Back in 2023, Aaron Judge declined to participate in the World Baseball Classic.
But while the New York Yankees’ captain will have another opportunity to represent the USA in 2026, Judge is looking forward to something two years beyond that.
The currently-ongoing 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will be the last one in the foreseeable future without the national pastime; starting in the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, baseball will be returning to the Olympics. Although commissioner Rob Manfred has yet to decide whether Major League Baseball players will be allowed to participate, Judge is eager to join the games if he gets the chance.
“I’d love to play,” Judge told Greg Joyce of The New York Post on Wednesday. “If they give us the opportunity — I don’t know what the ruling is or if anything has come out about that. But I’m all in on that.
“There’s very few opportunities to get to do that and especially, hopefully, in the prime of my career where I can still do it and make an impact, I’d love to. I’ve never represented my country before, never got invited to those Team USA camps, never really made the cut for those. Hopefully now I can make the cut.”
There are a few hurdles for both Judge and MLB for him to play in the Olympics, though. The first is the aforementioned decision to allow MLB players to participate; one of the major reasons why baseball was dropped from the Olympics after 2008 was the lack of major league players. Professional baseball players were allowed to participate in 2000, 2004, and 2008, but MLB’s then-commissioner Bud Selig refused to allow players on major league rosters, resulting in Team USA primarily using minor leaguers.
The second is how the league’s schedule would handle an Olympic break; while other leagues like the National Hockey League or even Nippon Professional Baseball over in Japan would pause their seasons for a few weeks to allow players to participate, MLB’s All-Star break typically lasts less than a week. Such a break would need to be significantly stretched out for MLB players to join the Olympics, so the 162-game season would either need to begin earlier in March or end later in November.
The third is Judge’s ability to keep his career strong and steady up to 2028; the slugger will be 36 years old by then, so there’s no guarantee that he’d still be in his prime, able to stay healthy, or even an active player.
Baseball has a very strong international audience, as shown in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which ended with an epic matchup between superstars Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. With the Olympics being on an even grander scale than the WBC, such stars would need to play in order to satisfy that audience; Judge, who is the frontrunner for AL MVP this season and is just two years removed from hitting an American League-record 62 home runs, is one of those stars that would give the games instant credibility and prestige.
Judge isn’t the only Yankee who is interested in playing in the Olympics, as teammates Gerrit Cole, Nestor Cortes Jr., and Austin Wells have each been intrigued by the thought of representing their countries.
But with the Yankee captain being one of the biggest superstars and most marketable players in the sport, Judge’s representation at the 2028 Summer Games would be a massive boon for baseball as a whole.
