Is the Third Time the Charm for Aaron Judge’s Triple Crown Hopes?

Will Aaron Judge win the Triple Crown? If you were hanging around on FanGraphs three years ago, this question might sound familiar. If you don’t want to click the link, back at the end of 2022, both Judge and Paul Goldschmidt were within earshot of a Triple Crown in the final weeks of the season. The projected probabilities were firmly against either of them winning it (about 4% for Judge and 3% for Goldschmidt), the bank won as it tends to do, and Miguel Cabrera remained the only Triple Crown winner of the last half-century. There’s a lot of 2025 left to go, but the man sometimes known as Arson Judge is once again setting fire to the league. And this time, some of the factors weighing against his potentially performing the feat are no longer present.

Triple Crown stats have lost their luster as tools for evaluating overall performance, especially batting average and runs batted in, but not everything has to be an optimized evaluative tool to be cool. Bo Jackson was not even close to the best baseball players of the late 1980s, but I dare someone to say he wasn’t one of the [insert superlative used by kids today that Dan totally doesn’t know because he’s old] players of his time. Triple Crowns are fun in a way that some sabermetric Triple Crown, perhaps wRC+/sprint speed/FRV, is not. Judge is, of course, also having an insanely good season by our more nerdy numbers, but today, we’re old school. And what could possibly be more old school and sepia toned than projection algorithms?

Let’s start with the prongs of the crown that Judge has found easier to forge in past attempts: home runs and RBI. In three of the four seasons (2017, 2021, 2022, 2024) in which he didn’t miss a bunch of time due to injury, Judge led the AL in homers. And in none of those three years was it even particularly close; he finished with a nine-homer lead in 2017, and even larger gaps of 25 and 14 in 2022 and 2024, respectively. He also has two RBI laurels, beating out José Ramírez both times, once by a small margin (five in 2022) and once with a massive cushion (26 last year).

Judge’s 18 homers aren’t currently leading the American League, but he is only one blast behind leader Cal Raleigh. (In fact, Judge entered the start of play yesterday with the league lead, but the Big Dumper deposited two dongs as the Mariners beat the Nations, 9-1, while Judge’s lone hit against the Angels was a single.) And although two of the league’s best power hitters aren’t too far in back of Judge — Brent Rooker and Rafael Devers at 12 — those six homers make for a fairly sizable cushion. Aside from Raleigh, the closest threats to Judge ahead of Rooker and Devers are players you don’t usually see at the top of the homer leaderboards, such as Taylor Ward and the maddening-to-predict Spencer Torkelson. As a result, ZiPS sees the Big Dumper as Judge’s primary obstacle for the home run title, just ahead of injury.

What’s perhaps most significant is the slugger who isn’t there, Shohei Ohtani. He’s the one player who has demonstrated he can regularly keep pace with Judge’s prodigious power output, but his move to the National League removed him as a contender for the AL crown.

In runs batted in, only five players are 10 RBI or fewer away from the leader, Devers (48): Judge (47), Torkelson (40), Riley Greene (38), Ward (37), and Raleigh (37). ZiPS sees Devers as by far the biggest threat to Judge, with the computer not thinking the Tigers will continue to produce runs at their current pace.

Judge has an updated full-season projection of 134 RBI, according to ZiPS, and with a projected 115 RBI, Devers is the only player expected to finish in the same galaxy. Torkelson and Raleigh have non-zero chances, but with projections right around 100 RBI, they need a lot to go their way, at least as ZiPS sees things.

That gets us to the third category, and the one that’s been the roadblock for Judge: batting average. Luis Arraez foiled Judge’s Triple Crown bid in 2022, while Bobby Witt Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. did so last year. But what makes this time different is that the wind is at Judge’s back. Coming into the year, ZiPS projected Judge to finish 11th in the AL in average, ninth if you knock out Chandler Simpson and Masataka Yoshida, who were projected by our Depth Charts to fall short of the 502 plate appearances necessary to qualify for the batting title. While many of the projected leaders are playing well, most notably Jacob Wilson at a .348 batting average, Judge has built in a massive cushion, as he’s still flirting with the .400 mark after Memorial Day.

In rest-of-season batting average, ZiPS now has Judge as the best in baseball, at .320. As far as I can tell, this is the first time Judge has ever been projected to be the league leader in average over the rest of a season. Combined that with a nearly 50-point lead (Wilson is behind by 47 points as I write this), and Judge is in the driver’s seat for the batting title.

So, what probability does this all add up to? According to ZiPS, Judge has a 72% chance of being the leader in home runs, and in 77% of the simulations in which he captured the home run crown, he also led in RBI, which makes sense because they are not independent stats. Put that together, and Judge led the AL in both homers and RBI in 55% of all simulations. Moving on to average, Judge won the batting title in 76% of the simulations in which he also paced the AL in homers and RBI.

All told, the final projection comes out as a healthy 42% for Judge to win the Triple Crown.

Naturally, playing this well, even for two months, has had a beneficial effect on his career projections. ZiPS now projects Judge to finish with 572 homers (up from 545 in the preseason), pass 2,000 hits, and inch close to 90 WAR for his career. He was already a Hall of Famer based on his mind-boggling peak, but even with three seasons hampered by injury and another shortened due to COVID, he’s looking quite Cooperstown-worthy by the counting stats as well. Adding a Triple Crown to his résumé would provide another great sentence to his future bronze plaque.