Aaron Judge has been so fantastic, so important, and so laughably overlooked while we fuss over several minor Yankees deficiencies (rotation, bullpen back end, usage) that I was going to wait to write about him until the Yankees have an off day, when he wouldn’t be competing for space with our game reports. But I’m going to do it today, since White Sox games should be the closest thing to an off day.
Oh, you say the judge is already receiving a lot of praise?
I say: not enough. Not even close to enough.
Consider that Judge has an OPS-plus of 219, which is the best estimate of his batting average and means he’s more than twice as good as the league average. Not counting the bigger, late version of Barry Bonds, that’s the best mark since Mickey Mantle hit .221 in his MVP year of 1957.
“(Judge) has gotten to the level of Ruth and Gehrig,” Yankees great Reggie Jackson told The Post.
Assuming Judge stays above 200, this will be only the third time in 50 years that someone has done that in a full 162-game season without additional, illegal help. The others were George Brett (203 in his 1980 MVP season) and Judge himself (210 in 2022). Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas did it in the strike-shortened 1994 season and Juan Soto in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. (Bonds*, Mark McGwire* and Sammy Sosa* all did it with medication help.)
Plus, Judge gave everyone a month head start, as his April was comparable to Alex Verdugo’s (Verdugo actually led in OPS, .804 to .754). Earlier this season, Judge faced Jackson, now an Astros manager (that’s the Yankees’ loss, but that’s a story for another day), and Jackson says Judge told him, “I’m not right, Reggie. But I’m going to make it right.”
He wasn’t kidding. It took Judge a while to get going. But over his final 84 games, he’s been indescribably unstoppable — batting .382 with 36 home runs, 88 RBIs, a .513 on-base percentage, a .826 slugging percentage and a 1.339 OPS. He now leads the MLB in all of those categories except batting average, and he also leads in walks, intentional walks, total bases and a number of analytical categories.
And he does so with sporadic protection behind him in the cleanup area. The Yankees have been better there since Austin Wells moved there and Giancarlo Stanton returned. But for half a season, the Bronx Bombers surprisingly had the league’s worst statistics in the cleanup area.
Judge has hit 299 home runs in his career, and if he doesn’t become the fastest home run hitter ever to hit 300 on Chicago’s South Side, it would be a surprise (or because they let him walk). Ralph Kiner holds that record, hitting 300 in his 1,087th game. Judge is on the brink of collapse after hitting just 952.
Jackson predicts he will hit 600 home runs.
“And I hope he does,” Jackson said. “He’s a good guy.”
Don’t bet against him.
“He’s never satisfied,” said Mets manager Carlos Mendoza, the former Yankees coach. “He wants to be better than the competition. But for him, it doesn’t matter how good he is, he only cares about winning.”
That’s probably an important reason why he stayed here.
Judge is so good that his then-record free agent contract of $360 million looks like a rare megadeal that is a real bargain. But to Judge’s credit, he passed up the chance to get more money from his hometown Giants (whose initial offer of $360 million the Yankees eventually beat) and the Padres (who talked about $400 million but never made a formal offer because Judge didn’t want them to waste their time). And to Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner’s credit, after serious internal debates with his baseball higher-ups, he made the right decision to increase their offer of $320 million for eight. (In the end, it was Steinbrenner and Judge who negotiated it.)
The first Judge-related decision Steinbrenner made, according to Jackson, was in the spring of 2017 when the Yankees discussed whether Judge should start after he missed 44 percent of the time in a brief cameo in 2016. Steinbrenner gave the go-ahead.
Jackson said Steinbrenner asked his staff at the time if Judge was ready, and Jackson said he replied, “Well, if you can handle 200 strikeouts, and he can handle 200 strikeouts, he’s going to hit 15 home runs and 15 more fly balls that are going to land on the other side of the fence.”
Jackson remembered that he had been badly ripped off.
“He hit 26 and 26,” Jackson said, referring to the 52 home runs that could have earned him his first of two MVP awards. (That one went to the great Jose Altuve, a year before Yankees fans started to seriously hate Altuve.)
As for this year’s award, in any other season, Royals shortstop Bobby Witt would be not only a viable candidate, but an excellent one. And so would Soto. But let’s be honest: Judge’s OPS of 1.160 is 14 percent better than the next-best Soto at 1.018.
Witt is the best shortstop defensively, but Judge still leads in WAR (in both WARs, at 8 and 8.3 points). Witt is a prodigy, but Judge is an all-time great. And we can’t take that for granted anymore.
