debuted at the beginning of July, going a combined 3 2/3 innings against the Blue Jays and Mariners and allowing three runs in each outing for an ERA of 14.73. He still has upside, but the volatility means that he didn’t really have a place on a Yankees team whose relievers will be expected to get outs in October. Here are Eric’s thoughts:
Beeter’s stuff is better than that of a standard middle reliever. His fastball has big uphill ride, he’s been up to 99 this year even though he’s coming off a shoulder injury, and his slider has huge depth for its velocity. It’s an 86-87 mph slider that essentially has curveball shape, which plays beautifully with Beeter’s fastball. But for most of Beeter’s career he has struggled to throw strikes, and that has been particularly true in 2025, as he’s walking seven batters per nine innings since returning from his shoulder impingement. Next season will be Beeter’s final option year, and it wasn’t clear that he’d be able to throw strikes and make the 2026 Yankees Opening Day bullpen to preserve that option. He’ll have more runway with Washington and could be a nice late-inning piece if things click for him late. More likely Beeter will always be a streaky strike-thrower and produce more like a fair middle reliever, overall.
In all, the Nationals are getting exactly what they hoped for when they signed Rosario. It will take years to know whether Martinez can contribute, but Beeter has the chance to be a useful piece pretty soon. If he’s useful enough, one July in the not-too-distant future, he might just pitch his way out of Washington altogether.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com