Yankees teammate underlines importance of captain Aaron Judge to Yankees: "We can't replace him"

After Aaron Judge's most recent toe injury, against the Los Angeles Dodgers, it has become clear that no team is as dependent on one player as the New York Yankees. Judge has been instrumental in leading the team to the third spot in the division after a string of impressive performances in the MLB.

Aaron Judge is truly the leader of this Yankees team on and off the field. When he is on fire, so is the rest of the team, and when he's not it's the whole team that seems to crumble. When Judge was in the IL for a short stint earlier in the season, the Yankees dropped to last place in their division. That perfectly illustrates how dependent the team is on Judge.

Yankees' veteran infielder DJ LeMahieu emphasized the captain's importance to the team to reporters recently. LeMahieu himself struggled with a toe injury during the latter part of last season which forced him out of the majority of the second half of the 2022 season. He knows exactly how unpredictable these kind of injuries can be and hopes that Aaron Judge can recover sooner rather than later, for the sake of the team.

“We can’t replace [Judge], but collectively we have to do our best to pick it up while he is out,” said DJ LeMahieu.

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The Yankees fall to their first defeat after Aaron Judge's toe injury

It has only been two days since the New York Yankees places captain Aaron Judge on the injury list and they have already lost a game without him. The first game which the Yankees had to play without Judge was the final game of the series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Yankees managed to win the game and complete a sweep of the Dodgers. It was a hopeful sign that they might be able to do better without their captain this time around.

However, they followed that win with a disappointing loss against the Chicago White Sox. The loss puts the pressure back on the other high-priced senior players to step up and get the team back to winning ways. While Judge's recovery timeline is not yet clear, time will tell how they fare without their captain this time.