Can Judge hit 60 HRs again? Yes! Here’s how

It’s that time of year again, by which we mean it’s once again time to look at the historic season Aaron Judge is having, and what his late-season path to 60-plus homers might be. What’s really standing out here right away is that we’ve already done this before, two years ago. With every additional homer, with each intentional walk from a manager unwilling to face him, it’s becoming clearer that his magical 2022 wasn’t a “career season.” It might just be what your garden variety excellent Judge year looks like.

With 47 Yankees games remaining, Judge has 41 homers. He’s on pace for 58. That means 19 more to get to 60, or 21 more to tie his own American League record of 62, or 32 to get to the all-time single season record. That last one’s not going to happen. But what might?

(An obligatory aside: No, 60 homers wouldn’t be any kind of new record. The Major League home run record is 73, by Barry Bonds in 2001, no matter how you might feel about it. Sixty homers, however, remains a magical and unmistakably cool number, one reached by only six players in history, Judge included. It doesn’t have to be a record-breaker for it to matter – and 60 still matters. Either way, it would make him the only player in history outside the turn-of-the-century PED era to get there twice, and it could solidify his Hall of Fame case.)

Judge, it can’t be stated enough, is having yet another of history’s greatest seasons, made all the more impressive by a slow and forgettable April. Entering play on Tuesday, Judge had an OPS+ of 219, where 100 is league-average, which absolutely is saying that he’s been more than twice as good as a league-average hitter. That’s difficult enough to do even one time; Judge is trending towards being just the fourth player since 1947 to do it more than once, along with Bonds, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams, who are “names you might know.”

But we’re not here to talk about his overall place in history. We are here for one thing: Dingers. Lots of them. What’s the road to (further) immortality?

Is it reasonable to even think about 60?

Let’s stick with the 60 as our goal here. Forty-seven games left. Nineteen homers necessary. The next-generation advanced metrics, fueled by AI, suggest that means he needs to hit one homer every 2.5 games. It’s a hotter finish than he needed back in 2022, when he was already at 46 homers through 115 team games.

We start there, because if we’re asking him to do something he’s never actually done before – to ask more of him than we’ve already seen – then the conversation is probably over before it begins. We aren’t. It’s not. Judge has hit as many as 19 homers in a 47-game span before several times, including as recently as “one month ago.” Looking only at single-season runs, and doing our best to exclude overlapping spans, he’s had homer stretches this good or better at least four different times.

• 2022, July-Sept. (when he hit 25)
• 2024, May-June
• 2022, April-June
• 2023, May-Aug. (around a toe injury)

So yes, sure, it’s a doable pace, and not even an unreasonable one, given his career to date. “Just do something you’ve already done four times in the past three seasons” is hardly an out-of-the-question ask, right?

What about the intentional walks?

There’s one way to ensure that Judge doesn’t hit a homer, and that’s to refuse to even throw him a pitch – which the Blue Jays did once on Aug. 3 and three more times on Aug. 4. (Judge still homered in the first game anyway.)

If that’s how the next two months go, then he’s got no chance – but it remains to be seen how much of an issue this is even going to be. Fully one-half of the 12 intentional walks Judge has received this year have come from Toronto alone, meaning everyone else has waved him along to first base a mere six times all season long. That’s absolutely nothing like Bonds getting intentionally walked 35 times in his record-setting 2001, or a wild 120 times in 2004.

So, maybe this is a Blue Jays-specific strategy, and it’s worth noting that he’s seeing the highest rate of pitches in the zone of his entire career, which is in part due to the protection from ahead he’s receiving from Juan Soto. Besides, the rest of a Yankees lineup that was accurately described as having “two good hitters” by old friend Luis Severino just last month is starting to round out, thanks to the addition of Jazz Chisholm Jr., the ascension of Austin Wells, the return of Giancarlo Stanton, and the rebound of Anthony Volpe.

It’s a concern, and it's true that the Angels did also issue him a free pass on Wednesday night (as well as challenging him enough for him to put six balls in play over the two games). But these same conversations happened in 2022, as well. It didn't stop him from topping 60 then.

What do the projections say?

The various projection systems aren’t infallible, but they’re a whole lot better than simply looking at “on pace for,” especially given the ups and downs of Judge’s season. They all somewhat agree, projecting between 14-17 remaining homers, which would put Judge between 55 and 58 homers. That’s a lot more impressive than it seems, because projection systems are, by their nature, relatively conservative. You don’t generally get to all-time seasons by “doing what was expected,” but it’s also hard to expect the 99th percentile outcome all the time. The projections aren’t far off what he needs to begin with; he just needs to outdo them mildly.

But: That’s not fun. We can do something a little more fun.

What if we tried to look exactly at the schedule and ballparks remaining?

The Yankees play one final game against the Angels on Thursday. Then, their remaining schedule looks like this:

At home (25 games)

• Rangers, Guardians, Rockies, Cardinals, Royals, Red Sox, Orioles, Pirates

On the road (21 games)

• White Sox, Tigers, Nationals, Rangers, Cubs, Mariners, A’s

It’s hard not to notice that the moribund pitching staffs of the White Sox and Rockies are on that list, isn’t it? Of course there is some quality pitching there too, but the season is nearing an end, and half the teams in the sport have already finished their head-to-heads against the Yankees. Why not focus on the teams they’ll actually see?

So we threw some spaghetti against the wall, hitting the back of an envelope pasted there, and ran some quick and dirty numbers. Judge homers once every 12 plate appearances or so – no matter whether you’re just looking at this year, the last few years, or the projections. He gets about 4.4 plate appearances per game, and there are again 47 Yankees games left, so doing nothing else at all, you could say “205 more plate appearances” and “17 more homers,” given the one-dinger-per-dozen-times-up approach.

But we know where those games will take place, and we know what pitching staffs he’ll see, don’t we? Let’s look at each remaining pitching staff’s rank above or below average in home run rate so far this year. The Mariners, for example, are excellent at preventing homers, 12% better than average. The White Sox, as you’d expect, are awful at this, 14% worse than average. The Guardians and Cardinals? Almost exactly average. Multiply our original number by the remaining games to play – three against every remaining opponent save for one four-game set vs. Boston – and our 17 turns into 18.

How about ballparks? Let’s throw in right-handed home run park factor, available via Statcast, which allows us to inflate or deflate each of the 15 remaining series left by where they are being played. The 25 remaining home games after Thursday take place at Yankee Stadium, which helps righty homers by 18%. Go on down the line on the road – Detroit’s Comerica Park hurts homers by 14%, and Texas’ Globe Life Field inflates them by 20%, and so on – and do the same thing, and our 18 turns into 18.7, which, if you’ll indulge us, would be 19.

Nineteen. Which, of course, is exactly what he’d need to get to 60.

None of this is guaranteed, of course. It all but requires Judge to play every day the rest of the year, which he’s probably not likely to do. Our best guesses about opposing pitching staffs will be affected by who happens to be pitching that day or not – imagine if he misses Garrett Crochet when they face the White Sox – and as anyone who’s ever been to Wrigley Field would tell you, not every park plays consistently all the time. But mostly, it requires him to get hot – yet not hot in a way he’s never done before.

Forty-seven Yankees games left. Nineteen homers for sixty. It’s not guaranteed. It’s not easy. It is, however, extremely in reach. The magic number remains an all-time mark.