Aaron's judge is Harrison Bergeron

Yesterday, Michael Baumann wrote about the great value of the Yankees offense against Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. According to the estimates created, those two sluggers were responsible for just under 39% of the Bronx bombardment this season, a percentage unmatched not only in this cursed year of 2024, but in the entire cursed millennium. Today, I would like to focus only on the Judge. He's having the best season of his career at the plate, which is a funny thing to say for a player who hit 62 runs two years ago, and who, if not on the odd spot of the concrete fence in Dodger Stadium's right field, well they did it last year. If we follow Baumann's lead and look at this century, the single-season wRC+ leaderboard among professional hitters looks like this:

First of all, no, I did not make a mistake. As of Thursday morning, Judge was sporting a 212 wRC+, which tied him with Barry Bonds' season high. Second of all, I lied a minute ago. We don't have to limit it to the 2000s so the top six wRC+ marks go to Bond and Judge. If we start going back in time, the leaderboard looks pretty much the same until we get to 1957, when a couple of guys named Ted Williams (223) and Mickey Mantle (217) crashed the party. Judge strikes as a Hall of Fame insider, too.

As you may have noticed by now, this is another post to thank Aaron Judge. Instead of focusing on wRC like Baumann did, we'll be looking at a different catcher metric — specifically, Judge's .470 weighted average — to get a sense of how far above the rest of the field he is. is something. Before we dig into wOBA, though, let's admit that it's not the most eye-catching way to measure Judge's power. Here is a graph showing the wRC+ of all qualified players. I named it wRC+ for All Qualified Players. I also left all the words mixed up because there is no reason why this should not be fun. The judge is a lovely green bar all the way to the right, and rightly so, it surpasses everyone else:

By comparing the weighted results to the league average, wRC+ shows what the international referee is like. Only two players, Soto and Shohei Ohtani, can even make the argument that they are below the Judge stratosphere. To be as good as a judge, you would need to take an average player, double his production, and add another 12%. Here's the same graph, but for wOBA:

He's still way above the competition, but it's not a fun graph, even if I did replace the small bet on the FanGraphs logo with Aaron's little judge. You're probably familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which an extreme equality policy is endorsed by the United States Handicapper General. Everyone is dragged down to the common ground: the beautiful wear annoying masks, the tough carry heavy burdens, the smart hear breaking noises that constantly interrupt their trains of thought. In this project, we will be working on the other side. We're not going to discount Aaron Judge as league average; we're going to raise the entire league to his Bergeronia level, and we're going to be doing that by putting them in the most friendly situations. This season, he has a league-wide wOBA of .311, compared to Judge's mark of .470. We'll want to break out when the league as a whole has a wOBA as good as Judge's .470. The question we ask is this: If you take a league average hitter, how favorable are the conditions for them to hit like Aaron Judge does every time?

When I started, I thought this might be easy: just look for the most hitable layers. To do that, I only looked at pitches over the heart of the plate, in the Attack Zones from first to ninth. Surely, when players get hitable pitches over the heart of the plate, they get better, right?

OK?

While it's true they're getting better, it turns out they're not getting Aaron Judge any better. This season, the league has a .358 wOBA in those spots, which is pretty good. That's a hair better than Fernando Tatis Jr.'s wOBA, which ranks 25th among professional players. But it's not very close to .470. If you don't throw a middle-of-the-league hitter anything but the heart of the plate, their wOBA would still be more than 100 points less than Judge's. Just for comparison's sake, if Judge sees spots in the heart of the plate, he has a wOBA of .543.

Next, I tried pitches that were literally down the middle. To do that, I chose the fields in Attack Zone five. In any nine-box diagram of the strike zone, the fifth box is the center. You know how people say home games aren't hit, they're pitched? They're talking about those zone-five meatballs, and in those spots, the league as a whole has a wOBA of .391. That's even better! A few more points than Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who has the ninth-highest wOBA among professional players. But – and you won't believe this – it turns out that the .391 is still much smaller than the .470. If you throw nothing to a major leaguer without pitching down the middle, their wOBA is still about 80 points less than Judge's. Take a moment to process that, then consider this: Judge's wOBA in those centerfields is a sweet, meaty .736. Maybe the pitchers should try to throw the ball somewhere else.

At this point, we'll need to cut to the bottom of the page, because I looked at so many, so many divisions and there weren't that many winners. I tried looking at medium fastballs. I tried to look for pitches that were within 1.2 inches of the center of home plate. I tried looking at sinks and four bottom seamers. I tried watching fastballs under 95 mph, then 94, then 93, and so on until I reached and passed Kyle Hendricks' pitch. I looked at eephuses and meatballs from rookie pitchers. None of those splits resulted in a league wOBA that was in Judge's position.

When position players play, the league has a .403 wOBA. That puts the player on par with Brent Rooker, who has the seventh-highest wOBA in baseball, but also leaves that player in the middle of the league, worse than Judge. Just to reiterate, the league as a whole, is way, way worse against position player pitchers rather than the Judge against the actual pitchers. I had to come up with pitches and hittable situations to get separation where a league-average hitter could be as good at hitting as Judge is all the time. Here are the different ones I found.

First, we can start with the location. If we only look at pitches in the garbage zone — meaning the white spot on the strike zone chart a few ranks back, pitches so far from the strike zone that they're not competitive at all — the league has a .478 wOBA, eight points above Judge (though in the garbage zone, the Judge has a .632 wOBA). So far this season, those pitches have resulted in 39.1% walks because players have only swung at them 5.5% of the time. To make a middle-leaguer as productive as Judge, all you need to do is throw them nothing but pitches so ridiculously far from the strike zone that they'll only swing once in 20 pitches. It can be boring to look at, but we'll end up with some really cool charts:

Second, and more effectively, we can waste by counting. Here's a wOBA breakdown based on the count so far this season. Remember that only pitches that complete plate appearances count toward wOBA, so in most rows in the table below, wOBA represents only balls in play:

That's like it. Once a player has entered a 3-0 or 3-1 count, the appearance at the plate ends because the batter has walked or because he has turned onto a surface that was too wet to pass. In those cases, the league average wOBA is much better than Judge's. In fact, at 3-0, Judge actually has a .652 wOBA, which puts him 18 points below the league average. Really embarrassing stuff. Then again, he's .821 in 3-1 figures, which is 262 points (aka Nick Ahmed's overall wOBA) above league average. But the fact remains, all we have to do to make a major league player better than Aaron Judge is start every plate appearance with a 3-0 record.

The final split is my favorite. I started this exercise by looking at pitches in the center, but even on those, the numbers weren't very close to the umpires. I looked for average run balls, breaking balls, etc. to no avail. Finally, I found it. Here's the breakdown: We're just looking at the sweepers on the fifth floor, down the highway. We also look at hanging sweepers (ie sweepers with less than five inches of glove-side break). For those sweepers who don't sweep directly over the heart of the plate, the league has a wOBA of .469, just one point below Judge. To be clear, this difference is so small that it doesn't matter. Only 39 pitches meeting these requirements were thrown this year. But I think that makes it even more relevant, because it shows how far the judge of the competition is. If you threw the league away with nothing but a center cut, sweepers who didn't mix cement while the judge had to deal with the usual game of one-hundred-mile-per-hour fastballs, wipeout sliders, Clase cutters, Ghost Forks, and splinkers, then it was the Judge. could be a league player.

Like I said before, this is a thank you post for Aaron Judge, because we really need to make sure we appreciate what he's doing at the plate right now. I thought this would be a simple exercise, but his performance is so amazing that it borders on farce. Simply put, he is at such a high level that even if we try, it is difficult to raise the rest of the league to his level.