It's All About Pain Tolerance: The World Series at Its (First?) Change of Coasts

All year, Aaron Judge was one of the best hitters in baseball on low pitches. No tall hitter gets very far if they don't learn to guard the bottom rail of their strike zone, because to pitchers accustomed to facing guys six inches shorter, it's pretty easy to target that segment. Judge long ago learned to cover that area, but because his swing is all about staying compact and getting up through the ball he still doesn't like to swing there.

During the regular season, Judge swung at just 32.8% of pitches in the lower third of the zone and below, one of the lowest rates in baseball. He only chased a bit over 17% of the low pitches he saw outside the zone, eighth-best of the 282 batters who saw at least 500 low pitches on the year. He doesn't have a persistent problem with low stuff, even tight, low breaking stuff. That set of pitches isn't kryptonite; it's limestone. You can find it everywhere, and no hitter for whom that was a weakness could possibly be Superman, as Judge has been for the last three years.

Nor, in these playoffs, has he totally broken and started fishing wildly on those offerings. It's tempting to feel like he has, based both on his overall failure to produce throughout the postseason and on the narratives pushed by certain commentators broadcasting the World Series, but in fact, he's chasing at just a 25.9% rate this month on those low offerings outside the zone. It's never good to chase more, but it's natural to get slightly anxious.

The more important problem is not pitch recognition or plate discipline, but the fact that Judge's timing is out of whack. He whiffed on 27% of lower-third pitches inside the zone during the regular season, but that number is 48.3% in the postseason. That is the crisis number, and it's hard to solve the problems that spring from it. 

Though John Smoltz labored in an effort to prove Judge "in-between" during Game 2 analytical interludes, the facts defy him. Judge has not seen a spike in in-zone whiffs or a degradation in batted-ball quality on hard stuff, even at above-average velocities, during the postseason. He's just hunting fastballs too aggressively, given that he's not getting them. In the regular season, four-seamers and sinkers made up 43.5% of the pitches he saw. This month, it's been 37.3%. The share of pitches he's seen that are breaking balls is up from a regular-season share of 32% to over 38%.

The Yankees' captain wants to be his teammates' hero, and he's begging every pitch to be a fastball. He's gearing up and starting early, wanting the fastball. He keeps getting wrinkles, and he looks terrible on them right now. If he succeeds in Games 3 and beyond, it will be by relaxing into his at-bat more, willing to be late on the fastball and secure in the knowledge that his swing is fast enough to do damage even if he truly is late. More often, since it's October and he's clearly sped-up, trying to be slow will put him right on time, and he'll be able to handle the slider again. That ability is still in there. The problem with all of this analysis, though, is the yawning gap between the ease of identifying the issues and the ease of solving them. Again, this is all about feelings. It's about compensating for whatever extra sense of fatigue he's feeling, amid the absolutely scorching internal fire of wanting to finish off this championship run. It's about managing the moment, not the mechanics. It's about dealing with the rising brain pain of these struggles, and finding enough calm within it to get back in touch with his talent.

Where Judge bats for the Yankees will be a hot-button topic, unless and until he breaks out of this. Aaron Boone has taken criticism already for not sliding him down at the expense of Giancarlo Stanton, wild though that might sound, but it's fair to note that Boone has lived a charmed life just to get this far into the postseason. He hasn't managed especially well; he's gotten especially lucky.