It’s Been a Very Good Year for Aaron Judge

You’re welcome, Yankees fans. Exactly one year ago today, I checked in on Aaron Judge while the slugger was in the throes of a season-opening slump. Though the Yankees were 16-8 when I wrote that piece, it was a dark time for Judge, who a few days earlier had heard a smattering of Bronx cheers while striking out four times on Aaron Judge Bobblehead Day and conceded with typical Jeterian diplomacy and humor, “I’d probably be doing the same thing in their situation.” He’d shown faint signs of turning things around since, combining a couple of days worth of hard-hit balls — including a double on April 23, his first extra-base hit in 10 days — with the apparent end of a strikeout spree, but he wasn’t out of the woods.

In the year since, Judge has put together what might be the best offensive performance any of us has seen. He not only recovered from his slump, he went on to hit 58 homers, win his second home run title and American League MVP award, help the Yankees to their first World Series since 2009, and secure his place in the pantheon of the game’s greatest hitters. What do you even do with these numbers besides gawk?

For sheer offensive impact as measured by wRC+, that performance would outrank any AL/NL season — even Barry Bonds’ best:

I don’t doubt that we could find 365-day slices for Bonds, Ruth, Williams, and maybe even Mantle that would eclipse their final wRC+ and move ahead of Judge in the pecking order, but I don’t have the programming skills to pull that off, and anyway, that’s not my point. All joking aside about how my article “fixed” Judge, my check-in fortuitously provided a convenient common reference point from which to measure and appreciate this incredible offensive outburst.

Setting aside the baggage regarding what we now know about Bonds, PEDs and his fraught chases for the record books, his two seasons atop the wRC+ leaderboard took place when major league teams were scoring about one-third of a run more per game than they are today. Batting averages were over 20 points higher and slugging percentages were almost 30 points higher. That’s what helps Judge edge ahead of those jaw-dropping seasons with their higher raw slash stats:

As for Judge’s WAR, the only position player seasons on the books that top it by our measure belong to Ruth: 14.7 in 1923 (a year he homered only 41 times but hit .393/.545/.764 for a 225 wRC+) and 13.7 in ’21 (59 homers, .378/.512/.846, 218 wRC+). He also tallied 13.1 in 1920 and 12.9 in ’27, both of which outdo Bonds’ top two seasons (12.7 in 2002, 12.5 in ’01). Those Ruth years featured the AL (which didn’t have interleague play and obviously hadn’t integrated yet) scoring anywhere from 4.76 to 5.10 runs per game, though they were averaging only about 0.4 homers per game.

Defensive metrics being as fuzzy as they are, WAR is always just an estimate anyway, but the numbers make no. 99’s case: Over the past year, we’ve seen Judge play at the level of Ruth and Bonds, joining them at the summit of what a hitter can do. And what a sight it’s been to behold.

When I wrote my piece last year, Judge’s slash line was still being propped up by a gaudy 15.7% walk rate, so his overall offense was just shy of league average; he had a 99 wRC+ at the time, subsequently revised downward to 91 as more runs scored in the warmer months. By the end of the first inning of the Yankees’ April 24 game against the A’s, his turnaround had begun, thanks in part to a stroke of luck. With two strikes, Judge was given a reprieve when an umpire ruled that A’s starter Joe Boyle had committed a balk before perfectly placing a 99-mph heater on the low outside corner. Instead of striking out looking, Judge sent the next pitch into the short porch in Yankee Stadium’s right field for his fourth homer of the year and his first since April 14.

He singled off Boyle in his next plate appearance. A couple more 0-fers followed, but he hit homers in back-to-back games on April 27 and 28 in Milwaukee, and he Just Kept Hitting. By June 26, he’d homered in 27 of 56 games since I’d weighed in, hitting .367/.486/.878. By that point, the social media references to my “fixing” Judge — both mine and those of others — had become a running joke.

At the time Judge was struggling, I checked to see if his slow start was of a piece with his performance in the second half of 2023, after he returned from missing eight weeks due to a torn ligament in his right big toe that he sustained in a collision with the outfield wall in Dodger Stadium. Long story short, it was not, as he was hitting the ball much harder that earlier stretch. This time around, he was hitting a lot more popups and grounders than usual, pulling the ball much less frequently, and barreling the ball about half as often as he normally did:

As you can see, Judge reversed those trends, and from April 24 through the end of the season, he maintained a 66-homer pace, which would have eclipsed the AL-record 62 he hit in 2022 en route to his first MVP award. He became just the fifth player ever to total more than 50 home runs in a season three times:

Judge not only won his third home run crown but led the league in WAR (11.2) and walks (133) for the third time, and in RBI (144), wRC+, OBP, and SLG for the second time. That wRC+ was nothing less than the highest of any right-handed batter in AL/NL history:

Only the aforementioned lefties Bonds, Ruth, and Williams have outdone Judge’s 2024 season. Note also that four of the top 10 marks from among the righties came during strike-shortened seasons (1972, ’81, and ’94), while another is from the 19th century, and two others predate World War II, leaving McGwire’s 1998 season — the one where he broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record — the only other campaign of comparable length besides Judge’s own 2022. As I noted last October, Judge also set a record for the highest wRC+ of any hitter of either handedness who took at least 700 PA, surpassing Lou Gehrig (205 in 717 PA in 1927).

Beyond those records, more has changed for Judge over the past year. He helped the Yankees reach the World Series for the first time in his career, and while his overall postseason line was unimpressive (.184/.344/.408), it was still better than his dismal showing in 2022 (.139/.184/.306), with some big moments along the way. Unfortunately, even his early heroics in Game 5 of the World Series — a two-run first-inning homer off Jack Flaherty and a fourth-inning catch of a Freddie Freeman drive while crashing into the right-center field wall — were offset by the routine Tommy Edman fly ball he dropped in the fifth inning of that game, opening the door for the Dodgers to score five unearned runs; they wrapped up their championship that night.

More impressively, Judge became the fastest player to reach 300 homers, doing so last August 14 in his 955th game (132 fewer than the previous record-holder, the aforementioned Kiner) with a bomb off the White Sox’s Chad Kuhl. He banked his second MVP award — unanimously this time, unlike in 2022 when Shohei Ohtani secured two first-place votes. And in all likelihood, he probably cemented a spot in the Hall of Fame, not that he wouldn’t have done so sooner or later.

When he entered last season, Judge had accumulated 41.7 bWAR for his career, and 42.1 for his seven-year peak. His 41.9 JAWS tied him for 34th among right fielders, a thoroughly respectable place to be for a player through his age-31 season, particularly considering he was a rookie in his age-25 season. Throw in last year’s 10.8-bWAR season and this year’s AL-best 2.1 bWAR, and he’s now up to 54.7 career/51.7 peak/53.2 JAWS, 16th between Tony Gwynn (69.1/41.3/55.2) and Dwight Evans (67.2/37.3/52.3), with the recently elected Ichiro Suzuki (60.0/43.7/51.8) just below Evans. He’s already ninth in peak among right fielders, and could climb as high as fourth with another 4.9 WAR, surpassing Mookie Betts:

As I’ve noted before, of the eligible position players with a seven-year peak of 40.0 WAR (32.0 for catchers), just over three-quarters are enshrined. Raise the bar to 50.0 WAR (40.0 for catchers) over those seven years and the math is even more favorable: 95% of such players, with the PED-linked Bonds and Rodriguez the only exceptions from among the 37 eligible. Judge, Betts, Albert Pujols, and Mike Trout are on deck to join that larger group.

The hit parade has continued. Your eyes may have breezed past Judge’s 2025 numbers in the first table, so they bear repeating: through 25 games and 113 PA in this young season, Judge is batting .415/.513/.734 with seven homers and a 258 wRC+. He’s batting FOUR FREAKIN’ FIFTEEN! Forget the Bondsian OBP and SLG for a moment and try not to enjoy that batting average, fleeting as it may be. Judge went 4-for-4 on Tuesday against the Guardians, his second four-hit game of the season; he hit three homers in the other one, on March 29 against the Brewers. With hits in his first two plate appearances on Wednesday afternoon in Cleveland, including an RBI triple that barely missed clearing the 19-foot fence in center field, his batting average was briefly up to a Hornsby-esque .424.

Judge’s 96 mph average exit velo, 25.4% barrel rate, and 59.2% hard-hit rate are all at or near the top of the leaderboards, yet all three are short of his marks from last year. Over the past two days, he’s closed about a 20-point gap in expected slugging percentage, to the point where he’s merely four points short of his current .738 xSLG. I don’t know what Statcast expects him to actually do with a baseball besides pulverize it to the point that it’s nothing but a cloud of dried Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud.

A couple more numbers from this season stand out. For one, Judge has a .500 batting average on balls in play. That’s not going to hold up; the AL/NL record since 1901 is .423, set by Ruth in 1923, and five of the top six marks are from 1922–24. The highest post-expansion mark over a full season is Rod Carew’s .408 in 1977, though Yoán Moncada managed a .406 BABIP as recently as 2019.

Also, Judge is striking out just 20.4% of the time, almost four points below last season’s career low, more than seven points below his career rate of 27.8%, and more than 10 points below his 30.7% rate in his AL Rookie of the Year-winning 2017 season — a testament to his growth as a hitter over the past eight years. He was a force to be reckoned with despite those K’s then, and he’s out of this world now.

Alas, just as there was hardly anywhere for Judge’s performance to go but up when I checked in last April 24, the likelihood is that there’s nowhere to go but down from here. Regression comes for all of us sooner or later. Just as we’ve had fun with the notion that my coverage fixed Judge, this article portends his inevitable statistical doom, and I’ve set myself up to take the fall. Still, so long as he’s at this altitude alongside Ruth and Bonds, it’s worth admiring the view while we can.

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