by EJ Fagan
May 20, 2024
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NOTE: The following comes from EJ Fagan's substack page and is shared with permission. This was published a few days ago so the stats don't include the last few games.
Please check out EJ's substack page for more great articles.
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We all had the same thought this offseason. With a batter like Juan Soto in front of him, could Aaron Judge get better?
We banished that thought from our minds when he started slow. His ill-timed injury clearly threw him off a tick at the beginning of the season. I don’t think many fans were worried about Judge per se, but the man is still 32 years old. Maybe he would get his timing back, but settle into something less than his 2022-2023 monster form.
Well, I think we can all rest easy. Judge’s season numbers are full monster. Even with the slow start, Judge is hitting .267/.405/.576 with 2.3 fWAR, 7th in the MLB an d just ahead of Juan Soto and Anthony Volpe.
But the underlying Statcast numbers are even better:
Statcast thinks he’s been unlucky. Judge has hit a lot of balls to the warning track lately. Even with the slow start, all of his underlying numbers match his legendary 2022 season.
But the slow start was not just unlucky. He really was playing at a lower level (for Aaron Judge) throughout most of April:
Judge is literally breaking the scale right now. Over his last 50 PAs, he has a .732 xwOBA (!!!!!). Peak Barry Bonds was in the .500s. Judge is hitting .408/.547/.959 in 17 games and 65 PAs in May. I was prepared to call it the best 17-game stretch of his career, but because Judge is a ridiculous human being, it isn’t actually all that close:
From July 22nd to August 10th, Judge hit a .422/.543/1.016 (!!!!!!!!). From September 3rd to September 22nd, he somehow hit .476/.585/.1.016 (!!!!!!!!!!!!).
But, Judge is getting unlucky. Statcast thinks that he’s even better than before. I think there’s a good case that Judge is better right now than even his peak-2022 form.
If so, can we attribute it to Juan Soto? I don’t think so. A keen observer will note that Soto is batting ahead of Judge, not behind him. Any lineup protection that he affords would be by being on base, but Judge has actually been a little bit better with the bases empty in 2024 than with someone on in front of him.
Instead, Judge is making a little more contact than in previous seasons. When Judge makes contact, good things almost always happen. He’s in the middle of the best 17-game K% stretch of his career, and better than in any stretch of the 2022 season:
There’s a little bit of magic in xwOBA from Statcast’s batted ball luck expectations, but none in K%. Judge’s progress is real.
We’ll see if it he keeps it up. One warning sign: Judge has been strangely bad against relief pitchers (.224/.342/.403) and power pitchers (.212/.388/.519) after not having similar splits in 2022-2023. Keep an eye on Judge against big fastballs. He’ll need to hit those in the playoffs.
Other than that, it’s all good news. We still haven’t seen Peak Judge and Peak Soto at the same time. When we do, the Yankees aren’t going to be losing a lot of games. But they also haven’t lost a lot of games with just one Peak Legend. Maybe Soto is just saving himself for when the Yankees need him most.
