The New York City mayor is having his Aaron Judge year after all. And it’s not good.

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Eric Adams dubbed 2022 his “rookie year” after a bumpy first 12 months in office. He promised 2023 would be his “Aaron Judge year.”

“I’m trying to knock it out of the park,” Adams, a Democrat, said in January.

But Adams — not unlike the Yankees captain, who was sidelined by a toe injury in June and July — has struggled all summer. There is a law enforcement investigation into a former member of his administration. There’s a looming federal takeover of city jails. The City Council overrode his veto of affordable housing bills. And now migrants are sleeping on sidewalks in Manhattan as a crisis over their arrivals grows worse.

The nonstop hits call into question Adams’ depiction of himself as a strong executive who is running the nation’s largest city competently after years of mismanagement. And if the problems continue to spiral, Adams could have what every New York City leader fears most — a one-term mayoralty.

“It has been a difficult couple of months,” Basil Smikle, the former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party, said in a phone interview. “He needs some victories. He really needs some ways to change the conversation.”

A high-ranking Adams administration official put it more bluntly.

“Horrible,” said the official about the mayor’s recent troubles. The official was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the boss.

Being mayor of New York is a notoriously hard job — there’s a reason why so many of Adams’ successors, from Rudy Giuliani to Bill de Blasio, have failed to win higher office. But this summer has been brutal.

Adams has faced a career worth of drama since mid-June:

• Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged donors to Adams’ mayoral campaign — including a former NYPD colleague — in a straw donor scheme. Neither the mayor nor any of his campaign employees have been implicated in the case, but one of his closest advisers was recently named in court papers for organizing a fundraiser with the retired police inspector. 

• A grand jury convened by Bragg also indicted Eric Ulrich, Adams’ former buildings commissioner, with corruption-related charges, The New York Times first reported. Ulrich told investigators that Adams tipped him off that prosecutors were gathering evidence, The Daily News reported. Adams has denied having any advanced knowledge of the probe. 

• In yet another court case, a judge moved to put the city’s notoriously dangerous jails into federal receivership, saying her confidence in the administration had been “shaken” by officials’ failure to report violent incidents and a recent death on Rikers Island.

• Also in July, the City Council overrode a mayoral veto of a package of bills expanding access to housing vouchers for the homeless. Adams had argued it would cost too much and divert resources from the neediest cases. 

• And Adams seemed to struggle more than ever to provide shelter to asylum-seekers arriving in New York. Whether it’s a tactic to get President Joe Biden’s attention, or difficulty managing resources, the migrant crisis has escalated to a near breaking point this summer, with newcomers sleeping outside a midtown Manhattan intake center last week. 

One of Adams’ plans to mitigate the shelter shortage — handing out flyers at the U.S.-Mexico border warning asylum-seekers not to come to New York because it’s so expensive — seemed both half-serious and antithetical to the city’s storied history as a beacon for immigrants.

Perhaps the plan didn’t get full vetting as the administration’s communications director and chief counsel left their jobs this summer.

Amidst their departure, The Times published a particularly embarrassing story about an Adams staffer rubbing coffee grounds on a photo of a murdered police officer to make it seem older and to cover for a fib the mayor had told.

“They’re nervous they’re getting less swagger,” said one Democratic political consultant who has talked with members of Adams’ inner circle. “They’re struggling to focus,” the consultant said, explaining that the administration had prioritized public safety and quality of life concerns but must now address the unexpected asylum issue.

“They’re a little bit off kilter,” the consultant said.

City Hall spokesperson Fabien Levy said the idea that Adams was having a bad summer was no more than inside baseball.

“You’re focusing on the stories that blow up, as opposed to what New Yorkers actually care about,” Levy said. He highlighted that many indicators in the city are trending the right way. More affordable housing is being built and preserved than the year before. Major crimes are down and shootings have declined significantly. Subway ridership is up, the city has fully recovered the amount of private sector jobs lost in the COVID-19 pandemic and complaints about rats are down.

“What do you think the actual New Yorker cares about?” Levy asked. “Rats? Crime? Or a City Council fight?”

Adams himself has set low expectations for his own ability to manage the migrant crisis.

“We need help,” he said in July, echoing months of pleas to Biden for federal intervention.

“It’s not going to get any better,” he said during a news conference last week when asked about migrants sleeping on city sidewalks. “From this moment on, it’s downhill.”

It seemed like a rare moment of weakness for Adams, who loves to say that being mayor hasn’t been hard. But some fellow politicians think his confidence is a front.

“I think crisis makes great mayors. Crises are opportunities,” said a New York City elected official who is a Democrat.

“I think he’s not seeing it as an opportunity,” said the official who was granted anonymity to speak honestly about the mayor. “I see him struggling with it.”

At the beginning of the summer, the mayor’s poll numbers were the worst they’ve been since he took office in 2022 with 46 percent of voters viewing him favorably.

In mid-July, progressive operatives who oppose Adams have started discussions to find a primary opponent for 2025.

But a string of bad press is far from a harbinger of a reelection loss for Adams in two years.

“I do not necessarily think that the mayor has lost much ground with the voters who he depends on,” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic political strategist who worked on Andrew Yang’s opposing mayoral primary campaign . “And we saw, under de Blasio, how much bleeding a mayor can take without losing the loyalty of their base.”

Still, Adams hasn’t been able to enjoy one of the slower seasons of the year in politics, where days are often filled with block parties in the city, and Hamptons fundraisers out of it.

“Would I want to work at City Hall?” one Democrat who served under de Blasio said. Not now. “I think it's been a rough couple of months.”