How Long Will Aaron Judge Hold Court?

The baseball season will soon be upon us, which means it’s time for an age-old question: How long until the best hitter’s reign ends? This year, and seemingly every year of late, that means Aaron Judge. You can quibble about who the best overall player is, but Judge is pretty clearly the best offensive player on the planet. Over the last four years, he has a composite 204 wRC+, miles clear of the competition, and he just put up that exact number in 2025. In 2026, we think he’s going to be the best hitter again, obviously.

Will we in 2027, though? It depends, of course. If Judge looks like his usual self this year, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the crown. I wanted a little bit more rigor than that, however, so I dusted off the Marcel projection methodology. Marcel is what Tom Tango dubbed the minimum sufficient projection system. It’s as simple as taking the last three years of performance, weighting them, and tossing in some league average.

Let’s take Judge’s last few seasons as an example. I grabbed his wOBA and plate appearances for 2023-2025 and threw them into a table. Then I calculated league average across those three years (the exact calculation uses some weighting to match Judge’s playing time by season). That looks like this:

Turning those into a Marcel projection is simple. Multiply the most recent year’s plate appearances by five, the next-most-recent year’s by four, the next by three, and the league average by two. Take a weighted average of these new values. The result is Judge’s 2026 Marcel projection – which works out to a .440 wOBA. That tracks logically, which is the point of Marcel. It’s really close to what you and I would think about a player’s skill. Post a wOBA above .450 for two straight years, and I’ll expect you to come back to the pack a little but still do something outrageous the next year.

Using this methodology, here are the top projected hitters for 2026:

Well, yeah, sure. That’s just a list of 12 incredible hitters. (I went to 12 because of the three-way tie for 10th). That’s what Marcel projections are supposed to do. These guys have been very good in the last three years, so we think they’ll continue to be very good. One quick note: You don’t see Nick Kurtz on this list because Marcel penalizes rookies pretty heavily – it fills in a lot of league average, basically. It’s a known weakness, and one that I acknowledge. Other than that shortcoming, though, Marcel does a great job of mirroring common sense. That’s the benefit of this system – it’s simple, explainable, and spits out reasonable answers.

Regardless, there’s no question that Judge is the best hitter today. To figure out when Judge might get leapfrogged at the top, we have to look to the future. I plugged in 2026 Depth Chart projections for everyone we have a projection for and used those to calculate some 2027 Marcels:

Boy, Judge is still at the top by a lot, huh? Obviously he is. He has the best offensive projection in baseball this year. He started with the best accumulated batting line. Add those two together, and the Marcel technique is always going to point to him as the best. But we’re not done here because that’s not the question I’m trying to answer.

First, I wanted to see how poorly Judge would have to hit for us to replace him in our heads as the best hitter. In other words, I worked out what wOBA he’d have to produce in 2026 to end up with the same 2027 projection as each of the next guys on the list. Here’s that list, along with a rough wRC+ translation for each for people who don’t swim through wOBA data all day like I do:

In other words, if Ohtani hits his 165 wRC+ Depth Charts projection for 2026 and Judge posts a 120 wRC+, they’d both have the same Marcel projection in 2027. That doesn’t track quite perfectly in my head, but honestly, it’s close. Judge has hit a lot better than Ohtani over the last three years – .312/.445/.674 (203 wRC+) to Ohtani’s .298/.397/.640 (177 wRC+). If Ohtani is 45 points of wRC+ better than Judge in 2026, that gap will collapse toward zero, and Judge’s trajectory will look a lot scarier.

You can at least theoretically calculate how far Judge would have to fall to end up behind other hitters on this list. I’m not sure it’s all that meaningful, though. If Judge posts the .231 wOBA necessary to make his projection for 2027 the same as Marte’s, there will probably be some obvious signs of what’s wrong, like a missing arm or leg. Another possibility would be a Space Jam situation, where his powers are siphoned away by Monstars. But there aren’t any realistic scenarios where Judge suddenly hits like Leody Taveras this year, so this type of analysis has a clear limit. I think that limit is basically Ohtani. If Judge isn’t considered the best hitter in baseball next year, and it’s entirely because he has declined, the only guy realistically to move ahead of him would be Ohtani.

Judge isn’t the only one whose performance can change, though. I think it’s more interesting to wonder about who might pass him if he keeps playing at his current projected level. Instead of moving Judge’s performance down, I moved every other hitter’s performance up until they had the same 2027 Marcel projection as him. This time I left off wRC+, because it’s hard to figure out when the numbers go so high:

Some of these numbers are at least theoretically possible. Ohtani’s .481 breakeven is reasonable — that’s in the neighborhood of a 210 wRC+, essentially a peak Judge batting line — even if it’s not particularly likely. There are eight different player-seasons with a 200 wRC+ or higher in the 21st century. To be fair, Barry Bonds has four of those and Judge has three, but if we’ve learned anything over these last eight years, it’s that we shouldn’t doubt Ohtani. Soto and Acuña are at least flirting with reality in their breakevens, too.

Past that, we’re getting really silly. Could Bobby Witt Jr. post a .540 wOBA and ascend to Judge’s equal? Never say never, but since 1948, there are only five player-seasons with even a .520 wOBA — three from Bonds and two from Ted Williams. Kurtz could equal Judge by posting the greatest offensive season of all time. Hey, something to aim for!

I wanted to do one last permutation, where I moved Judge’s performance down and each hitter’s up. That’s the way that he is most likely to get passed; he fades slightly and someone else bursts onto the scene. This time, I told the computer that Judge performed at that player’s projection for 2026. To use Ohtani as an example, Depth Charts has him down for a .407 wOBA in 2026, so I told the computer that Judge posted that .407 mark. Then, I calculated the number Ohtani would have to hit to end up with the same projection as Judge in 2027. That came out to .473. So if Judge hits to a .407 wOBA and Ohtani hits to a .473 wOBA, they’ll have identical Marcel projections in 2027. Here’s the whole list:

I think this is pretty close to the spirit of the question. The top 10 guys on the list have wOBAs that Judge could reasonably post in 2026 without some type of catastrophic change. It’s not likely by any means, but it’s at least within the realm of possibility. But even if Judge declines, they’ll have to have incredible years of their own to catch up to him. Could Tucker post a .490 wOBA in 2026? Indubitably. Could Judge post a .374 wOBA in 2026, Tucker’s Depth Charts projection? Surely. The odds of both of those happening are quite low, but they’re not zero.

Perhaps that’s not a satisfying answer, but the truth is that it’s going to be very hard for Judge not to look like the best hitter in baseball in 2027. He’s head and shoulders above everyone else. He’s been head and shoulders above everyone else for so long that even if he declines, he has a long track record to fall back on, and in this instance, past performance often is indicative of future results. Judge won’t reign forever, but I’m pretty positive he’ll still be atop the heap in a year’s time.