The 2026 MLB season will get underway for the New York Yankees on March 25 with their Opening Day game against the San Francisco Giants. Nonetheless, the one player on the Yankees with the most pressure to deliver a championship is Aaron Judge.
Although Judge has collected AL MVP honors during the regular season, it’s in the postseason where he’s faced criticism. Judge has a .236 batting average with 58 hits, 17 home runs, 41 RBIs, and 42 runs scored in 65 games in the postseason in his career, per StatMuse.
It’s on the Yankees slugger to deliver in the situations in which there’s the most pressure, and he didn’t have a good start already, with him going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in the WBC final as Team USA lost to Team Venezuela.
As a result, former MLB star and manager of Team Dominican Republic, who the Americans defeated in the WBC semifinal, Albert Pujols shared advice to Judge on handling those pressure moments.
“I think my encouragement to [Judge] is really in those situations myself, I never changed my approach,” Pujols told Adam Schein in a March 24 video from Mad Dog Sports Radio.
“I took my approach like it was with nobody on, with men on. It doesn’t matter. My approach never changed. It’s still the same. For me, I have to probably ask him on a private side, to ask him if he thinks differently, because I haven’t had that opportunity to ask him about it.”
“He’s a great player, and I know that probably people are frustrated a lot of the time that he hasn’t come through. I was in that situation too. It’s just part of baseball, you know, and part of growing mentally and physically in this game.”
Albert Pujols Has Faith in Yankees’ Aaron Judge
Moreover, Pujols believes that Judge will figure it out in these pressure situations.
“Sooner or later, it’s gonna click,” Pujols added. “He’s still one of the best in the game. I will take him on my team, and if I’m building a team, I’d be the first guy that I would pick to have on my team. When it comes to those situations, it’s just I have to really ask him if he thinks a little different, because I don’t know. Everybody has a different approach at the plate.
“I had a different approach in the way I went about it. He probably has a different approach as well, so it’s hard to say why he sometimes, in those situations, probably doesn’t come through. Maybe he presses a little bit. Who knows? I don’t know. But like I say, he’s definitely a guy that I will put on my team 100 percent.”
Aaron Judge Faces Pressure to Win a World Series
Nonetheless, if New York falls short of winning the World Series again, it won’t be an indictment of the franchise, as WFAN’s Craig Carton says it’s Judge, not the Yankees, who desperately needs to win a World Series if he wants to receive consideration for being among the franchise’s all-time greats.
“If I had to rank in my head who involved with the Yankees needs to win a championship the most, it’s not the Yankees,” Carton said in a March 19 video from WFAN. “The Yankees have 27 of them, and they’re in the playoffs every single year. And when’s the last time the Yankees were under .500 for a regular season? It’s been a quarter century. So, the New York Yankees have nothing to prove to anybody.
“They are the winningest team of the last 30 years in Major League Baseball. But Aaron Judge desperately needs a championship to solidify himself as one of the great Yankees of all time, which he cannot lay claim to without the ring. And you only need one. You don’t need five, nope. But you have to have one.”