Juan Soto and Aaron Judge Are Creating a Historic Amount of Offense

The other day, I swam through the soupy Delaware Valley air to catch the Phillies-Yankees game at Citizens Bank Park, mostly to see Juan Soto and Aaron Judge in person. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these two dudes are both having monster seasons. Through Tuesday’s games, they were first and third in the league in WAR, first and second in walk rate, first and second in wRC+, first and second in OBP, and first and fourth in slugging percentage. For those of you who like to go old school, they’re also third and seventh in batting average, first and fourth in runs scored, and first and fifth in RBI.

Back in December, I predicted that something like this might happen, in an article titled “Juan Soto Is Going to Score A Bajillion Runs Hitting In Front of Aaron Judge.” Soto isn’t quite on pace to score a bajillion runs, but he is on pace for 132, which would be one of the 10 highest totals since the strike.

On Monday night, the big dudes gave me my money’s worth: Soto went 3-for-5 with two doubles, two runs, and three RBI. Judge went 2-for-5 with two home runs and three RBI. The Yankees put a huge hole in Zack Wheeler’s Cy Young case and left parts of the Phillies bullpen scattered around South Philadelphia, en route to a 14-4 win.

That might be representative for Soto and Judge, but it was uncharacteristically productive for the rest of the Yankee lineup. Three other Yankees also homered, including Jazz Chisholm Jr., who lined up at third base in Yankee road grays and immediately transformed into Home Run Baker.

See, once you set aside Soto and Judge, the Yankees lineup looks an awful lot like it should belong to a 78-win Angels or Marlins team. It’s a lot of OBPs in the very low .300s and a lot of SLGs around .400 or below. Maybe if this young guy adds two grades of power while cutting his strikeout rate by a third, and if the injury-prone guy stays healthy, and if the Quad-A slugger keeps hitting like an All-Star, and if four or five other things happen, maybe they’ll be on to something.

Now, drop the two best hitters in the world into that otherwise mediocre lineup and you’ve got the best offense in baseball by runs scored and wRC+. That’s why the Yankees swept the Phillies on the road, and why they’re in a tight three-way battle for the no. 1 seed in the American League.

Nevertheless, the Yankees are highly reliant on their two best hitters. That much is obvious to anyone who looks at a team stats page, or even just watches the Yankees for any extended period of time. But I was curious how much of the Yankees’ offense so far this season has come from Judge and Soto. Fortunately, we can quantify that.

I’ve mentioned wRC+ twice already in this article, because as a park- and league-adjusted per-plate-appearance metric, it’s the best way I know to express offensive production as an easily digestible integer. Colloquially, 100 is average, more is better, less is worse.

But its antecedent, wRC (or weighted runs created) is a counting stat, like RBI or hits or WAR. It incorporates not just quality but quantity. The argument I’m about to illustrate with wRC could just as easily be made with RBI or WAR or any other counting stat, but this is the tool I like best for this job among the stats we have on the site.

Here are the top five in the league by wRC, as well as no. 3 through no. 5 among Yankee hitters:

You see how big the drop-off is from Judge and Soto (and Judge in particular) to the rest of the league leaders, and how far down you have to go on this leaderboard before you find any other Yankees.

So far this season, the Yankees have produced 576.4 weighted runs created as a team, of which 224.6 have come from their top two hitters. In the table below, I’m going to give you those three bits of information for all 30 teams. It’ll make for a big table, but not only does having it allow you to contextualize Judge and Soto’s contributions, there’s some interesting trivia in here:

First of all, you’ll notice that there are several players on this list who got traded in the past week; they’re listed with their old teams because, while the Marlins traded Chisholm, they get to keep all the runs he created for them beforehand.

There’s more than one way to build a good offense. There are good and bad teams sprinkled throughout this list — no. 1 is currently in a playoff position, but so is no. 30.

What I hope you get out of this chart is a sense of what is a normal percentage of offense for the two most productive hitters in a lineup to generate. Exactly 20 teams, or two-thirds of the league, get between 25% and 30% of their weighted runs created from their two top hitters. The Yankees, at 38.97%, are an enormous outlier, nearly six percentage points ahead of Kansas City.

If you want to sort solely by the runs created by the top two hitters, without factoring in the rest of the team, the Yankees are more than 40 runs clear of Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman of the Dodgers, and a further 20-plus runs clear of anyone else. In other words, Judge and Soto have been 23.5% more productive than Ohtani and Freeman, a pair of recent MVPs having great seasons.

But wait, there’s more. I went back and ran the numbers dating back to the year 2000. (Excluding 2020, because the shortened season lends itself to weirdness.) Here’s how the current Yankees stack up in terms of greatest percentage of offense derived from a 1-2 punch:

I’ll paraphrase what Meg said when I showed her an early version of this chart: You know this is a good measure of offensive top-heaviness because Barry Bonds And Friend appears twice in the top five.

This sample includes every player season of 300 or more plate appearances since 2000, as well as 24 seasons of team data — more than 700 team seasons and more than 6,000 player seasons in total. And this year’s Yankees are no. 1 by a mile. Nobody else is within a percentage point of them, not even the Barry Bonds and the Seven Dwarves lineups of the early 2000s. Only seven other teams, out of 720, got over 35%.

Historically, the numbers line up pretty well with 2024: The average is in the mid-27% range, with one standard deviation from the mean running from 24.19% to 30.52%. This year’s Yankees are 3.67 standard deviations above the mean in terms of percentage offensive share generated by their top two hitters.

The 2024 season isn’t over yet, obviously, so in order to figure out how Judge and Soto compare to some of the top duos of the 21st century, we have to project a little. They are, hilariously, already some 20 runs clear of the mean wRC for a top duo since 2000, despite having more than 50 team games to go.

Extrapolating the Yankees’ schedule out to 162 games, Soto and Judge are on pace to combine for 333.8 weight runs created, which would be the best total for a two-man partnership since 2000. Only four duos have even broken 290 runs in a season: Bonds and Aurilia and Todd Helton and Larry Walker in 2001, Bonds and Kent in 2002, and Ronald Acuña Jr. and Matt Olson last year. This not being a league-adjusted stat, the top 10 is mostly from the early 2020s, with the exceptions being last year’s Braves and Dodgers (Freeman and Mookie Betts).

The Yankees, as a team, are on pace for 856.6 wRC, which would make them — by this metric — the 64th-most productive offense of the 21st century, exactly 140 runs short of the record holders, the 2003 Boston Red Sox.

The projected wRC total for the Yankees without Judge and Soto is 522.8 runs. Taking the 690 full-season totals since 2000 and removing the two most productive hitters from each lineup, 522.8 runs would put the Yankees in a tie for 396th, with the 2006 Nationals and 2013 Dodgers.

It’s obvious that Judge and Soto are having incredible seasons and carrying an otherwise lackluster Yankee lineup. But even though everyone accepts this premise as true, it’s true to a degree that absolutely beggars belief.