TAMPA — Aaron Judge was like many frustrated Yankees fans early in the offseason.
The only difference is that he likes where they ended up.
The judge acknowledged Monday that the start of the winter was “brutal,” waiting for the Yankees to make moves while the rest of the league improved around them. They got Trent Grisham back on the qualifying offer in mid-November, but then didn’t make another significant move until January, culminating in finally re-signing Cody Bellinger to a long-awaited deal to essentially fully bring back the league’s best offense for 2026.
“It was pretty hard to watch at first,” Judge said after the first full-squad practice at George M. Steinbrenner Field. “I’m like, ‘Man, we’re the New York Yankees, let’s go out and find the right people, put the right pieces together to close this thing out.’ We have a special group of players here, we have a good core, a good young core. So it was frustrating, but I think we are exactly where we need to be.”
When asked if he expressed those sentiments to the front office, Judge chuckled.
“Yes, oh yes,” he said with a grin. “But they took care of things.”
The captain and back-to-back AL MVP, who has the ear of Hal Steinbrenner as the face of the franchise, is now hoping another effort with nearly the same group — 24 of the 26 players on the ALDS roster are back with the organization — will end differently than last October, when they were defeated by the Blue Jays.
The rollback has taken on negative connotations for much of the fanbase, but not for Judge.
“I love it,” he said. “People might have their opinions about it because we didn’t win the whole game last year, we fell short in the division series. But we get a chance to bring a lot of those guys back, they’re impact players. You bring back a guy like Cody Bellinger, who can play all over the diamond, he can hit for you in the middle of the order, he can come up with a big hit when you need to. You bring back Paul Goldschmidt, who’s been an MVP and… what he brings to the clubhouse, not just at the field, but in the clubhouse. He especially takes the younger group that we have to the next level, especially in the infield. We have a young core, and you have a young guy like that, who can help them, he has been there and done it.
“You’ll get another year for the young guys to develop and bring back some big pieces, especially Trent Grisham, our midfielder who had a great breakthrough year. I’m looking forward to it. Then you can add [Gerrit] Cole is on the road for a while with some other guys. I like our chances.”
Judge is coming off another dominant season in which he won a batting title (.331), crushed 53 home runs, posted a 1.144 OPS and claimed a second straight AL MVP. And after surviving a season-ending scare with an elbow flexor strain — which he and the Yankees say is fully healed — Judge got a big monkey off his back by carrying his regular-season success into the playoffs.
But the giant ape still looms large in the sense that he’s entering his 10th full season with the Yankees and has yet to win a World Series for an organization defined by championships. Judge turns 34 in April, and while there are no signs of him slowing down, the time eventually comes for even the greatest players, and the Yankees risk wasting his best years with every October that ends without a parade.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied until we go out there and finish it, no matter the awards, MVPs, All-Stars, none of that stuff matters,” Judge said. “It’s about getting New York back on top and putting this organization back where it belongs: the best organization in this field.
“I don’t get paid to just play this game, I get paid to win here. So we have to go out and win.”
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