Aaron Judge is Un-Hirable

     "Winner" is a title many men in the business world like to ascribe to themselves. As we all know Aaron Judge is the furthest thing from a winner: furthest from it because he has all the necessary tools to win, but continues to fail from an individual and leadership standpoint. 

    The main knock on Judge is that he has zero leadership ability. In modern baseball, a game ruled by analytics, the manager is a lame duck who couldn't crack it at Deloitte sitting in the dugout looking at a spreadsheet. This leaves the burden of leadership on the shoulders of your player captain. The Yankees scored the most runs in baseball last year and blew teams out. Business was booming, a new 52-week high. When things were good, they were good. This soft-spoken gentle giant character is a great vibes guy when you're winning in July.

    In close games (decided by 3 runs or less) the Yankees ranked 17th in the league- below average. It's in these close, high stress games, which happen a lot in the postseason, that the guys in the dugout are looking towards their captain to lead them not just with his play, but emotionally. This is when they lose year in and year out. The C-suite is looking for answers and they want to know where the problem stems from because it's certainly not them. So it's Judge, he has no charisma and cannot connect to his teammates, which is no fault of his own and is not truly fixable, but the problem is that he continually says he wants this leadership role. 

    Let's say he is the VP at your company: a role he earned by being productive, but of what use is this when everyone underneath him continues to fall short of expectations. To his credit he is the kind of guy who would go to a sham leadership workshop to improve. At the end of the day he would be a boob walking around the office that everyone shares jokes about kind of a Michael Scott character, but less charming. These middling results are fine if that's the expectation, but they're not.

    Why not him? The man has been a physically imposing athlete his entire life: likely why he has never had to develop any of these other skills. This has given him a massive amount of self confidence that unfortunately he just can't use to inspire his team. His peers Vladdy Guerrero Jr., Shohei Ohtani, and Bryce Harper do so naturally. These guys could run a profitable sand company in the Sahara. Judge couldn't sell water to a beached whale.

    On an individual level he may be a good worker bee. Year after year he is productive in the regular season then fails to produce in the playoffs because he refuses to adapt. Now, this sounds bad, but I believe this directive is coming from the boss. The aforementioned Deloitte flunkies who think they solved baseball tell him not to adjust anything he does in the playoffs even though there should be enough data to show playoff baseball is different. This is a valuable asset to have in any line of work, a head-down grinder, but it will always lead to frustration when he doesn't take the initiative to solve problems on his own. 

    Judge's sporting ability thrust him into the spotlight without giving him the tools to succeed in any other facet of life, which is the ultimate purpose of sports. Ultimately he is the beneficiary of job title inflation- he fell ass-backwards into a CEO role on the field without having the ability to manage an Old Navy.