We’re not quite at the point where it would be helpful for one of the city’s priests to take it upon themself in an effort to fix Aaron Judge.
Not yet.
But then again, it probably wouldn’t hurt.
You know the story, right? In 1952, Gil Hodges went 0-for-21 in the World Series against the Yankees. The next season he suffered from one of the worst hangover slumps ever. Father Herbert Raymond, a 44-year old parish priest at St. Francis Xavier Church on Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, who kept picking up the newspapers in the unseasonably warm spring of 1953 and kept seeing a string of gutless Hodges games, decided to help.
One especially steamy Sunday, in lieu of a sermon, Father Raymond told his congregation: “Go home, keep the Commandments. And say a prayer for Gil Hodges.”
Soon thereafter, Hodges returned to his usual Hall of Fame form.
Every little bit helps.
Judge is now nearing that place where he could use the help. He could use a boost. He came into Saturday night’s Game 2 of the World Series with a slash line of .167/.304/.361. He’d struck out 16 times in 36 at-bats. And things didn’t get better Saturday: 0-for-4, three more strikeouts, and a notably empty ninth-inning at-bat while they were trying to come back before settling for a 4-2 loss.
And look: players slump at all times of the year. And really good players have had their difficulties in October. Gil Hodges proved that. So did Barry Bonds. So did Alex Rodriguez. It happens. It’s baseball. Baseball is maddening for a lot of reasons and as much as anything, it’s impossible to explain why great players turn ice cold when they do.
The Judge we see now bears no resemblance to the Judge we saw all year, unless you’re talking about the Judge who woke up on May 2, after 33 games, with a slash line — .197/.331/.393 — that looks awful resemblant of the one he carries now.
You may have heard: Judge recovered.
Now, it goes without saying, that he needs to make a similar bounce-back in what’s left of this series. Look, after two games, the stars in both sides have all delivered big moments — Juan Soto (another home run Saturday night) and Giancarlo Stanton, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Judge is the one who’s been dim.
And the Yankees simply aren’t going to close what is now a two-game gap against a team as good as the Dodgers if their best player doesn’t start playing like the best player.
There were a lot of jokes this year about the Yankees being a two-man team, Soto and Judge, and that obviously wasn’t the case because two-man teams don’t finish in first place. Two-man teams don’t cruise through seven playoff wins in nine games.
But that doesn’t mean that the Yankees don’t get their confidence, and their swagger, knowing that Soto and Judge are waiting for opposing pitchers four and five times per game. Entire game plans are arranged around that harsh lineup truth, and with good reason. They have been a reliably ferocious two-man game all year.
Needs to happen now.
Needs to return to The Bronx when the Yankees do. The Yankees can win without Judge at his best but they sure wouldn’t want to try it too often, surely not as many as four times in the next five games, which is the mission now.
Maybe it’ll take a change of scenery and the absolute electric store that Yankee Stadium promises to be when the Series resumes Monday. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible that when public address announcer Paul Olden introduces Judge, there’s even more oomph behind the welcome than normal. Maybe the same can apply when the Bleacher Creatures clear their throats in the top of the first.
Maybe it’ll take — as Aaron Boone has insisted time eternal whenever Judge has slumped, and with cause, “one swing to change everything.”
Maybe.
And maybe there are men (and women) of the cloth who might want to lend a hand. As we’ve seen, it couldn’t hurt.
