ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The general manager was asked a simple question Thursday morning. If the scan comes back clean, how long until Aaron Judge plays? Brian Cashman answered by rejecting the premise.
The Yankees do not expect it to come back clean.
That is the news out of Tropicana Field, delivered hours before the Yankees beat Tampa Bay 12-4 to salvage a split of the four-game series. It arrived in the flat, careful register Cashman uses when he wants a sentence to travel no further than it has to.
What he said next carried more weight. Cashman has not asked the Yankees medical staff for a return timeline. Not once.
Six weeks, and the question nobody asked
Judge has been on the injured list since June 5 with a stress fracture of his right rib, confirmed by a CT scan, an MRI and a specialist. He last played May 31. He believes the rib cracked while he attempted a diving catch April 26 in Houston, then kept playing through it for a month.
When the Yankees shut him down, they said imaging would follow in four to six weeks. Thursday marked the end of that window. The scan happens during the All-Star break.
Cashman set expectations low before anyone saw a result. He is hoping the images show progress, not resolution.
“I don’t think we’re anticipating it’s coming back clean,” Cashman said.
The reason he has not requested a timeline is more revealing than the scan itself. Judge cannot do the work that would make a timeline meaningful. He has been limited to lower-body conditioning since May, unable to load his rib cage at all.
“His current condition restricts him in a lot of different ways,” Cashman said.
The best the Yankees hope for next week is permission to expand his workouts. Not a rehab assignment. Not a date. Permission to lift.
The word Cashman would not say
Cashman stated plainly that he expects Judge back this season. He said the healing timeline should allow it. He also attached a condition to every version of that sentence.
“That’s everything I know thus far,” Cashman said, adding that the imaging would settle the rest.
Asked whether Judge would return at full strength or play through discomfort, the general manager deferred entirely to his medical staff. He would not guess. He drew one hard line: Judge will not be activated while still injured.
“He should be asymptomatic before we turn him loose,” Cashman said.
The fear underneath that caution is reinjury. A second fracture would likely end Judge’s season outright, which is why the Yankees will not accelerate him to meet a schedule.
Internally, the organization has long viewed mid-August as the realistic ceiling. Judge would need roughly three weeks of baseball activity to rebuild, essentially a private spring training, and that clock cannot start until the rib permits it. The math leaves little margin.
Stanton’s setback was not a setback
The Yankees are missing a second middle-of-the-order bat, and Thursday brought the clearest explanation yet of why Giancarlo Stanton has not returned.
It was not a reinjury. Stanton strained his right calf in late April, rehabbed to the edge of activation, then hurt the same calf again in mid-June while running the bases at Yankee Stadium. Cashman said the second strain occurred in a slightly different area of the muscle. It was new damage, not aggravated damage.
“He had a new injury, which kind of resets the whole thing,” Cashman said.
That distinction explains the pace. Stanton, 36, has resumed running after a course of PRP injections. He has not played since April 24 in Houston. The Yankees are unlikely to have him before August.
Cashman did not disguise what the absence costs a lineup that has needed a slugger for six weeks.
“Certainly, we’d love to have him in that lineup,” Cashman said.
What the numbers say about life without them
The Yankees are 15-19 without Judge and were 36-23 when he went down. They lost 15 of 20 entering Thursday, the worst mark in baseball since June 18. Their 56 runs over that span were the fewest in the majors. Their 212 strikeouts were the most.
Thursday’s 12-4 win was the exception that measured the rule. It was the first time the Yankees scored double digits since June 17. Ben Rice homered twice and drove in five. New York collected 14 hits. Ryan Yarbrough took the win, Drew Rasmussen the loss.
Cashman refused to let the offense hide behind his captain’s absence.
“Clearly, you miss him,” Cashman said, before rejecting it as an explanation for the collective slump.
He was equally firm that the injuries will not dictate the Aug. 3 trade deadline. Judge, Stanton, Max Fried and Carlos Rodon are all on the shelf, and Cashman said the club will pursue improvement regardless of who is healthy. He named catcher as an obvious need. Rodon threw on flat ground Thursday for the first time since landing on the injured list with left elbow inflammation.
A scan, and everything riding on it
The Yankees trail Tampa Bay by four games in the AL East. They play three at Washington before the break. Then the imaging happens, and the second half organizes itself around whatever it shows.
Cashman never said the Yankees might finish this season without Aaron Judge. He said he expects the opposite. But he declined to ask for a date, declined to predict a condition, and warned the results will not be clean.
That is not a door closing. It is a door nobody in the Yankees organization is willing to shut.
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