Aaron Judge and Aaron Boone Brush Off Disparaging Comments from Judge's Personal Coach

The New York Yankees are experiencing an almost unimaginable stretch of bad baseball. They've won five of their last 20 games—including three separate slides of three or more consecutive losses—and as a team are slashing .218/.313/.371. Before the slide, they were slashing .256/.334/.440. New York has also fallen to 3.0 games back in the AL East, behind the Baltimore Orioles.

It's hard to find a word negative enough to explain how poor this stretch of play has been. Abysmal? Terrible? A trainwreck? Juxtaposed with their hot start to the season that had the team looking like a favorite to win the American League, it's been a nosedive.

With that has come detractors, including a personal hitting coach—Richard Schenck—that Aaron Judge works with on occasion, who took to X (formerly Twitter) to disparage the Yankees' offensive developmental capabilities earlier this week.

Judge addressed the comments from Schenck, saying:

“It doesn’t involve me, to be honest. It’s somebody else making a comment. I’m not going to comment for somebody else. … I’ve got no control over what another person does. It’s out of my control. I’ve got nothing for you," Judge said, per Bryan Hoch.

Boone had similar thoughts:

“People are going to say things, and certainly everyone is entitled to their opinion. Especially when you go through a tough stretch and you wear this uniform, I know people are going to take shots and things like that."

Judge, for his part, is one of the Yankees who hasn't been bitten by the slump bug. His OPS is 1.079 since June 13. Before, it was 1.135. Only two other players—Juan Soto and youngster Ben Rice—have an OPS above .750 in the slump stretch.