Judge's 'hidden historic year' is just his latest feat

Far be it from us to pretend that Aaron Judge hasn’t been the recipient of enough positive media coverage over the last half-decade – you may have noticed the video game cover and the pair of American League Most Valuable Player Awards – but there’s also a danger in his nightly, extraordinary greatness just seeming … normal. Expected, even.

While Shohei Ohtani goes 50/50 and prepares to pitch, and Elly De La Cruz flies through the air like Superman, Judge just keeps on doing the same thing he’s been doing for nine seasons now, which is to destroy baseballs.

Normal, right? No longer worth paying attention to? Not quite. Couldn’t be further from the truth.

Judge was hitting .415/.513/.734 in his first 25 games of the season, entering Friday. It’s the best April of his career. It’s nearly the best April of anyone’s career, really; entering Friday, Judge’s OPS was 2.5 times better than the Major League average, which is one of the 10 best Aprils anyone’s ever had, at least among players who took 100 plate appearances.

But it’s also not the best month of his own career, again compared to the league average. It’s not even in the top five.

That is, perhaps, what happens when you’re in the midst of your ninth consecutive excellent season and are on track for what looks for all the world like it’ll be a third historic season in the last four years. Judge, who celebrates his 33rd birthday on Saturday, is tied for third-best offensive production in AL/NL history through age 33, posting a line 75% above the average for his era. The only two batters more productive? Babe and Ted. You don’t need their last names. Neither one has taken a plate appearance in the last six decades.

In 2022, Judge posted what was, at the time, the (tied for) fifth-best season in modern AL/NL history for a right-handed batter (210 OPS+). In 2024, he one-upped himself, posting the best season by a right-handed batter (223 OPS+), giving him two of the top six. In 2025, he's off to another tremendous start -- he’s not going to hit .415 all season long, obviously, but he might not need to, either. If he merely plays to the projections, which include what he’s done to date and could reasonably be expected to do for the rest of the year, he’d have his third season being more than twice as good as the average hitter.

The only AL/NL hitters to do that three times or more? Ruth, Bonds, Williams, and Hornsby. And, perhaps, Judge. Meanwhile, dozens of all-time legends – Henry Aaron, Alex Rodriguez, Joe DiMaggio, Albert Pujols, and Mike Schmidt among them – never did it once.

“This week, he’s Tony Gwynn, next week, he might be Hank Aaron," laughed Yankee teammate Carlos Rodón after a Yankee victory on Wednesday in Cleveland, which would be a tremendous line if Gwynn or Aaron -- for all their obvious legendary status -- ever hit like Judge has. Comparing all three through age 33, Judge is better than Aaron at slugging and better than Gwynn at getting on base.

Normal? Just about nothing about this is normal.

Consider what happened last season, when Judge got off to an uncharacteristic slump to start the year, posting a .754 OPS in April. That's perfectly fine for most hitters, yet was still one of the weakest months of his time as a Yankee. Near the end of the month, he started to heat up, changing his stance in the process, as MLB.com’s David Adler went into great detail to explain.

After that, Judge was his usual excellent self for the remainder of the season, still managing to post 11.2 WAR, the best season anyone’s had since Bonds’ heyday around the turn of the century. (Yes, better than any season by Ohtani, whose best pitching years and best hitting years haven’t yet come at the same time.)

Looking at what he’s done over the last 365 days, then, mostly excludes that slow start. Entering Friday, Judge’s last calendar year was worth 13.7 WAR, thanks to the .360/.489/.762 (and 62 homers) he put up in 162 games, while mostly playing center field.

Call it a “hidden historic year,” because if you were to go back to the birth of the American League in 1901, then a 13.7 WAR season would be tied for the second-best year ever, stuck right in the middle of a few of Ruth’s best seasons. And while WAR does a good job of adjusting for the changing league-average skill level, it doesn’t explicitly account for the fact that Ruth played all day games, never stepping on a plane or playing a game west of St. Louis, in a league that had not yet been integrated, seeing the same seven pitching staffs over and over and over.

Best seasons ever, Wins Above Replacement (since 1901)

• 14.7 // Ruth, 1923
• 13.7 // Ruth, 1921 [also Judge’s last 365 days]
• 13.1 // Ruth, 1920
• 12.9 // Ruth, 1927
• 12.7 // Bonds, 2002
• 12.5 // Bonds, 2001
• 12.4 // Gehrig, 1927

If you want to look at offense only, using wRC+ (which is very similar to OPS+), then the 245 mark that Judge had over the last calendar year would be … No. 1, just ahead of the 244 that Bonds posted in 2002.

Now: We can’t say we’ve been able to go throughout history and run a 365-day check for every player. Bonds, for example, put up 14.2 WAR and 253 wRC+ between Sept. 18, 2001, when baseball returned from the 9/11 attacks, and Sept. 17, 2002, and that’s a cherry-picked sample that may or may not be his best run ever. So, no, we can’t say this is “the greatest calendar year ever,” as great of a headline as that would be.

But we also know two things, for certain: WAR isn’t really precise enough where decimals points matter all that much, particularly as you go back through the decades; and a season of around 14 WAR is about as much as anyone is capable of posting. If not the greatest calendar year ever, it’s got to at least be in the conversation.

Despite all this, Judge is probably still unlikely to challenge any all-time records as far as “most home runs” or “highest WAR,” despite being the fastest player to reach 300 homers. That's because he got off to a relatively late start – his Rookie of the Year Award-winning 2017 campaign came at age 25 – and because he lost time to the shortened 2020 season and various injuries. What’s going to stand out here, aside from Judge's lofty position atop the all-time Statcast hard-hit leaderboard, is his value on a per-game basis, which can best be expressed by showing his average WAR per 162 games.

Career WAR/162 games (min. 1,000 games)

• 10.8 // Ruth
• 9.3 // Hornsby
• 9.2 // Williams
• 9.1 // Mike Trout
• 8.2 // Bonds
• 8.8 // Willie Wells
• 8.7 // Judge <--
• 8.7 // Gehrig

It’s an incredible list of names, particularly so the more you learn about Wells, a Negro Leagues legend who was one of the greatest shortstops in baseball history.

Judge isn’t going to be the greatest hitter ever, because that title will always belong either to Ruth, who single-handedly changed the sport in ways that can’t be repeated today, or Williams, the original baseball scientist who was decades ahead of his time, or Bonds, who dominated in a way no one has before or since, regardless of how you might feel about the baggage that came along with that.

But Ruth, Williams and Bonds were all left-handed hitters. Judge might just end up being the greatest righty batter to ever play – among any righty to take at least 1,500 plate appearances, that’s exactly where he’s ranked, right now. He’s long since been assured of a place in Cooperstown, when eligible. He’s either put up the best calendar year ever, or very close to doing it.

Is reliable greatness normal, just because it never goes away? We’d argue it’s not. We’d argue that doing something so incredible so often that it barely seems to stand out is exactly what real greatness seems to be.