Clash of Titans: Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge Head to the World Series

Beyond offering the rare clash between number one seeds, this year’s World Series matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees is steeped in baseball history and — as anyone who’s read me over the past two and a half decades knows — is of great personal resonance. The last time the two teams met in the Fall Classic, in 1981, I was an 11-year-old baseball nut hoping his favorite team could avenge its back-to-back World Series losses from ’77 and ’78. I could never have imagined that I’d get to cover their next October matchup. For most of the country, this pairing’s biggest selling point beyond the top-seed aspect and the involvement of the sport’s two most storied franchises is the presence of the game’s two biggest stars. Both the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Yankees’ Aaron Judge are coming off historic seasons that will likely net them MVP awards, though things haven’t come quite so easily for either of them in the postseason.

We won’t officially know until November whether Judge and Ohtani both won the awards, but even working from the assumption that they will, this is hardly the first time that two likely MVPs have squared off in the World Series. In fact, it’s happened 25 times since 1931, with four such pairings from among the 11 times the Yankees and Dodgers have met. That said, it’s just the second such meeting since the start of the Wild Card era (1995 onward) and the sixth since the start of the Division era (1969 onward). MVP choices may be driven less by team success these days, but even when they are, the expanded playoff field makes getting to the World Series much harder:

This World Series matchup does have the distinction of being the first to feature 50-homer hitters on both sides, with Judge (58) and Ohtani (54) just the 10th and 11th such sluggers to even reach the Series, regardless of opponent:

Only one of the previous nine thumpers who reached 50 homers was shut out in the World Series, and to be fair, he had a note from a doctor, if not a reputable one. Mantle missed the first two games of the 1961 World Series due to an abscess in his right hip, caused by an infection stemming from a “miracle shot” full of amphetamines, vitamins and who knows what else, and — according to Mantle biographer Jane Leavy — administered by an unscrupulous physician as a means of combatting a sexually transmitted disease. Mantle went homerless in his six plate appearances during the Yankees’ four-game sweep of the Reds. All of which is to say that history suggests Judge and Ohtani will find ways to put the ball over the wall at some point.

Thus far in October, the 30-year-old Ohtani has been the more successful of the two, so we’ll tuck into him first. In the first year of his 10-year, $700 million megacontract, on the heels of both a reconstructive elbow surgery that prevented him from pitching and a gambling scandal involving his interpreter, he rose to the occasion to hit .310/.390/.646 while leading the NL in homers, RBI (130), on-base percentage, slugging percentage, wRC+ (181), and WAR (9.1); he fell four points short of winning the batting title and thus the traditional and slash-stat Triple Crowns. In addition to the homers, what grabbed the baseball world’s attention was his 59 steals, making for the first 50-50 season in history. He was only caught stealing four times during the regular season, closing his campaign with 36 consecutive steals from July 23 onward. His stolen base streak finally ended when he was thrown out by the Mets’ Francisco Alvarez in the NLCS opener.

One other accomplishment of Ohtani’s flew somewhat beneath the radar: He reached 400 total bases for the season (411 to be exact). That plateau has only been reached 30 times, with 19 of those coming in the 1921–37 span, when offensive levels were quite high. It’s been done just 11 times since:

Of those 11 seasons, seven took place in the 1997–2001 span, another high-offense era, and both Bonds and Sosa have been connected to performance-enhancing drugs. The other four seasons belong to Musial, Aaron, Rice, and Ohtani, and both Rice and to a lesser extent Musial did so while playing in hitter-friendly parks. For Ohtani to join this company while playing in a comparatively low-offense environment is a major accomplishment.

So far in the postseason, Ohtani has hit .286/.434/.500, with very different flavors of performance in the Division Series against the Padres (.200/.273/.350 with one homer, two walks and 10 strikeouts in 22 PA) and the League Championship Series against the Mets (.364/.548/.636 with two homers, nine walks, and seven strikeouts in 31 PA). He hasn’t hit the ball quite as hard in the postseason as in the regular season, but the numbers are still pretty impressive:

Most of the focus on Ohtani thus far has been on the stark contrast between his performance with the bases empty and with men on base. With nobody on, he went hitless in his first 25 PA of October, a stretch that extended through NLCS Game 3. In that span and that context he was 0-for-22 with three walks and 11 strikeouts, a performance that colleague Michael Baumann suggested may have owed to his taking longer and more frequent cuts in pursuit of homers. He finally got on the nobody-on-board board with a solo homer off Jose Quintana to open up Game 4, and has since added three singles to lift his bases-empty line to a still-meager .138/.265/.241 with five walks and 13 strikeouts in 34 PA. Meanwhile, he’s been on a rampage with men on base, hitting .615/.737/1.077 in 19 PA, with two homers, six walks, and four strikeouts; in that context, he reached base nine times in 11 PA in the NLCS, while being driven in seven times by his teammates.

Uncharacteristically, but related to that odd nobody-on split, Ohtani is just 2-for-13 with three walks and five strikeouts in plate appearances ending with four-seam fastballs, against which he hit .295 and slugged .639 during the regular season. The split boils down to going 0-for-7 with three strikeouts and a 41.2% whiff rate in bases-empty situations and 2-for-4 with two walks, two strikeouts and a 28.6% whiff rate with men on. Pitch selection aside, six of the seven balls he’s gotten under — made contact at unproductively high launch angles, producing little chance of a base hit — have been with nobody on base, and likewise 13 of the 16 balls in which he’s made poor contact (under, topped, or weak). Three of those 13 still became hits, but none of them will hang in the Louvre.

With his runners-on oddity evening out, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that Ohtani has found his postseason groove. He may have been pressing in the Division Series. His 52.3% swing rate and 34.4% chase rate were both well above his season marks (47.3% and 26%, respectively), but he was down to a 37.7% swing rate and a 22.7% chase rate in the NLCS, which helps to explain all those walks.

Here it’s important to remember that while Ohtani never got to play in the postseason with the Angels, he’s been under the big spotlight before. He hit .375/.412/.625 with four doubles and a walk-off hit for the Nippon Ham Fighters in the 2016 Japan Series (NPB’s postseason championship round), and he was the MVP of the 2023 World Baseball Classic for Samurai Japan, hitting a crisp .435/.606/.739. In the WBC, he also posted a 1.86 ERA in 9.2 innings, winning both of his starts and then locking down the championship by striking out then-Angels teammate Mike Trout to preserve a 3-2 lead with two out in the ninth inning. Anyone worrying that the World Series might be too big a moment for him should be sentenced to an eternity listening to sports talk radio call-in yahoos.

As for Judge, despite slumping for nearly the first month of the season, the 32-year-old finished with a remarkable .322/.458/.701 batting line. He led the AL not only in homers but walks (133), RBI (144), on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and WAR (11.2). By wRC+, he didn’t just lead the league, he turned in the top mark of any right-handed hitter in AL/NL history:

A few things worth noting: Judge bumped his own 2022 season down a notch, and those two seasons represent two of the three played over 162 games; four of the top 10 marks came during strike-shortened seasons (1972, ’81, and ’94), another is from the 19th century, and two others predate World War II, leaving McGwire’s 1998 season — the one where he broke Maris’ single-season home run record — the only other campaign of comparable length. In fact, Judge also set a record for the highest wRC+ of any hitter of either handedness who took at least 700 PA, surpassing Gehrig (205 in 717 PA in 1927).

The postseason has been rougher going for Judge, as he’s hit just .161/.317/.387 in 41 PA. He’s struck out 13 times (31.7%), more than seven points above his regular-season mark (24.3%, a career low) while walking seven times (17.1%). He has heated up a bit, in that after starting the playoffs 1-for-11, he’s gone 4-for-20 with a double, two homers and six RBI. Those were big blasts, with the first a two-run seventh-inning shot off Hunter Gaddis that put the Yankees up 6-2 in Game 2 of the ALCS, and the second a game-tying two-run shot off Emmanuel Clase in the eighth inning of Game 3, a game the Yankees ended up losing in 10.

So far, Judge is swinging more often, both at pitches in and out of the strike zone, a pattern that again suggests some pressing:

Not surprisingly, Judge is whiffing more often as well; his whiff rate on sliders has risen from 41.9% to 68.8%, on changeups from 45.8% to 63.6%, and on cutters from 31.8% to 46.2%. He has been particularly prone to chasing sliders outside the zone, whiffing on all seven such swings, five of them low and away. Inside the zone, he’s particularly struggled against changeups, whiffing on five out of eight including all four in the lower third. When he’s made contact, though, Judge has hit the ball very hard — harder than the regular season:

While Judge has hit balls at 95 mph or higher more frequently than in the regular season, he hasn’t barreled them with the same regularity. All too often, he’s gotten under them; his 40% under rate is nearly double his regular season rate of 22.8%. Four of those had exit velocities of 99 mph or higher but also launch angles of 39 degrees or higher; one was a sacrifice fly, another the pop-up that was dropped for an error in the ALCS opener, but none of those were hits.

Though it’s tempting to draw a connection between Judge’s current struggles and his rough 2022 postseason, the shape of the performances is different. In 2022, he hit .139/.184/.306 with two homers in 38 PA against the Guardians and Astros. That year, he didn’t hit the ball quite as hard (94.6 mph average exit velo), he was chasing out of the zone even more often (28.8%), and he wasn’t drawing his walks (just two overall, one in his first game and the other in his ninth). He hasn’t been up to his standards thus far this year, but he hasn’t been that bad, and — to paraphrase Reggie Jackson — with a bat in his hand, he’s still got a chance to change the story.

No doubt it will be tough to escape the focus on these two superduperstars, as this is a marketing dream come true for MLB. Baseball is a team game, and what happens in this World Series will hinge upon the performances of dozens of other players as well, but this matchup between two iconic teams and two players who have spent most of the past season at the top of their games should be something to savor.