Aaron Judge Cemented His Status As A Legend In 2025

By E.J. Fagan

October 2025

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NOTE: The following comes from EJ Fagan's substack page and is shared with permission.

Please check out EJ's substack page for more great articles.

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As the 2025 World Series winds down and the offseason is about to begin, I want to take some time to remember Aaron Judge’s 2025 season. We’re watching something very special, but it will get all forgotten given how the playoffs ended and the forward-looking nature of an offseason.

Aaron Judge is in the middle of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, stretches in MLB history. Since the start of the 2022 season, he is hitting .311/.439/.677. That’s good for a 204 wRC+ over 573 games and 2500+ plate appearances. For reference, since 1980 the only players to clear 200 in a single non-shortened season are Barry Bonds, Aaron Judge and 1998 Mark McGwire.

We’re not just talking about a level of sustain excellence, but a level of excellence that even the single-season biggest outliers for non-steroids users do not approach. First ballot Hall of Famers like Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, Frank Thomas, Miguel Cabrera, Bryce Harper and Ricky Henderson all could not approach Judge’s sustained level of excellence in a single year.

To make matters crazier, Judge’s numbers are held down a bit by two extended periods playing injured. If we zoom way out and look at Judge’s 50-game rolling wRC+ since 2022, we get this:

Judge was great in the first half of 2022, hitting between a 150 wRC+ and 200 wRC+, but really took it into another gear in the second half. From that period until today, Judge has sustained a wRC+ in the 230-260 range when healthy, peaking at 297 (!) during the 50-game stretch that ended in early July 2024.

Even when hurt in the second half of 2023, first month of 2024 and second half of 2025, Judge has been playing at a sustained MVP-level 150 wRC+.

I think that we can confidently make the statement that Aaron Judge is, right now, better than even peak Barry Bonds when healthy. No qualifiers. No mention of steroids. No “greatest right-handed hitter” distinction. Bonds was a 232 wRC+ from 2001-2004. Judge is sustaining that or better right now.

The weird thing is that Judge is rarely talked about in that language. Everyone agrees that he’s amazing, but I rarely hear people talk about him as the GOAT. What will it take to shake some of that perception loose?

I’m watching a few things. First off, Judge seems likely to win his 3rd MVP Award in a few weeks. A few players have won three awards - Yankees Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Alex Rodriguez (one with Texas) among them. No one but Barry Bonds has won more than three. A fourth award would cement him as not just a First Ballot Inner Circle Guy, but truly special.

Second, I’m watching some all-time leaderboards. Judge is already 1st overall in wRC+ at 178 since 1970*, ahead of Barry Bonds (173), Juan Soto (158), Mark McGwire (157) and Shohei Ohtani (156). To stay #1 in the modern era, Judge is going to have to put a little more distance between himself and Bonds to cover his inevitable decline years.

*If you extend the period to 1920, only Ruth and Williams are ahead.

If OPS+ is your favorite, Bonds still has him by a few points (182 to 179), but Judge could conquer that leaderboard as well. He’s also the modern leader in slugging (.615).

Then there’s the big leaderboard: home runs. Judge got started too late (and was injured too much early in his career), to have a shot at the all-time records. But how high could he go?

He’s currently 87th overall with 368 home runs. He’s averaging about 50 home runs per season since 2022. Let’s assume he keeps the pace up for two more years. Judge will then 36 years old with 468 home runs, 35th all time.

Let’s assume that a 40 year-old Judge retires when his contract runs out four years later. To get to 600 home runs (10th all time), he would have to average 33 home runs per year. That seems doable, but Judge would have to stay pretty healthy.

In that scenario, Judge retires 10th all time in home runs, first in slugging, first in wRC+/OPS+ and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 bWAR.

90 bWAR is a lot, but modern guys like Adrian Beltre, Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, Cal Ripken, Alex Rodriguez and Ricky Henderson will be higher on the list. And of course Barry Bonds is first at a crazy 162 bWAR.

Will it be enough for baseball to discuss Judge as the GOAT? I think so. Obviously, it will be debatable in terms of peak vs. career value, steroids issues or eras. But I think that Aaron Judge will be in the conversation.

In the mean time, we’re all treated to watching the GOAT.

Now let’s hope that Brian Cashman can fill out a roster around him to make sure that the GOAT (like Bonds) doesn’t go down as a Great Guy Who Never Won a World Series.