Aaron Judge’s American League Home Run Reign May Be Short-Lived

Last season, Shohei Ohtani had one of the greatest seasons in history that did not result in taking home an MVP trophy. His misfortune in 2022 was running into one of the best offensive campaigns that anyone living can remember, with Aaron Judge putting up a 207 wRC+ and 11.5 WAR without any known pitching skills to utilize. Most writers still don’t vote entirely or even primarily based on WAR-type metrics, so Judge setting a new American League single-season home run record, with 62, was also quite helpful. Fast forward to 2023, and Judge’s toe injury has basically ended any chance of him repeating his MVP feat, but Ohtani has been doing his best to ensure that even a healthy Judge would have had trouble doing so.

Ohtani’s never been a shabby hitter, with a .265/.364/.554 line, 146 wRC+, and 80 homers over the last two seasons. Those are star-level numbers, but not historic ones. This year is another matter entirely. He’s cranked his offense into overdrive and now stands at .306/.390/.670 with 31 homers as the Angels have played past the halfway point of the 2023 season. Over at Sports Illustrated, Emma Baccellieri made a solid argument that Ohtani’s June may have been the best month by an individual in major league history. He has crushed 10 homers in his last 16 games and now leads all of baseball in round-trippers, three more than Atlanta’s Matt Olson.

With a few exceptions — he’s not stealing 131 bases, and Chief Wilson can rest comfortably with his 36 triples — achievements of the past aren’t safe from Ohtani’s onslaught. And with the recent surge in his power numbers, he is now on a real approach pattern to eclipsing Judge’s AL home run record. This mark has been in Yankees pinstripes in one form or another since 1920, when Babe Ruth broke his own record that was earned wearing a Red Sox uniform.

So will Ohtani pass Judge? Well, I’ve got a projection system, and it would be a crime to not ask it.

The full-version of the ZiPS in-season model gives Ohtani a final projection of 53 home runs, based on him hitting home runs in 22 of 303 projected plate appearances (7.3%). That rate would not be enough in itself, but as I discussed when talking batting average and Luis Arraez last week, we don’t actually know what the “true” underlying probability is; we can only guess at it afterwards, aided by the actual results. That uncertainty is what gives Ohtani the chance to break some records. ZiPS is only 95% sure that the underlying probability for an Ohtani home run over a half-season is between 5.5% and 9.6%, with even greater rates possible when he’s both underrated by the model and fortunate. Crank out a million simulations, and ZiPS can give an estimate as to Ohtani’s overall outlook:

Ohtani is not yet a slam dunk to catch Ruth or Roger Maris, let alone Judge, but based on the projections, he’s got a fighting chance. ZiPS estimates he has a 15% shot of matching Ruth’s 60, 11% to catch Maris at 61, 8% to tie Judge, and 5.5% to put the AL record in Angel red. Catching the major league records for home runs is a bit more challenging, and he’s a little too far behind the pace at this point. Sammy Sosa‘s 66 is reachable (1.5%), but the numbers drop off quickly from there, as ZiPS thinks he’ll run out of calendar. Mark McGwire’s 70 was caught about once per 10,000 seasons; to equal Barry Bonds, Ohtani has to match his June total of 15 in each of the last three months of the season, which he did nine times in a million sims.

It’s not just home run records that are vulnerable to Ohtani. It hasn’t gotten as much attention, but winning the Triple Crown is yet another plausible feat available to him. The home run part is relatively easy, with ZiPS projecting a 16-homer final edge over Luis Robert Jr. The projections have him third behind Rafael Devers and Adolis García in RBI, but by fewer than five runs each. Batting average looks to be the toughest of the three. ZiPS sees Corey Seager as the most dangerous competition to Ohtani in the BA race, but while Seager is hitting .351, he doesn’t appear on the leaderboards since he’s 23 plate appearances short of the minimum requirement right now. Adding 23 hitless at-bats drops him to .317, but if he remains healthy, he’ll be on track to qualify or come very close to 502 plate appearances and not have his BA reduced. ZiPS projects Ohtani to finish ninth, but with Arraez in Miami, nobody is projected to lap the field.

By the end of the season, ZiPS projects a 2.3% chance that Ohtani wins the batting average title in the American League. In the scenarios in which he finishes with a high batting average, he’s almost always going beat expectations in homers and RBI, which makes his shot at the Triple Crown very close to his BA title chances, with an overall 2.1% projected shot. The major league Triple Crown is, sadly, almost certainly out of reach; even with Arraez falling off his .400 pace in the last week, he has such an edge in the BA race that injury is nearly the only obstacle, in which case, Ronald Acuña Jr. becomes the odds-on favorite.

But maybe Ohtani will end up hitting that 74th home run in the final days of the season. His last few years have made the implausible seem possible, and it would be hubris to suggest it can’t happen again.