Yankees World Series Collapse: Aaron Judge’s Struggles a…
Across the 2024 season, Aaron Judge was by far the league’s best player. The Yankees slugger engineered one of the greatest offensive campaigns in league history, recording a .322/.457/.701 slash line, 223 OPS+, and a league-leading 10.8 bWAR to help power New York’s playoff push.
It was always going to be hard to recreate that level of play in the postseason, even for a player of Judge’s caliber. He was tasked with facing the best pitchers from the best teams in the land — an unenviable sight for any batter.
The breadth by which Judge toiled through the postseason proved especially disconcerting, however. While Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton raked when the lights were at their brightest, Judge — statistically one of the greatest right-handed hitters MLB has ever produced — was quiet, falling victim to an odious mix of weak contact, whiffs, and plain old rotten luck.
The World Series housed Judge’s worst outings. His prowess for strikeouts intensified throughout the five-game set. The result? New York’s World Series defeat.
