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- Ongoing Attempts, May 23: Great players always figure it out, right?
Ongoing Attempts, May 23: Great players always figure it out, right?
About Aaron Judge and the Yankees, more Paul Skenes, surprising divisions, and more.
Hayden Kane
May 23, 2024
Aaron Judge was always going to figure it out.
Great players figure it out. Great players will bounce back over the course of a long season. Judge was off to a woeful start, batting south of .200 into the second month of the season with little power to show for his efforts.
Judge is back on track now, and the Yankees are on fire as they sit atop the American League East. But as we see from the stories of two other great players, it might not have been as obvious as we thought that Judge was still great.
In today’s Ongoing Attempts:
Taking it for granted that star players are still great
Paul Skenes, a confident young man
Being wrong about which divisions will be the bad divisions
The Rockies crashing back to earth
On we go.
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Stars always get back on track, until they don’t
The aesthetics of Judge struggling are jarring. He is larger than life and larger than most of his opponents, which is quite the feat in 2024. Judge dominating pitchers and smashing home runs matches the visual of him just walking onto the field. It likewise surprising, then, to see that player outdone over a long period of time.
Even if he wasn’t a physical force, Judge’s struggles would be outliers as compared with his long track record as a great player.
Great players figure it out. Aaron Judge appears to have figured it out. He’s up to a .268/.405/.585 slash line, good for a 177 OPS+. That was always going to happen, right? There were no signs before this season that a healthy Judge wouldn’t continue to produce at an elite level.
It felt inevitable, because great players don’t just suddenly stop being great. We expect a warning, a decline that happens over time that gives us a heads up that player isn’t what he used to be.
So, what is going on with Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt?