Aaron Judge Is Harrison Bergeron

Yesterday, Michael Baumann wrote about the enormous proportion of the Yankees’ offense that Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are responsible for. According to weighted runs created, those two sluggers have been responsible for just under 39% of the Bronx bombardment this season, a percentage that is unmatched not just in this cursed year of 2024, but in this entire cursed millennium. Today, I’d like to focus just on Judge. He’s having the best season of his career at the plate, which is a ludicrous thing to say about a player who hit 62 home runs just two years ago, and who, if not for an oddly situated concrete embankment in Dodger Stadium’s right field, might well have done so again last year. If we follow Baumann’s lead and look just at this century, the leaderboard for single-season wRC+ among qualified batters looks like this:

First of all, no, I didn’t make a mistake. As of Thursday morning, Judge was running a 212 wRC+, which makes him tied with a peak Barry Bonds season. Second of all, I lied just a moment ago. We don’t need to limit ourselves to the 2000s for the top six wRC+ marks to go to Bonds and Judge. If we start traveling back in time, the leaderboard looks exactly the same until we get all the way to 1957, when a couple of guys named Ted Williams (223) and Mickey Mantle (217) crash the party. Judge is hitting like an inner circle Hall of Famer, again.

As you’ve probably realized by now, this is another Aaron Judge appreciation post. Instead of focusing on wRC as Baumann did, we’ll be looking at a different catch-all metric – specifically, Judge’s .470 weighted on-base average – in order to get a sense of just how far above the rest of the field it is. Before we dig into wOBA, however, let’s acknowledge that it’s not the most eye-catching way to measure Judge’s prowess. Here’s a graph that shows the wRC+ of all qualified players. I titled it wRC+ of All Qualified Players. I also left all the names jumbled up at the bottom because there’s no reason this can’t be fun. Judge is the lovely green bar all the way to the right, and fittingly, he towers over everybody else:

By comparing weighted results to the league average, wRC+ shows just how otherworldly Judge is. There are only two players, Soto and Shohei Ohtani, who could even make an argument that they belong Judge’s stratosphere. In order to be as good as Judge, you’d need to take an average player, then double their production, then add another 12%. Here’s the same graph, but for wOBA:

He’s still way above the competition, but it’s just not as exciting a graph, even though I replaced the tiny batter in the FanGraphs logo with a tiny Aaron Judge. Maybe you’re familiar with the Kurt Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which a policy of radical equality is mandated by the United States Handicapper General. Everyone is dragged down to the lowest common denominator: the beautiful wear hideous masks, the strong are burdened by heavy weights, the intelligent hear crashing sounds that constantly derail their trains of thought. In this exercise, we’ll be working in the other direction. We’re not going to drag Aaron Judge down to league average; we’re going to bring the rest of the league up to his Bergeronian level, and we’ll be doing so by putting them in the most hitter-friendly situations possible. This season, the entire league has a wOBA of .311, compared to Judge’s .470 mark. We’ll be searching for splits in which the league as a whole has a wOBA as good as Judge’s .470. The question we’re asking is this: If you took a league-average hitter, just how favorable would the conditions need to be for them to be able to hit like Aaron Judge does all the time?

When I started out, I thought this might be simple: just look at the most hittable pitches. To do that, I looked only at pitches over the heart of the plate, in Attack Zones one through nine. Surely, when players get hittable pitches over the heart of the plate, they get way better, right?

Right?

While it’s true that they get better, it turns out that they don’t get Aaron Judge better. This season, the league has a .358 wOBA on those pitches, which is excellent. That’s a hair better than the wOBA of Fernando Tatis Jr., who ranks 25th among qualified players. But it’s not particularly close to .470. If you threw a league-average player nothing but pitches over the heart of the plate, their wOBA would still be more than 100 points below Judge’s. Just for comparison’s sake, when Judge sees pitches over the heart of the plate, he has a .543 wOBA.

Next, I tried pitches that were literally right down the middle. To do that, I selected pitches in Attack Zone five. In any nine-box diagram of the strike zone, box five is the one right in the middle. You know how people say that home runs aren’t hit, they’re thrown? They’re talking about those zone-five meatballs, and on those pitches, the league as a whole has a wOBA of .391. That’s even better! It’s a few points above Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who has the ninth-highest wOBA among qualified players. But – and you’re not going to believe this – it turns out that .391 is still a whole lot less than .470. When you throw a league-average player nothing but pitches right down the middle, their wOBA is still nearly 80 points lower than Judge’s. Take a moment to process that, and then process this: Judge’s wOBA on those same middle-middle pitches is a nice, meaty .736. Maybe pitchers should try throwing the ball somewhere else.

At this point, we’re going to need to cut to the end of the page, because I looked at so, so many splits and there just weren’t that many winners. I tried looking at middle-middle fastballs. I tried looking at pitches that were within 1.2 inches of the very center of home plate. I tried looking at sinkers that didn’t sink and low four-seamers. I tried looking at fastballs under 95 mph, then 94, then 93, and so on until I had reached and passed Kyle Hendricks territory. I looked at eephuses and meatballs from rookie pitchers. None of those splits resulted in a league-average wOBA that was in Judge’s neighborhood.

When position players are pitching, the league has a .403 wOBA. That makes the league-average player equivalent to Brent Rooker, who has the seventh-highest wOBA in baseball, but it also leaves that league-average player so, so much worse than Judge. Just to reiterate, the league as a whole, is way, way worse when facing position player pitchers than Judge is against actual pitchers. I had to come up with comically hittable pitches and situations in order to actually find splits where a league-average payer would be as good at hitting as Judge is all of the time. Here are the splits that I found.

First, we can start with location. If we look only at pitches in the waste zone – which is to say the area in white in the strike zone chart a few paragraphs back, pitches that are so far from the strike zone as to be completely noncompetitive – the league has a .478 wOBA, eight points above Judge’s (though on pitches in the waste zone, Judge has a .632 wOBA). So far this season, those pitches have resulted in a 39.1% walk rate because players have swung at them just 5.5% of the time. In order to make a league-average player as productive as Judge, all you need to do is throw them nothing but pitches that are so comically far from the strike zone that they’ll only swing about once every 20 pitches. It would be boring to watch, but we’d end up with some truly gorgeous pitch charts:

Second, and most effective, we can mess with the count. Here’s a breakdown of wOBA based on count so far this season. Keep in mind that only pitches that end a plate appearance count toward wOBA, so for most of the rows in the table below, wOBA only represents balls put into play:

That’s more like it. Once a player gets into a 3-0 or 3-1 count, plate appearances are either ending because the batter walked or because they swung at a pitch that was so juicy they just couldn’t pass it up. In those situations, the league average wOBA is much better than Judge’s. In fact, in 3-0 counts, Judge actually has a .652 wOBA, making him a whopping 18 points below league average. Truly embarrassing stuff. Then again, he’s at .821 in 3-1 counts, which is 262 points (also known as the entire wOBA of Nick Ahmed) above league average. But the fact remains, all we need to do to make a league-average player way better than Aaron Judge is start every plate appearance with a 3-0 count.

The last split is my favorite. I started this exercise by looking at pitches right down the middle, but even on those, the numbers weren’t particularly close to Judge’s. I looked at center-cut fastballs, breaking balls, and so on to no avail. Eventually, I found it. Here’s the split: We’re looking just at sweepers located in zone five, right down main street. We’re also looking at hanging sweepers (which is to say sweepers with fewer than five inches of glove-side break). On those non-sweeping sweepers right over the heart of the plate, the league has a wOBA of .469, just one scant point below Judge. To be clear, this split is so small as to be meaningless. Only 39 pitches that meet these criteria have actually been thrown this year. But I think that makes it even more apt, because it illustrates just how far above the competition Judge is. If you threw the rest of the league nothing but center-cut, cement-mixer sweepers while Judge had to face the normal gamut of hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs, wipeout sliders, Clase cutters, Ghost Forks, and splinkers, then Judge would be a league-average player.

As I said up front, this is an Aaron Judge appreciation post, because we really need to make sure that we’re appreciating what he’s doing at the plate right now. I thought this would be a fairly simple exercise, but his performance is so outlandish that it borders on farce. Quite simply, he’s up so high that even when we try, it’s hard to bring the rest of the league up to his level.