Photo: Ishika Samant/Getty Images
It wasn’t something you’d hear about on a TV broadcast, but earlier this season, Aaron Judge passed Yogi Berra to move into sixth on the Yankees’ all-time WAR leaderboard. WAR, or wins above replacement, is a stat that aims to capture a player’s total value in a single number, and the only names left for Judge to chase on the list are the ones in the innermost circle of Monument Park: Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, DiMaggio, and Jeter.
A decade into his career, Judge has muscled his way into this elite group. He’s the favorite to win his third MVP in four years after belting 53 home runs and leading the majors in batting by 20 points. He’s eclipsed 50 home runs four times, including an American League–record 62 in 2022. Among players who debuted after 1940, only Barry Bonds has a higher career OPS. There’s a case to be made that Judge is the greatest right-handed hitter in modern times.
His place in the Hall of Fame is already secure. But as any Yankees fan in their finest vintage “Got Rings?” T-shirt will tell you, there’s one notable difference between Judge and the other Yankee legends on that WAR leaderboard: They each won multiple championships in pinstripes, and with the Blue Jays ending the Yankees’ season in the ALDS on Wednesday night, Judge is still seeking his first. He is perhaps the most talented Yankee since Mickey Mantle, but the franchise has yet to surround him with a championship ball club. It’s time for Yankees fans to worry about the unthinkable: What if it never does?
The Yankees have been relatively competitive throughout Judge’s career because, in this era of expanded playoffs, it’s hard for a team with the Yankees’ resources not to be. They reached the World Series last year, lost in the ALCS three other times, and missed the playoffs just once since Judge’s first full season. But they’ve consistently crashed out in October, a difference-maker or three from realizing their championship dreams.
The front office hasn’t exactly been quiet during Judge’s career, betting big (and correctly) on free-agent pitchers Gerrit Cole and Max Fried, trading for Giancarlo Stanton and one year of Juan Soto, and retooling their bullpen over the past 12 months with splashy trades. But they haven’t quite been aggressive, either. They’ve missed out on multiple attractive free agents, either because the price tag got too steep in an era with multiple big-spending superpowers, because they had misplaced faith in their own young players to blossom into stars, or because they were concerned with staying under the luxury-tax threshold, even though their ability to spend to the moon remains one of their great advantages.
The teams Brian Cashman has assembled over the past decade have won lots of regular-season games and more than a few in the playoffs, but they’ve all ultimately fallen short, losing sometimes in heartbreaking fashion, sometimes in bizarre fashion, and sometimes in downright dispiriting fashion. Judge himself has an uneven playoffs history. He had a phenomenal postseason in 2025, batting .500 and electrifying Yankee Stadium with a game-tying homer in Game 3 against the Blue Jays. It was the 17th postseason home run of his career and the sixth in a game facing elimination, tied for the most in league history. But Judge has disappeared at times, too, hitting under .200 in six different postseason series. His low point came in 2022, weeks after breaking Roger Maris’s A.L. home-run record, when he went 1-for-16 in a four-game Astros sweep in the ALCS.
When the Yankees re-signed Judge in 2022, he was 30, and they took a chance that he still had years of elite play ahead of him. So far, we’ve seen the best-case scenario: He’s been mostly healthy, other than the injury he sustained literally running through a wall in Los Angeles, and he’s somehow only gotten better, twice topping the OPS he posted in his record-breaking 2022 season.
But Judge will turn 34 in April, safely in the territory where even star players begin to fade. He may prove to be the exception to the rule, the rare player who continues to excel well into his 30s. He may decline gradually, which would still mean several more thoroughly productive seasons given his outrageously high peak. But he also … may not be the exception. He may prove to be a mortal whose body is indeed affected by the passage of time. Given his own injury history and the miles he’s put on his six-foot-seven body patrolling the outfield all these years, it would hardly be surprising for Judge’s production to slow — perhaps soon.
Baseball is famously a sport in which one player can’t single-handedly will his team to a championship. Even the best hitter can bat only once out of nine times, and even the best pitcher spends half the game on the bench (provided his name isn’t Shohei Ohtani). Bonds, the greatest hitter this side of Babe Ruth, never won a World Series title. But the opportunity to build around a dominant, homegrown player like Judge is the stuff of a general manager’s dreams.
Aaron Boone talked more than once this year about how the 2025 Yankees were the best team he’s managed in his eight seasons. But if the best team he’s managed can’t get out of the ALDS, the takeaway can be only that the Yankees must get better, and not just by a little. Time could be running out sooner than anyone would like to admit.
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