A fractured rib has kept Aaron Judge on the injured list for weeks, but the Yankees’ captain has been working the clubhouse like a bench coach with a single charge: Jazz Chisholm.
Chisholm, hitting .228 and coming off a stretch he described in plain terms — “I’ve sucked all season” — hit three home runs in two games this week, including a pair of towering blasts off Pirates starter Braxton Ashcraft in Monday’s 8-5 Yankees win. Afterward, he traced the breakout not to a mechanical adjustment but to something Judge said to him.
“Confidence … is the biggest tool I’ve got,” Chisholm told reporters. “They see me dragging a little bit lately, so they’re like, ‘Bro, let’s not forget who you are. You’re the greatest in the world. You’re Jazz Chisholm.'”
That quote, stripped of context and bounced through social media, surfaced under a headline suggesting Chisholm was claiming Judge and the entire Yankees clubhouse consider him the best player on the planet. He wasn’t. He was recounting a motivational message — Judge’s words, delivered to a teammate mired in a slump, not a self-assessment delivered to the media.
Bob Klapisch, reporting for NJ.com and Yahoo Sports, described Judge as the Yankees’ “in-house Dr. Phil” and wrote that the reigning MVP has turned Chisholm into his “pet project” while recovering from the rib injury. Judge is at least a month from returning, and the Yankees need production from somewhere in the meantime. Paul Goldschmidt “looks every minute of his 38-plus years,” Klapisch wrote. Cody Bellinger has yet to assert himself. That leaves Chisholm — the team’s best all-around athlete aside from Judge — as the most viable engine for an offense that scored five runs across three games in a weekend series against the Dodgers.
The numbers cut both ways. Chisholm’s .228 average and .310-ish on-base percentage paint the portrait of a player who has underperformed his tools. He set a spring goal of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases; he currently sits at 16 and 26, and the calendar won’t cooperate. One talent evaluator told Klapisch, “Jazz is the kind of player who can get a manager fired.” Don Mattingly and Derek Jeter tried to reach him in Miami. He tuned them out.
But the Yankees chose encouragement over scolding, and two nights of results followed. Whether three home runs in two games represents a genuine turnaround or a brief spike in a volatile profile is the question the next 60 games will answer. Chisholm, for his part, framed the remaining schedule as opportunity.
“There’s still two and a half months — there’s a lot that can happen in two and a half months, especially on a baseball field,” he said. “So for me, I feel like it’s more than enough time to just flip the whole season around.”
The standings add urgency. The Yankees sit 1.5 games behind the first-place Rays and can’t ignore a Red Sox team that had won 14 consecutive games as of Klapisch’s reporting, sitting 4.5 back. New York is in the middle of a 22-game stretch against teams currently above .500.
Judge’s six-word message — “You’re the greatest in the world” — was never meant as an objective claim. It was a lever, pulled by a player who can’t take the field, aimed at the one teammate who might carry the offense until he can.
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