Yankees' Judge progressing slowly toward return

When New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge was sidelined July 26 with a chip fracture in his right wrist, the team thought he'd be out just three weeks.

The judge was hoping to meet that timetable, but the bone has been slow to heal and it remains uncertain when he will return to action.

"I've got a broken bone. It's still fractured. I've got to give it time to heal," Judge told reporters on Thursday. "Just got to make sure I'm 100 percent before I got back out there because I don't want to have a setback."

The slowness of the recovery front led to the slugger receiving a cortisone shot on Monday.

"It's something they said that I might have to do at some point," Judge said. "But we didn't want to rush into doing the shot. We wanted to see how it would heal up and how everything would feel without it."

General manager Brian Cashman explained the reasoning for the shot in an interview with WFAN on Wednesday.

"We repeated an MRI the other day to get a status. It's taking longer," Cashman said. "Normally, we underpromise/overperform where we give an extended round. We thought maybe three weeks would cover it. But it's going to be longer than that. So, we missed the timeframe.

"We've repeated the MRI just to be certain that there's nothing new or nothing missed. Everything is as expected. They gave him a cortisone shot to alleviate the pain. So, he was down yesterday. Today, depending on how he feels, he could start potentially progressing."

The Yankees certainly miss the bat of Judge, who is batting .285 with 26 home runs and 61 RBIs. He suffered the injury when hit by a fastball from Kansas City right-hander Jakob Junis.

New York has fallen 10 games behind the Boston Red Sox in the American League East entering Thursday's afternoon game against the Tampa Bay Rays. The Yankees entered 3 1/2 games ahead of the Oakland Athletics for the first wild-card spot.

Seeing his club spiral out of the AL East race makes for some frustrating times for Judge, who isn't used to sitting around and watching games.

"I've just got to keep myself busy during the games and try to do anything I can to help the team," Judge said. "Even though I'm not out there playing, I want to try to do stuff to help the team win, if that's either talking to a guy, motivating a guy or saying a little something, pick someone up, just trying to keep myself busy."

Judge won AL Rookie of the Year honors and finished second in the MVP balloting last season when he batted .284 with 52 homers and 114 RBIs.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)