Cortisone shot pushes back Judge's timeline

NEW YORK -- Aaron Judge was sent for a second MRI on his injured right wrist this week, receiving a cortisone injection for pain management, and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman acknowledged on Wednesday that a three-week estimate for the slugger's return had been overly optimistic.
"We probably over-expected maybe because of how he's responded in past years with anything pain-related," Cashman said on WFAN. "He's as tough as nails, but this is going to be a little bit longer than we hoped. It's going to take as long as it needs to take, and we're going to give him that time because you don't want to mess things up and push him through something when he's not ready."
Judge sustained a small chip fracture of the right wrist when he was hit by a Jakob Junis pitch in a July 26 game against the Royals at Yankee Stadium. Cashman said that the cortisone injection was administered on Tuesday, so Judge was unable to work out on Wednesday, though he has recently been running the bases and performing range-of-motion exercises.

"The wrist is feeling all right. It could be better," Judge said late last week. "... I feel like hopefully I'll swing a bat here in the next couple of days or week sometime. We don't have a timetable on that yet. I know shortly we should start ramping it up and get going, get swinging again."
Judge, 26, was hitting .285/.398/.548 with 20 doubles, 26 home runs and 61 RBIs in 99 games at the time of his injury.
As with injured catcher Gary Sánchez, who Cashman said is pain-free and could begin a Minor League rehab assignment on or around Aug. 24, Cashman said that he is confident that Judge's injury will not be season-ending.

"I've certainly peeled the onion on that question and rightfully so, not just because of who [Judge] is and what he means to the club," Cashman said. "... We went through that process recently; that's why we repeated the MRI and the CT scan. Everything was as we expected it, which was good.
"It's just the timeframe, obviously I think we undershot. It's going to take longer and it'll be whenever, but he will be back at some point and then obviously we'll see how he manages it coming out of the gate early. That's the unknown, too, where I doubt he hits the ground running."
Cashman said that there could be issues if Judge logs too many at-bats in a short period or needs to check his swing repeatedly, but those are concerns that the Yankees believe they will be able to manage.
"Sometimes you get lucky and guys don't miss a beat, but that would be highly unlikely," Cashman said. "He's going to be dealing with getting his timing back. ... There is a full optimism that at some point, the [injury] will be behind us. It's not Judge's fault; it's just going to take longer than we anticipated."