Aaron Judge wanted to play in the Yankees’ Wild Card Series against the Boston Red Sox after straining his calf, but the team left its captain off the roster instead. A foot-and-ankle surgeon says that decision may have protected Judge from far worse injuries.
Judge suffered a moderate soleus muscle strain and received a platelet-poor plasma injection to accelerate his recovery, but the treatment wasn’t enough to get him cleared in time for the best-of-three series. Dr. Drew Burdi, a former college football quarterback who now works as a foot-and-ankle surgeon, told OutKick that pushing Judge back onto the field too early could have set off a chain reaction of injuries.
“If you do go too fast, too soon, you could just make it a more severe injury. It’s a soleus, so that could lead to overstraining (the) hamstring, up and down. So that’s your calf muscle, or part of the calf muscle. You could put more strain on your Achilles, you could put more strain on your hamstrings, and that could lead to other injuries,” Burdi said.
Burdi explained that muscle strains come in degrees of severity, and a premature return could turn Judge’s moderate strain into a severe one, extending his recovery no matter what treatment doctors throw at it.
“If you’re not ready to go back in yet, you tear it more, you can get to a point where the advanced conservative therapies like PRP injections, shock wave therapy, these guys are getting oxygen chamber therapy. This stuff can only go so far. The body can only adapt so much, can only heal so quickly,” Burdi said.
The worst-case scenario, according to Burdi, is an Achilles rupture — an injury he did not rule out.
“Possibly, yeah, I mean, that’s always a risk. Again, it kind of depends how he feels, but it’s always a risk, and Achilles is always so scary because a lot of people, you see it in football, guys are jumping up on the sidelines and they come down weird and they rupture their Achilles. You’re just like, wow, they don’t even feel it before it happens,” Burdi said. “That’s tough because those are tough injuries to come back from. Guys do do it, but they’re never quite the same.”
Burdi added that Achilles tears don’t necessarily end careers, but they change them.
Judge had said he intended to try to play in Game 1 of the series but didn’t recover in time. He’d already been playing through a rib injury that had sidelined him since June, and in seven games back from that injury he was hitting 4 for 23 with one home run and 13 strikeouts. Even in a slump, his presence in the lineup takes pressure off the rest of the Yankees’ hitters.
On the season, Judge is hitting .241 with 18 home runs and 41 RBI in 66 games. He’s hoping the Yankees can knock out Boston in the Wild Card Series so he can return for the ALDS.
