Yankees Fan Rich Reacts to Aaron Judge Missing the Wild Card Round with a Calf Injury

It was a good morning to be a Red Sox fan and a rough one to be a Yankees fan, and Rich, a Yankees fan, delivered both pieces of news on The Rich Eisen Show.

The good news went to Chris first. Boston removed the interim tag from Chad Tracy, and Rich said it was "richly deserved." Tracy pulled the Red Sox out of the morass from earlier this season, when Alex Cora was fired and the team went deep under .500, and now Boston is headed to the playoffs.

The bad news came from Aaron Boone. Before the Yankees opened a four-game set in the Bronx against a Tampa Bay team that will pop champagne in the visitors locker room unless New York sweeps, Boone said they don't expect Aaron Judge to be available for the Wild Card Series, most likely against the Red Sox.

That means a Yankees team without Judge and without Giancarlo Stanton, who Rich noted "has been a burr on your side" for quite a while. Chris conceded the point when Rich reminded him that Boston played just about the whole year without either of those guys anyway.

Chris's worry was bigger: that Judge "will never be truly great again." Rich's concern was more specific. Boone described the calf strain that sent Judge to the injured list last week as moderate grade, and Rich said all Yankee fans are talking about Kevin Durant's calf strain, which he came back from before "there goes the Achilles." That would put Judge's next season at risk too.

"It's definitely an Achilles risk that no one wants to take," Rich said, adding that he imagines Judge "would be the first to raise his hand on that front as much as he wants to play." And, Rich pointed out, there may not be a season next year anyway.

For now, Boone said Judge received a plasma injection on Monday and will avoid physical activity for a couple of days. Rich had questions about the acronym. "I'm not a doctor, I don't play one on television," he said, before guessing that the letters, as he first heard them, stood for "please, please, please get better."

Once the crew looked it up, a regenerative treatment derived from a patient's own blood, Rich wanted to know if it was poor man's plasma. "I'd put rich man's plasma in there if I were the Yankees," he said. Someone in the room chimed in that "everybody wants some of that Aaron Judge plasma."

That sent Rich down memory lane to summer college at Cornell and a staple he called PMPs, or poor man's pizzas: Italian bread, sauce, and cheese. He ate them nonstop. When he came home 15 to 20 pounds heavier, his late father took one look at him and delivered a one-word review. "You're grotesque."

Rich called his dad "one of the sweetest men and a saint on the planet," and said his response at the time was simple: "Dad, don't sugarcoat it. How do you really feel?"

Has Rich ever said anything like that to one of his own kids? "I have not." As the room put it: "Different generation."