Aaron Judge and the Outer Half of the Plate

Two and a half years ago the Yankees had three first round draft picks thanks in part to the free agent defections of Nick Swisher and Rafael Soriano, and already the usual rules of prospect attrition apply to those three picks: one got hurt (Ian Clarkin), one has been traded (Eric Jagielo), and one is a promising top prospect (Aaron Judge). That, as they say, is baseball.

Judge remains New York’s top prospect and last season he reached Triple-A, so he’s ostensibly close to making his MLB debut. He hit .258/.332/.446 (124 wRC+) with 20 home runs in 124 total games last year, though that can be broken down into a .284/.350/.516 (147 wRC+) line with 12 homers and a 25.0% strikeout rate in 63 Double-A games and .224/.308/.373 (98 wRC+) with eight homers and a 28.5% strikeout rate in 61 Triple-A games. Clearly Triple-A pitching gave him a hard time.

“They started pitching me a little differently and I just wasn’t able to make the adjustments as quick as I wanted to. You’ve just got to learn. Live and learn and get better,” said Judge to Bryan Hoch earlier this week when asked about his Triple-A struggles. Judge is enormous, he’s listed at 6-foot-7 and 275 lbs., and experienced Triple-A pitchers took advantage of his size by attacking him with soft stuff down and away. That’s the next adjustment he has to make.

The Yankees shuttled Judge in and out of Tampa this offseason for what were essentially hitting mini-camps designed to help him work on handling those down and away pitches. (That’s actually not uncommon. Prospects of every caliber attend these mini-camps throughout the winter.) The issue is not so much Judge’s approach, but his size and freakishly compact swing. He does a good job hitting the ball to the opposite field, which is the usual approach against pitches away, so that’s not an issue. Here are Judge’s batted ball heat maps for the 2015 season, via MLB Farm:

As you can see from the heat maps, the right-handed hitting Judge does a pretty good job of taking the ball the other way in general, so he’s not some sort of brute masher looking to yank everything to the pull side. Judge does tend to hit a lot of ground balls to the left field of the infield, however, and Keith Law actually mentioned this in his recent top 100 prospects write-up:

He’s excellent at covering the inner third despite his long arms, which is a positive skill overall but causes two issues: He hits too many grounders to the left side, and he’s very vulnerable to soft stuff away, which led to the excessive strikeout rates in 2015. Learning to cover the outside corner — or lay off pitches just off of it — while maintaining that plate coverage inside is the main challenge for Judge if he wants to become an impact bat in the majors.

The Baseball Prospectus crew had a pretty interesting line in their Yankees top ten prospects write-up: “It’s almost as if Judge’s body prevents him from being the kind of pure hitter he could be.” Every scouting report since the 2013 draft has indicated Judge is an excellent pure hitter more apt to rip line drives from pole to pole than sell out for power, which is uncommon for dudes his size. He has big power — Law’s says it’s 70 raw power on the 20-80 scouting scale, which is well-above-average — but that isn’t his strength as a hitter. It’s his pure hitting ability.

“A lot of times, you see power arms from starters at Double-A and then you see them again in the big leagues,” said minor league hitting instructor James Rowson to Dan Martin when asked about Judge’s Triple-A issues. “Sometimes in Triple-A, you don’t have as many starters with those power arms. I thought he picked it up as he went along. One thing that stands out as a young player that size is he has great plate discipline and body control. He’s as wide as he is tall, so he has a good foundation.”

A year ago at this time we were all talking about Judge as a potential second half call-up should the Yankees need outfield help. He absolutely mashed at Low-A and High-A in 2014 and the scouting reports were glowing. The issues with outer half pitches in Triple-A were more of a surprise than expected, I’d say. That’s okay though. Judge is a very unique prospect — he’s a really good athlete and runner for his size, this isn’t a dude who lumbers on the field — and he’ll have a unique development path.

The Yankees are pretty well set in the outfield heading into the 2016 season. They have their three big league starters (Brett Gardner, Jacoby Ellsbury, Carlos Beltran), an up-and-comer as their fourth outfielder (Aaron Hicks), a solid fifth outfield option (Dustin Ackley), and a wealth of Triple-A options (Slade Heathcott, Mason Williams, Ben Gamel) already on the 40-man roster and ahead of Judge on the call-up depth chart. Judge isn’t in a Greg Bird situation; the Yankees needed Bird this year. They don’t need Judge.

As far as Judge is concerned, the goal this season is improving against those pitches away and putting himself in the best possible position to replace Beltran as the everyday right fielder in 2017. Does he want to reach the show this summer? Of course. He’s human. “I’m excited that maybe I’ll get a chance to do (what Bird did last year) this year,” he said to Martin. But as far as the Yankees are concerned, they want Judge to work on his main weakness, and if it takes the entire season with the RailRiders, so be it.