It is possible, in 2024, to go to the ballpark and watch the most talented hitter in baseball history.
This is the sort of grandiosity and presentism that baseball fans, who worship the old gods of the sport, typically do not stomach. And it’s true that Aaron James Judge has not had the career of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, or even Barry Bonds, who played as well as all five but will forever be tainted by his steroid scandals. He is the fastest player ever to 300 home runs but is already 32, and this means he is unlikely to join the 600 or 700 home-run clubs, where Ruth, Mays, Bonds, and Hank Aaron all reside. The relatively late start to his career — he attended college and didn’t play a full season until he was 25 — will keep him from accumulating the statistics of the immortals of yore, and he won’t have performance-enhancing drugs to make him an MVP at age 39. And anyway, baseball today is too punishing — the pitchers too wickedly fast and precise — for a hitter to dominate at the cusp of middle age.
So enjoy Judge now, at Yankee Stadium, as he surpasses anyone who has ever taken the field, crushing baseballs at a clip that is difficult to fathom. He is, as of Wednesday, on pace to hit 63 home runs this season with 51 already and a month left to go. At six-foot-seven and nearly 300 pounds of muscle, he is as imposing as an NFL tight end, and anyone like that who ever managed to step in the batter’s box was usually power-hitting but plodding, prone to prodigious strikeout totals and unable to muster many singles or doubles. As August winds down, Judge’s batting average is north of .330 in an American League where the average player hits around .241. Judge’s on-base percentage is an astounding .464 (league average is .310), and his OPS+, which measures his combined on-base and slugging percentages relative to the rest of the AL, stands at 229, which means he is 129 percent beyond the league average OPS.
To put this into context, when Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941, his OPS+ was 235. And Judge is already ahead of Mantle’s legendary 1956 season when the Yankee icon won the triple crown, leading the league in home runs, RBI, and batting average. (Mantle’s OPS+, in ’56, was a mere 210.)
In a 100-game stretch, from the end of April to August 24, Judge batted .378/.505/.835 with 45 home runs and 106 RBI. Judge is the only player in Major League history to hit at least .375 with 45 homers in a run of that many games. Even Ruth, in the midst of the hitter-happy 1920s and ’30s, couldn’t do it. (Shohei Ohtani, who hits and pitches, is also Ruth-like and is having his best offensive season yet. But he’s out with a pitching injury and has been a designated hitter all season.) If it weren’t for the Royals’ Bobby Witt, who is having his own magnificent season and batting close to .350, Judge would have locked in the triple crown. Two years ago, his 62 home runs set the AL record, and he almost won the triple crown. This year, he’s somehow better.
All of this should be impossible.
What Judge is showcasing is athletic genius rarely witnessed in any sport. He smashes homers at a historic pace while slashing singles and doubles like the best contact hitters of any generation. He does this with an enormous strike zone that leads to lousy strike calls; pitchers who will do anything, if they can help it, not to throw him a hittable pitch; and lineup protection that most nights includes the dependable but very mortal Austin Wells, a 25-year-old catcher in his second season, or Giancarlo Stanton, who is no longer one of the leading sluggers in the game.
Judge does this as the art of pitching, in the analytics age, threatens to make hitting itself a Sisyphean act, with every team featuring relievers who brush up against triple digits and unleash savagely effective sliders and sweepers. As the sportswriter Joe Posnanski recently pointed out, hitters like Ruth and Williams had dozens of at-bats each year against wearying starters facing them for the fourth time in a game. Even Bonds, during his 73-homer campaign in 2001, got 21 at-bats against a pitcher for the fourth time in a game.
Judge has had zero.
Judge’s at-bats, in the flesh, are their own self-contained events, tens of thousands of fans roaring then sucking in their breath, like the moment before a philharmonic orchestra bursts to life. When Judge is up, it feels like anything is possible: the towering home run, the booming double to right, a single roped to left. Judge uses all fields. For his size, he runs very well, and he’s a gifted right fielder who has held down center this year. His outfield arm is among the best anywhere.
He is paired, this year, with Juan Soto, the 25-year-old outfielder with Ted Williams’s batting eye and Willie Mays’s swagger; he and Judge, right now, are the Yankees’ best one-two punch since Ruth and Gehrig, and the Yankees will need to spend more than $500 million in the offseason to keep Soto in pinstripes. Their top competitor might be Steve Cohen’s Mets.
That I haven’t even mentioned the rest of the 2024 Yankees yet is by design. This team, neck and neck with the Baltimore Orioles for the division lead and still boasting one of baseball’s best records, is decidedly weird. For weeks at a time, they have been virtually unbeatable. For other stretches, horrendous. Sans Judge and Soto, the lineup can be dangerously punchless, and the starting pitching, depending on the month, is either the deepest in the league or unsettlingly erratic. The bullpen can break any which way, and Clay Holmes, the Yankees’ closer, leads the league in blown saves.
It is not impossible to imagine the Yankees catching fire in the playoffs, as the Texas Rangers, another flawed AL team with a balky bullpen, did a year ago, and winning the World Series. It is also not beyond the realm of probability they fail to win the East, fall into the wild-card round, and get smoked by an upstart.
On Saturday, I saw Judge play after the Yankees Old-Timers’ Day ceremony, which honored the 2009 World Series–winning squad. This was, as any fan knows, the very last time the Yankees have won it all or even appeared in the series. Barack Obama was completing his first year as president. Facebook was the hippest hangout spot for college students. Instagram did not exist.
Judge, if you really want to gut a Yankee fan, wasn’t old enough to vote.
This is Judge’s private hell, or what passes as one for such a superior ballplayer who earns $40 million a year and is universally beloved: He has no World Series ring and no idea of what it’s like to even play on that stage. He is past 30, and there are only so many prime years left. The closest analogue may be Don Mattingly, the star Yankee first baseman of the 1980s who only made one postseason appearance and retired just before the 1990s dynasty came into bloom. But as good as Mattingly was, Judge is so much better, and there’s a particular outrage fans feel when they consider the possibility he could end this dazzling Hall of Fame career — he’s done enough, already, to get there — without a championship.
If the Yankees don’t win again this fall, it will not be Judge’s fault because one player, in baseball, cannot will a team to victory, no matter how good they are. Judge cannot bat nine times, start the games on the mound, or try to close them out. He can’t give the Yankees a league average second baseman or a competent first baseman. A single god cannot sculpt a baseball universe to his liking. But it sure is a treat to watch that god play.
