A Comparison for Judge's 2026 Season
- Paul Semendinger
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Paul Semendinger
March 29, 2026
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Note - This article originally ran in the IBWAA's newsletter, Here's The Pitch, on March 28, 2026.
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This is the time of year when everyone makes their predictions for how teams and players will perform. Fans and experts alike will use formulas, past stats, and more, to project, they believe with accuracy, what will occur during the coming season.
I decided to take a unique approach to try to ascertain what Aaron Judge’s 2026 campaign might look like.
Rather than using any regular projection methods, I wanted to find a player in baseball history that had a peak of dominance similar to Aaron Judge over the last few years.
I wanted to see if there was a player, who like Judge, put up an OPS+ over 200 for three years in a four-year period. I wondered if there was a one-to-one comparison I could use with that player that might indicate how Aaron Judge might perform in the coming season.
In this exercise, I quickly found that there were not many players, at all, who have dominated as Judge has since 2022. In this period, Aaron Judge has gone from a very good player to one who can stand with and among many of baseball’s all-time greats.
The list of players with an OPS+ over 200 in any season is a short one. Only 17 players other than Aaron Judge have ever accomplished that feat. Of them, only seven exceed the 200 OPS+ mark on more than one occasion.
The following are the only players in baseball history with multiple seasons with an OPS+ above 200:
Babe Ruth - 10
Ted Williams and Barry Bonds - 6
Rogers Hornsby - 4
Ty Cobb and Aaron Judge - 3
Jimmie Foxx and Mickey Mantle - 2
It is difficult to compare any players to the first three names on the list. Babe Ruth stands alone; he always has. Ted Williams’ career was interrupted through his military service in two wars. Barry Bonds’ stats are tainted with suspicion.
But then, and there was a player quite similar to Judge - Rogers Hornsby.
Just like Aaron Judge, Rogers Hornsby had an OPS+ over 200 in three out of four seasons doing this in 1922, 1924, and 1925.
In the one year that he didn’t reach a 200+ OPS in that period, 1923, Hornsby put up a 188.
Aaron Judge had 200+ OPS+ seasons in 2022, 2024, and 2025. In the one year he didn’t put up an OPS+ over 200, 2023, Judge had a 175.
The comparison seems valid. And, amazingly, Hornby’s seasons were exactly 100 years before Judge’s.
This all, finally, brought me to Rogers Hornsby’s 1926 season to see if it might be a predictor for Aaron Judge’s 2026 season.
In 1925, Hornsby batted .403/39/143.
But in 1926, Hornsby had a “disappointing” year, batting .317/11/93.
In 2025, Aaron Judge batted .331/53/114.
If Aaron Judge’s 2026 ends in a similar fashion to Hornsby’s, with the same percentage drops in batting average, homers, and runs batted in, he will hit only .260/15/74 in 2026.
To most Yankees fans, this would seem to be a disaster, but, all is not as it might seem...
In 1926, in spite of his down year, Rogers Hornsby’s St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series.
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Paul Semendinger’s newest book The Greatest New York Yankees By Uniform Number is now out and available wherever books are sold.
