By James Peacock

It took a freak bounce off of second base for the Yanks to score their two runs against the hated Red Sox, Sunday evening, at Yankee Stadium. Both of their runs scored on that play, one of the Yankees’ three hits in the game. There is no other way to say it than to state the obvious: The offense is absolutely lost without Aaron Judge.

It’s not a crazy thing that any team with the defending MVP would be better with him out there playing, but the Yankees offense is downright anemic without number 99. They score nearly 1.5 less runs per game, hit 21 points worse as a team, and slug .48 points worse. It doesn’t help that other key cogs in the lineup–Rizzo, Stanton, and D.J.–are struggling, but it feels endemic of a larger issue.

The fact of the matter is that Judge is the single centripetal force of the lineup. Everything begins and ends with him. Even in the rare instances when he isn’t hitting at an all-world-level for a week or two at a time, his mere presence on the lineup card dictates how everybody else in the order is attacked by the opposition.

For as great as Aaron Judge is, he is a human being. He can’t play in every single game, and every now and again he’s going to get injured. It happens. What cannot happen is for the other eight guys in the lineup to not exhibit any signs of being able to produce-by-committee. It isn’t just the three guys that I named…everybody needs to be better.

Nobody knows for sure when Judge is going to be back and the Yankees have a tough two weeks ahead of them, with series against the Mets, Red Sox, Mariners and Rangers. There is a very real possibility that the next couple weeks could, in large part, determine their season. Who is going to step up?