When Should You Intentionally Walk Aaron Judge?

If you’ve ever struck up a conversation with a stranger at the ballpark, you might have noticed that the FanGraphs readers are easy to spot. Let’s say you find yourself discussing the Yankees. A FanGraphs reader might ponder whether the 30-point gap between Paul Goldschmidt’s wOBA and xwOBA will catch up to him, while a non-reader is more likely to fret over whether Brian Cashman is too reliant on analytics when constructing the team’s roster. But sometimes, the two groups ask the same thing. So today, let’s consider one of those broad questions: Should teams be intentionally walking Aaron Judge more often?

Admit it. You’ve wondered. If you’re a Yankees fan, you’ve wondered just how long Judge is going to be allowed to hit in big spots. If you’re a fan of the team the Yankees are playing, you’ve wondered how your team’s manager ought to solve this impossible puzzle. And if you’re a neutral fan, well, Aaron Judge is the biggest story in baseball right now. He’s having one of the best offensive stretches in the history of the game. Don’t you want to know if there’s anything that can be done about it?

Ever since Barry Bonds broke the sport in the early 2000s, every hot streak in baseball comes with questions about the “Bonds treatment.” Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean 120 intentional walks, Bonds’ tally in 2004 and the single-season record. (It’s the single-season record by 52 walks. Second place? Barry Bonds. Third place? Barry Bonds.) The best non-Bonds total was Willie McCovey’s 45 in 1969. The most Judge has ever racked up in a single season is a measly 20. So the question isn’t whether teams should treat him like Bonds, because no, they shouldn’t. But should they treat him like McCovey? And more importantly, how should opposing managers handle Judge in a playoff game, when all the chips are on the table? Let’s do some math.

If you’re trying to decide whether to walk Judge, you have to estimate his talent level. We could use projection systems and such, regress towards the mean, and treat Judge’s recent results with a grain of salt. But come on, that’s boring. Let’s estimate Judge’s true talent by taking his statistics from 2022 to the present. That’s a long time! If you can’t call 2,038 plate appearances across four years a true talent level, the concept is meaningless. And he’s batting .314/.438/.684 over that stretch, good for a ludicrous 207 wRC+. So my estimate of Judge is easy: It’s just what Judge has done since ascending to his current form.

Next, we have to come up with some scenarios. Intentional walks don’t happen in a vacuum. The identity of the batter is the most important factor, of course – no one’s thinking about intentionally walking the backup second baseman. The game situation matters too; with first base open, many more intentional walks are justifiable. If it’s the bottom of the ninth and the winning run is on base, walking a good hitter is even more defensible. Good and bad matchups matter – with a righty on the mound, walking a righty to pitch to a lefty seems bad, but with a lefty on the mound, it’s comparatively great. And lineups play their part – if Babe Ruth is due up next, you’re going to respond differently than if it’s Mario Mendoza.

Luckily, we can hold at least one of these things constant: the Yankees lineup. We can also come up with a few scenarios to capture the other variables. Like, say, early in the game, when a single run is less likely to determine the outcome. In that world, we can look at run expectancy. You’d take a 75% chance at two runs over a 100% chance at one run in the first inning – 1.5 is more than 1.

To figure out whether it’s worth walking Judge, I first gathered his actual results (excluding intentional walks, naturally). For example, he’s hit home runs in 8.6% of his plate appearances, singled in 12.8% of his plate appearances, and struck out in 25.9% of his plate appearances. I plugged those numbers in for every outcome to figure out the likely base/out state after Judge bats – that’s what we’ll be comparing the intentional walk to.

Here’s an example: With a runner on first and no one out, the league run expectancy was 0.895 runs in 2024. That’s for a league average hitter against a league average pitcher. With Aaron Judge hitting instead, the run expectancy ticks up to 1.05 runs. Next, we need to figure out the run expectancy if Judge gets intentionally walked. That’s just the league run expectancy with runners on first and second and no one out, or 1.491 in 2024. In that situation, walking Judge is a bad decision, and it’s clearly a bad decision by a lot. Plugging in the best hitter in baseball raises run expectancy by around 0.15 runs; intentionally walking the best hitter in baseball increases it by more than half a run.

Truthfully, this was an obvious one. Judge hasn’t been intentionally walked in the early innings with a runner on first yet this year, because it’s a clear spot where a walk is dangerous. More importantly for our purposes, we can compare the two options and come up with a run cost to walking Judge: 0.44 runs. We can come up with a run cost for every possible base/out state, in fact:

That’s right: Even with Aaron Judge batting, there’s no early-game scenario where it makes sense to intentionally walk him assuming neutral batters coming afterwards. But in a few scenarios, that second assumption matters. The rest of the Yankees lineup, ex Judge, has been far better than average so far this year, playing to a 119 wRC+. But with Ben Rice batting after him, a lefty pitcher might prefer to duck Judge and face Rice instead with, say, a runner on third and two outs. In four spots – all with two outs, but with either no runners, one on second, one on third, or runners on second and third – walking Judge is close enough to be a managerial decision based on their view of the subsequent matchup.

So far this year, managers have basically stuck to these rules. Judge has been intentionally walked in the early innings only three times. Twice, there were runners in scoring position, no one on first, two outs, and a lefty pitching. That seems easy enough. The third time was interesting – bases empty, two outs, righty Aaron Civale on the mound. It does fit with our rules, though: close enough for a managerial decision. In the early innings, opposing managers are handling Judge by the sabermetric book, more or less.

How about late innings? When the game gets close to its conclusion, run expectancy matters less than win expectancy. Tie game? The first run matters a lot more than the second. Down by four? They’re exactly identical. So I picked a scenario that I think exemplifies many of the times where people want to walk Judge: bottom of the ninth, down by one run. I ran the same complete grid of base/out states, but this time I looked at win expectancy, and how Judge changes that.

Let’s start with an example. Let’s say that down a run in the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees have a man on second with one out. Judge steps to the plate, with a lefty up next (maybe Rice, maybe Jazz Chisholm Jr., maybe Cody Bellinger — we’re being general here). Your average big league team wins from that position about 28% of the time. Things are pretty bad but not hopeless. But with Judge batting, things get a lot better. Judge is so powerful and makes so few outs that with him batting in this spot, his team projects to win a whopping 32.7% of the time. That’s enormously better than average, though it might not sound like it. Play 162 of these games, and the Yankees would win eight extra games by having Judge bat there compared to an average hitter. And that’s just 162 plate appearances, naturally – it completely ignores the rest of his impact on the game.

On the other hand, walking Judge here isn’t great either. He represents the winning run in this scenario, and he does make outs more than half the time. Intentionally walking him gives the Yankees first and second with one out. From there, major league teams win about 33.5% of the time. In other words, walking Judge (as compared to pitching to him) means the Yankees are 0.8% more likely to win the game. That’s within the realm of managerial decision in my mind: I’d be completely willing to accept a walk there. Here’s the grid of how expensive, in win probability, an intentional walk is for each base/out state:

I’ve highlighted two cells, because these are outrageous. Intentional walks that put the winning run on base? They’re awful. You really shouldn’t do that – unless you’re facing Aaron Judge, that is. There are very few hitters who actually merit intentional walks in those spots without some extenuating circumstance – batter/pitcher matchups, basically. But Judge is just that good.

Personally, I would be willing to walk Judge in a few more spots – the ones within two percentage points, basically. It would depend on who I had on the mound and where we were playing, but the threat of extra bases is just terrifying. Issuing intentional walks while you’re in the lead is almost always bad business, but come on, do you really want to lose to Judge?

I’ve left out a key scenario: What if the Yankees are ahead? In that case, opposing managers should feel free to walk Judge at the slightest provocation. Here’s the same grid of the cost of intentional walks, with the Yankees ahead by one in the bottom of the eighth:

In plain English, you can basically walk Judge whenever you want unless both first and second are occupied – and occasionally even if they are. I’ll stick with my rule of thumb that decisions within two percentage points are close enough that a manager should make them if they like the following matchup – if they have a good lefty to face the guy hitting after Judge, basically. That won’t always happen in the regular season, where managing so actively can affect long-term fatigue and bullpen health, but in the playoffs, I’d expect him to get walked quite frequently in these situations.

The Barry Bonds treatment, this is not. Managers in the early 2000s went way too far in walking Bonds. Most at-bats don’t happen close and late, when it might be worth giving up a runner to avoid the disaster of a homer. When Judge does get a chance to hit with the game in the balance, though, he should relish those opportunities. The math dictates that the other team should frequently take the bat out of his hands – and when the calendar turns to October, I think that managers will have these charts burned into their brains when they draw the Yankees.

All statistics current through Sunday, May 11.