On July 19, 2022, Aaron Judge had a 4.8 fWAR, .364 OBP, and 33 home runs across 89 games. In the remaining 68 games he played during that wonderful summer, he put up another six and a half wins of value, got to 62 homers, and reached base half the time he came to the plate. It’s a stretch of baseball unlike anything we’d seen in 20 years, and after that MVP campaign, we all figured we’d never see it again.
Except, we may be seeing it again. It’s July 19, 2024, Aaron Judge has played in 96 games, about 30 more plate appearances than at the same point two years ago. He has 34 home runs, he’s getting on base almost 20 percent more often, and he has a cackle-worthy full win and a half over his 2022 pace. He’s striking out less frequently and batting 22 points higher than July 19, 2022. He’s once again the best player in baseball.
So what do we expect over the unofficial second half of the season? The second half of 2022 was a run of offensive excellence that only two or three hitters in MLB’s history, and we’re unlikely to see an August and September like that replicated. And yet, over and over throughout his career we’ve said that Aaron Judge won’t repeat or replicate his performance, and then he does it.
Judge was well on the way to repeating his should-have-been MVP debut season in 2018 before that wayward Jakob Junis fastball saw him miss a third of the season. He had a 190 wRC+ last year until he ran into that stupid, stupid concrete curb at Dodger Stadium. Every full season Judge has played, he’s been the best hitter in the sport (or at least among the elite), every season after he’s matched that caliber of play only to be undone by injury.
So, the big thing standing in the way of Judge’s second MVP is the injured list, and we can’t really project stupid concrete curbs or fastballs that hit you in the wrong part of the arm. Barring that, what kind of a second half will we see from the Yankee captain? What do the projection systems and good ol’ on pace numbers have in store for MLB’s very best?
Assuming Judge reaches 700 plate appearances — he got to 696 in 2022 — he’s on pace for another 22 home runs and four-plus wins. Should he not deviate from what he’s done in the first 100 or so Yankee games, we get a 56-homer, 10.4 fWAR season that would almost certainly help drag a rather uncooperative squad to some kind of playoff appearance.
But what do the nerds say? FanGraphs give us Depth Charts, a combination of the popular ZiPS and Steamer projections, with adjustments for playing time.
Depth Charts is less kind to Judge than the back of the envelope, saddling the Yankee captain with just a 9.5-win season, merely the 14th-best individual season of any player this century. I think Depth Charts is a little conservative with this as projections often are, especially because they’re baking in performance while Judge was either fresh off an injury or playing through one.
It’s all the eyeball test of course, but it certainly looked like Judge was playing through a malignant toe problem even after coming off the IL last year. His wRC+ dropped 30 points in the return from injury, and even that was ballooned by a walk rate over 21 percent. He struggled to get out of the box and the injury to his back foot seemed to sap his power, with a 60-point drop in ISO after being activated.
With the Yankees in freefall and one of the other reliable bats in Anthony Rizzo seemingly vaporized, Judge must have felt pressure to return and play despite not being 100 percent. Given that projections most heavily weigh the previous season’s performance, it’s likely that playing through injury is the reason Depth Charts is relatively down on Judge going forward.
Maybe the point really is that the actual WAR total doesn’t matter. Barring acts of God and men with axes, Aaron Judge will have an excellent case to make as the best player in baseball by October. He is one of the very best players to step on the field in the last half-century, his “conservative” projection pegs him as prime Albert Pujols. He’s paid $40 million a year and won an MVP, etched his place in Yankee history with one of the franchise’s most sacred records and somehow I still think we don’t appreciate him enough.
Whether Judge finishes with 9 WAR, 10, or 12, I think he’s probably the best Yankee of my lifetime in terms of pure and peak talent. He doesn’t have the rings of Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera, and he likely started a bit too late to have the career counting stats of Alex Rodriguez. But none of them ever had a projection for nine and a half wins, and had me saying “Huh, I think that’s a little low.”