Aaron Judge and the Greatest Postseasons of All Time

You may think you’ve already heard enough about Aaron Judge’s heroics during this postseason, especially considering that he wasn’t able to keep his team from getting knocked out barely a week into October. Heroes usually do a more thorough job when saving the day. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about Judge’s 2025 playoff excellence. But I’d argue that you haven’t heard enough, because there’s a bit of context I’d like you to consider. That context? The entirety of postseason history.

Over the course of the American League Divisional Series against the Blue Jays, Judge batted .600. If you factor in his .354 batting average against the Red Sox in the Wild Card round, he batted an even .500 over 31 plate appearances this postseason. Now let’s head over to our handy-dandy postseason leaderboard. If you set a minimum of 30 PAs, you’ll find that Judge just ran the third-highest batting average ever over a single postseason; his .581 on-base percentage is the second highest. His 253 wRC+ is the 14th highest in postseason history (just behind the 255 mark that teammate Giancarlo Stanton put up in 2020). By that standard, Judge just produced one of the greatest postseason performances ever.

To be clear, those numbers are slightly misleading. We need to qualify them, but after I do so over the next couple paragraphs, I’m going to show you that even with all the right statistical context, this was still a very special run. Alright, now let’s do our sabermetric duty and throw some cold water on all of this.

The minimum of 30 plate appearances is important here. First, it rules out a huge chunk of postseason history. Until 1969, the postseason consisted only of the World Series, which sometimes goes as few as four games. To that point, baseball saw just 207 instances of players accumulating at least 30 PAs in a single World Series. No one ever made it to 40.

Next, the smaller the sample, the noisier the results. In postseason history, 171 different players have put up a wRC+ above 400, but none of them made more than 17 plate appearances and only five of them (including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1928) made more than 10. On the other hand, the larger the sample, the more time there is for regression to the mean. Judge’s 253 wRC+ is amazing, but it’s much less amazing than the 245 that Barry Bonds ran over 74 plate appearances in 2002. The graph below shows every postseason performance in baseball history. Judge is the red circle and Bonds is the green one.

This certainly makes Judge look a bit less spectacular. He’s up toward the top of the heap for a player around 30 plate appearances, but he’s not standing out from the pack the way Bonds did. According to this chart, the most impressive performance in postseason history is undoubtedly Randy Arozarena’s magical, homer-filled 2020 run with the Rays, all the way to the right. With fewer than 100 regular season plate appearances under his belt, Arozarena somehow ran a 240 wRC+ over 86 PAs. He wouldn’t even win the Rookie of the Year until the next season! All of this is to say that Judge got just enough plate appearances to get to the point where he doesn’t really have to compete with players from before the divisional era, but few enough that he can still benefit from maximum variation. It’s a good sample-size sweet spot for looking like an outlier.

If we head over to Stathead and look not at whole individual postseasons, but rather postseason spans of seven games and at least 30 plate appearances, we find that 79 different players have put up stretches with a higher OPS than Judge’s 1.273 mark. It would be hard to argue that he actually put up the 14th-greatest postseason performance of all time. Now that we’ve put it in context, let’s talk about what makes it so special anyway.

First, it’s at least a little bit unfair to penalize Judge that harshly for the plate appearances he didn’t take. He did just about everything humanly possible to try to get the Yankees a deeper postseason run, and while his performance may have fallen back down to earth if he’d kept going into Game 5 or the ALCS, Judge has a career OPS of 1.018, and Stathead lists 189 different (though often overlapping) 15-game stretches during which he ran an OPS above 1.300. That’s a better performance over a period that’s twice as long. It’s not just possible that he could have kept this going; it’s something he’s done over and over again.

Next, if we go back to looking at complete postseasons, Judge is still an outlier even if you lower the plate appearances threshold. The list of player-postseasons with at least 20 PAs contains 10,842 entries. That’s a big sample, and within it, just 167 players have maintained a wRC+ of at least 200. Judge actually appears in the top 40 twice. He comes in 38th place this season, and his 2018 run of 22 PAs with a 284 wRC+ ranks 20th. By any measure, Judge has had two of the best complete postseason runs in baseball history. Moreover, he’s the only player who appears in the top 40 twice.

As you might recall, Judge was pretty good during the regular season, too. He led all of baseball in batting average (.331), on-base percentage (.457), and slugging (.688). He put up a major league-best 204 wRC+. That’s the 25th-highest mark ever among qualified batters, and it’s just the third-highest mark of Judge’s career! In the postseason, Judge increased his wRC+ by just under 49 points, an increase of 24%. Essentially, I just weighted Judge’s weighted runs created plus again, this time against his regular season numbers. It was fun, so I took all 167 of the individual player-postseasons with at least a 200 wRC+ over 20 or more plate appearances and weighted them the same way. Postseason wRC+ is on the x-axis, and the percentage above regular season performance is on the y-axis.

As you’d expect, the trendline goes from the bottom left to the bottom right. The better your postseason performance, the more likely you are to just be on a crazy, unsustainable hot streak that bears little relation to your regular season performance. The place to be is toward the the bottom right. If you’re down there, you’re putting up the best postseason numbers, but you’re not all that different from your regular season numbers. You’re performing well not because of an unsustainable streak, but because you’re just that good.

Now look at the two red dots. The one toward the very bottom is Judge in 2025, and the higher one is Judge in 2018. He’s right where you want to be. Few players have ever put up such a great postseason, and few players have ever looked more like themselves while they did it. If there’s such a thing as a believable 253 wRC+, Judge is one of just a few players ever to pull it off.

Before we finish here, I’d like to get away from wRC+, because as great as Judge was as an overall hitter, his batting average was probably the most impressive thing about this postseason. If you drop the plate appearances minimum to 20, he still just ran the 15th-best batting average in postseason history. If you drop it all the way to 15 PAs – that’s just three games for a player at the top of the lineup – he’s still tied for 24th. If this were 30 or 40 years ago, when batting average was still the be-all, end-all, we really would have considered this one of the greatest postseason performances of all time.