Aaron Judge strained a flexor in his elbow on Saturday, an injury that the New York Yankees say could keep him off the field for a few weeks. It’s a situation that will grasp headlines in the coming days. However, the injury is ultimately a setback, but it cannot, and should not, overshadow the fact that the Yankees have been struggling even with him healthy. 

That’s putting it mildly. The reality is: the injury caps off a week that was nothing short of a defensive catastrophe for the Yankees. Throwing errors. Fielding errors. A myriad of mistakes that didn’t go down as errors, including plays where no one covered home plate to receive starting pitcher Max Fried’s throw and Cody Bellinger lost track of a fly ball on Wednesday night against the Blue Jays.

It has reminded me of Little League, where fielding can emulate a circus show and where errors are commonplace. And the thing is Wednesday was supposed to be a get-right game for the Yankees after they had three errors in the first two games of the series, including two bad throws that led to runs as they lost the series opener, 4-1. And then when that didn’t happen, we said the off-day Thursday would solve the problem. That didn’t happen; Friday and Saturday against the Philadelphia Phillies, they committed a combined three more errors.

But that’s part of the issue, too.  It’s easy, especially in baseball, to say “it’s just one game (or a couple games) and we’ve got two more months to get right,” or that they have begun to effectively solve the problem with Friday’s trade for Ryan McMahon. But saying that — or even manager Aaron Boone simply saying the defense is “just not good enough” — doesn’t recognize that this sloppiness is part of a pattern. It’s an exhausting pattern, where it feels like every season at the trade deadline, I feel like the Yankees have to do something to address their fielding. 

But I don’t know if this is a problem the Yankees can solve overnight, or even with a single trade. It feels like it has become part of their modern franchise, where they say, “We’re going to focus on power and pitching, and hopefully defense works itself out, and if it doesn’t, then hopefully hitting and pitching can make up for it.” But that’s not reality. If the Yankees — or any team — give their opponents extra outs, they will lose games, especially in the playoffs against the best in the league. This particular problem isn’t one to be shaken off. It makes the team and organization look bad from top to bottom. I don’t know if the Yankees just don’t practice fielding enough, or if they don’t focus on fielding when they evaluate players, or if Boone simply doesn’t value attention to detail as much as other managers. 

Whatever it is, they need to figure it out. I would say it’s going to cost them in important moments, if it hadn’t already. Over the past four-plus seasons, defense has been an achilles heel –– it has either been a season-long problem or a demon rearing its head at the worst times. Let’s break it down:

In three of the past four full seasons, the Yankees have had a bottom seven fielding percentage — which measures how effectively a team executes defensive plays — in the league. 

Just before the postseason in 2021, the Yankees moved Gleyber Torres from shortstop to second base because of his fielding struggles —at that point, he was second-worst among qualified shortstops in fielding percentage. And that did somewhat address the problem, as they had the sixth-best fielding percentage in the 2022 regular season, but then things unraveled in the most  important moments.

The fielding fell apart in the American League Championship Series, not once but twice. In Game 3 of that series, Harrison Bader dropped a fly ball as Aaron Judge cut in front of him. And the next batter, Chas McCornick hit a pitch in the right field bleachers. In Game 4, Torres fielded a ground ball, went to toss it into shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa’s glove to start an inning-ending double-play, but it rolled into left field. Yordan Alvarez then hit a RBI single.

And ne could argue that in 2024, defense cost the Yankees the World Series. Remember that fifth inning in Game 5? That inning where Gerit Cole was pitching a no-hitter and then the yarn unraveled? The disaster where they made three errors –– a misplay in center from Judge, a wild throw from Anthony Volpe that loaded the bases, and a ground ball from Mookie Betts where Anthony Rizzo misplayed the ball and Cole stopped running to cover first base, allowing Betts to reach –– that opened the door for the Los Angeles Dodgers to wipe away their 5-0 lead and tie the game? It was a microcosm of that entire season, where the Bronx Bombers committed 96 regular season errors, compared to the league average of 84, in one inning in the most important game

So this isn’t a new issue. It’s becoming a defining characteristic of this era of the Yankees. Like previous generations were defined by greatness, this generation is slowly becoming known for having its potential hindered by a lack of attention to the little things. I don’t know what it’s going to take to turn that around. It seems like we’re too deep into the fielding conundrum for it to be a matter of flipping a switch internally or with another trade.