AARON JUDGE HEALING FROM 'UNUSUAL' INJURY

Two months ago Aaron Judge discovered that he had a fractured rib, interestingly this injury is still not healed. Why?

Dr. Guillem Gonzalez-Lomas, an orthopedic surgeon at NYU Langone Sports Health, talked about Judge's injury. He did not treat Judge himself, however, he has experience helping people through the same exact injury. The injury is unusual because Judge fractured his first rib, which is a very unusual and rare condition. The Yankees believe he also suffered a partially collapsed lung. 

“We just almost never see stress fractures in this area,” he said. “This translates into there not being standardized rehabilitation protocols for the injury — it’s hard to derive any conclusions about treatment when our collective experience includes so few cases.”

Even with the injury, Judge played through the pain during the end of last season and the postseason. He trained through it during the winter and once he arrived in Tampa for pre-spring training workouts is when he told the team he was experiencing pain and discomfort. 

It took almost a month for the Yankees to even figure out what was wrong with Judge because he was feeling the pain in his right shoulder, not near his ribs. Strange right? But apparently to Dr. Gonzales-Lomas, this is common. 

“This means that the brain interprets pain as coming from a part of the body where a crossing nerve goes to rather than where the pain actually is,” he said. “Figuring out that the pain actually originated from the first rib, an unlikely origin, was actually tremendously insightful and likely saved Judge from an even longer convalescence.”

Aaron Boone appeared on MLB Network Radio earlier this week and provided an encouraging update on Judge. Judge is due for another CT scan to check on his progress in the upcoming weeks. 

"This time down has allowed that rib, that bone to hopefully continue to heal," Boone said. "All signs are encouraging there. Hopefully, this time down allows that rib to heal properly and hopefully have him part of all this as well."

It is hard to be thankful for the pandemic going on right now, but thankfully it pushed back baseball season so that Yankees injured players such as Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Hicks, and James Paxton had more time to heal and will be ready to play whenever that time comes.

--Missy O'Rourke
BYB Contributor
Twitter: @missy_orourke