How the Yankees should handle Aaron Judge’s wrist injury

On the surface, Aaron Judge’s rehab seems to be going swimmingly as of late. After a long period of inactivity, Judge has started taking batting practice and outfield drills this week, and just yesterday, the Yankees activated him from the disabled list. Though Judge won’t hit in a game quite yet, he’s officially back on the roster and could appear soon. Great news for Yankee fans, right?

Wrong. The Yankees are jeopardizing Judge’s future by rushing him towards increased baseball activity. Their medical staff is clearly incapable of doing what is best for Judge. In their place, then, we loyal fans must pool together our collective knowledge (and credits from the Online Medical School for Reputable and Really Good Doctors) to determine the best course of action regarding Judge’s injury. By that, I mean that you all should agree with what I’ve written below and bombard Brian Cashman’s office with phone calls urging him to do what I say.

“Why are you so sure that the Yankees are screwing Judge’s rehab up?”, some of you might ask. To such readers, I present to you a testimony from Judge himself.

There it is - a 4 out of 10 on the pain scale. That is be-all, end-all evidence that Judge’s wrist isn’t ready to take on an increase in baseball activity, regardless of whatever data or professional knowledge that the Yankees’ medical staff purportedly possesses. For those unaware of the gravity of a score of 4, may I remind you that this was rated as just a 6 out of 10 on the pain scale during a 1990s American social experiment:

The pain Aaron Judge is experiencing in his wrist when he swings is equivalent to 66% of the pain of being stung in the groin repeatedly by an innumerable amount of bees. Yet Yankees management continues to push Judge further down the comeback trail. It is an absolute travesty, this handling of Judge. It is nothing short of an affront to humanity.

But what else is to be expected from a team that decided it was a good idea to keep Masahiro Tanaka from getting Tommy John surgery, leaving him to pitch with a damaged elbow ligament for the majority of his stateside career to terrible results (an unsightly 3.77 ERA post-injury)? The Yankees have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing what is best for their players. That is why we have to take matters into our own hands. We must flood all of the Yankees’ channels of information - their website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, phones, faxes, pigeon post schemes - with calls to heed the following proposal.

My proposal is this: stop Aaron Judge from swinging the bat. Stop him from throwing the ball. Stop him from picking up his glove. Stop him from putting on his cleats. Stop him from driving to the ballpark. Bar Aaron Judge from doing anything that remotely resembles baseball activity. Forever.

The logic behind this is simple. Baseball activities are, by far, the number one cause of injury for baseball players. The human body is simply not designed to perform the feats required of it by the game, which is why only a handful of players play all 162 games in a season, and even the longest of careers seldom last over twenty years.

This means that even if Aaron Judge overcomes his wrist injury and returns to the Yankee lineup, chances are the next injury is waiting just around the corner. If we are especially unfortunate, that injury will be career-threatening. If it is not, that only gives the Yankees’ incompetent medical staff another chance to mishandle the situation, thereby endangering Judge’s future anyway. The only way we can ascertain that Judge remains healthy is to keep him from setting foot on a baseball field for the rest of his life. I mean, keeping him healthy is the point of it all; is it not?