A calf, a captain, and eight days left
Aaron Judge tried to hide it. First inning against Minnesota, something grabbed in his lower right leg, and the Yankees captain said nothing. He stayed out there until the sixth, came off, and only then told manager Aaron Boone what he had been feeling since the opening frame.
New York made it official earlier today. Judge goes on the 10-day injured list with a right calf strain, backdated to Thursday. Infielder/outfielder Max Schuemann comes up from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to fill the roster spot.
“Once you start ramping up, things pop up,” Judge said. “Hopefully, it’s just one little thing and we’re back out there soon.”
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Nine days back, then this
The backdating matters more than it sounds. Because the move is retroactive to Thursday, Judge becomes eligible to return on Sept. 27, the final day of the regular season. One game. That is the entire runway before October.
He had only been back since Sept. 8 anyway. A rib injury took more than three months out of his summer, and the seven games since his return never produced the rhythm he was looking for: 4-for-23, a .174 average, one home run, three RBIs.
Stretch it across the whole year and the picture gets stranger. Sixty-six games. A .241 average, 18 home runs, 41 RBIs. Two seasons ago those numbers would have read like one bad month. In 2026 they are the complete file on a three-time American League MVP.
What the Yankees do with this
The playoff place is already secured, which takes the panic out of it and leaves a colder question behind. What does a postseason lineup look like when the man it was built around has taken 23 at-bats since early June?
Schuemann is not an answer to that, and nobody is pretending otherwise. The 29-year-old hit .194 with two home runs and eight RBIs across 41 games in the Bronx earlier this season. He is here to cover eight days.
Boone’s actual decision arrives on Sept. 27. By then he has to choose between a calf that has already been played through once and a postseason roster quietly learning to function without its captain.
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