The Yankees Lost a Heartbreaker in Minnesota, and Now Everyone Is Holding Their Breath on Aaron Judge

The Yankees somehow managed to turn what should have been a routine Wednesday afternoon into a four-hour stress test.

They lost 5-4 to the Twins in 13 innings, failed multiple times to put the game away after finally waking up offensively in the ninth, and the much bigger story is that Aaron Judge left the game in the sixth inning with tightness in his lower right leg. That is obviously the part that has every Yankees fan immediately forgetting about the actual loss and wondering whether we are about to do this injury thing all over again.

Judge had just returned on September 8 after missing 99 days with a stress fracture in his first right rib. He was only playing his seventh game back, had finally homered again Monday, and now he is dealing with another physical issue less than two weeks before the end of the regular season. The encouraging part is that Judge said he first felt the tightness in the first inning, tried to play through it because these games matter, and eventually decided it was smarter to come out before he made it worse. Aaron Boone said the hope is that they caught it early.

That is the right decision.

I do not care how important the division race is. I do not care how badly we want home field. I do not care if Judge says he can gut through it. The Yankees absolutely cannot afford to take a minor leg issue in mid-September and turn it into something that costs him October.

We just spent three months waiting for this guy to come back.

Wrap him in bubble wrap.

Put him in a golf cart.

Do not let him run anywhere until the training staff says he is 100 percent.

The game itself was frustrating for a completely different reason because the Yankees actually had multiple chances to steal it after doing almost nothing offensively for eight innings.

Carlos Rodón gave them every opportunity to stay in the game. Minnesota scored once in the first on a Josh Bell RBI single and again in the fifth on a Ryan Kreidler solo homer, but the Yankees were still only down 2-0 entering the ninth. Rodón kept them alive long enough for the offense to finally show up, and Clarke Schmidt also made his return from the 60-day injured list and recorded his first strikeout since undergoing his second Tommy John surgery. Schmidt had not pitched in the majors since July 2025, so getting him back now could become a legitimate bullpen weapon heading into October.

Then the ninth inning finally came.

Anthony Volpe tied the game with a double.

For all the criticism Volpe gets, and plenty of it is deserved, that was a huge swing. Eight innings of basically nothing and suddenly the Yankees had life.

From there, the game became complete nonsense.

Ali Sánchez singled home the go-ahead run in the top of the 10th to make it 3-2.

Minnesota answered immediately when Luke Keaschall tied it in the bottom half.

José Caballero hit a sacrifice fly in the 11th to put the Yankees back ahead 4-3.

Minnesota answered again with a Royce Lewis sacrifice fly.

Then both teams somehow went scoreless in the 12th before Victor Caratini finally ended it in the 13th with a walk-off single that brought Keaschall home and gave Minnesota the 5-4 win.

That is the part that annoys me almost as much as the loss.

The Yankees took the lead twice in extra innings.

Twice.

And both times the bullpen immediately gave it back.

David Bednar allowed the tying run in both the 10th and 11th. John Schreiber eventually gave up the walk-off in the 13th. The automatic runner obviously changes extra-inning baseball completely, but when you score the go-ahead run in consecutive extra innings, eventually somebody has to shut the door.

They did not.

The Yankees finished with nine hits but went scoreless through the first eight innings. Judge struck out in both of his at-bats before Heliot Ramos replaced him in the sixth. That matters because this lineup still looks completely different when Judge is not in the middle of it, even if he has not exactly been scorching hot since coming back.

Judge is batting .241 this season with 18 home runs and 41 RBIs in 66 games. In his first five games after returning from the rib injury, he was only 3-for-17 before finally hitting a three-run homer Monday. Nobody should expect him to immediately look like peak Aaron Judge after missing more than three months, but the entire point of getting him back in early September was to let him find his timing before the postseason.

That is why this new injury is so frustrating.

Not because it sounds catastrophic right now.

It does not.

Lower-leg tightness is not automatically some season-ending disaster. Boone sounded

hopeful. Judge was able to stay in the game for several innings after first noticing it. Initial reporting has not suggested anything more serious yet.

But we have been Yankees fans long enough to know how these stories go.

Someone has “tightness.”

Then they are day-to-day.

Then they get an MRI.

Then suddenly we are learning the anatomy of some body part we did not even know

existed.

So yes, I am going to worry until Judge is back in the lineup.

That is just where we are.

The timing makes it worse because the Yankees are otherwise playing really good baseball.

They had won the first two games of this Minnesota series, including an 8-1 win Tuesday behind Spencer Jones, Cody Bellinger and Max Fried. They had won three straight and seven of eight entering Wednesday while trying to keep pressure on Tampa Bay in the AL

East race.

This was an opportunity to sweep a Twins team that has struggled recently and keep rolling into the final stretch.

Instead, they blew multiple extra-inning leads and left Minnesota worrying about the one player they absolutely cannot lose.

The standings matter.

The division matters.

But Aaron Judge matters more.

That is where my head is after this game.

If Judge wakes up Thursday, gets treatment, feels fine and this becomes a one- or two-day thing, then whatever. Flush the loss. You already won the series. Move on.

If this becomes anything more than that?

Then we have a problem.

The Yankees already proved they can survive without Judge. They went months without him and stayed in the playoff race. Spencer Jones emerged. Cody Bellinger produced. Ben Rice helped carry the offense. Other guys stepped up.

Surviving is not the same thing as winning a World Series.

October changes everything.

You can get away with piecing together regular-season lineups against mediocre teams.

You are not trying to beat playoff rotations for a month without Aaron Judge.

That is why I do not care if he sits for the next several games.

Get him healthy.

Let the leg calm down.

Do not turn a September 16 game against Minnesota into a postseason problem.

The Yankees lost 5-4.

That stinks.

They failed to close the game twice.

That stinks too.

But none of that is what anybody is going to remember from Wednesday if Judge misses

time.

The only thing that matters now is what that lower right leg feels like tomorrow.

Because the Yankees can survive an ugly 13-inning loss.

They cannot afford another Aaron Judge absence.