The young Washington Nationals beat the towering New York Yankees twice in three games at Nationals Park this week, an outcome worth celebrating for an inexperienced group the standings say is playing for nothing but dignity.
At 32, Judge continues to be the most prolific slugger of his age, so powerful when he is healthy that he makes home run history look routine. His 51 homers lead baseball by nine over the best pure talent the game has seen in years, Shohei Ohtani. Those 51 homers lead the AL by a baker’s dozen, his slugging prowess so far beyond anyone the game has seen in years.
Forget Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle trading blows in pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single-season record or Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa bludgeoning their way to Maris’s 61. Like only Barry Bonds before him, Judge is in an annual home run race against himself after setting the AL record two years ago. Unlike Bonds, he is doing so untainted by the specter of performance-enhancing drugs. This month, Judge became the fastest player ever to reach 300 career homers. Since his first full season in 2017, he has 304 homers. The next closest player has 258.
Asked this week to explain what makes Judge different, fellow hitting savant Juan Soto offered a simple answer.
“He’s 6-7!” Soto said. Then he smiled.
“No, but he’s just a great player. He’s coming every day to the field to work hard — to do everything he needs to do to get ready for the game. His work ethic is one of the best I’ve ever seen so far.”
All joking aside, Judge’s size does explain some of it. At 6-foot-7, he has longer limbs and levers than most of his competitors. He can, therefore, lift the ball differently and generate more power than those with smaller frames. And at 280-plus pounds, he has more muscle behind the ball than any slugger in recent years. For comparison, another 6-7 slugger in the making, Nationals rookie James Wood, weighs nearly 50 pounds less.
Size is not always an asset, particularly when it comes to being a well-rounded hitter: Bigger bodies mean more ways to get out of whack mechanically — though this is not so much scientific as anecdotal, they often mean longer swings that result in more swing-and-miss. But Judge, whose .333 batting average is second in MLB only to smaller, faster Bobby Witt Jr., is slugging at historic rates without adopting the high-strikeout tendencies of many of his peers.
“I’ve been trying to figure it out. He’s obviously very strong. He’s very good at leveraging everything that he has and getting in a good position to hit. But the fact that he can hit the ball as much as he does and hit it as hard and as far is unbelievable,” said the Nationals’ Joey Gallo, Judge’s 6-5 former teammate. “It’s annoying because it makes everyone look f---ing bad. I don’t know what he sees at the plate, but he has to see it in slow motion.”
Despite the Nationals’ best efforts to intervene, Judge remains on pace to hit 62 homers, another hot streak away from challenging his record. Along the way, he is compiling one of the more complete and dominant offensive seasons in baseball history.
Consider: Weighted runs created plus (wRC+) is a statistic that calculates how many runs above the major league average a player creates and adjusts that number for ballpark and era to allow for broad comparison. The major league average is 100 wRC+. Judge sits at 225. Since integration, a player has finished the season with a wRC+ higher than 225 three times. Bonds provided all of them. Judge is also playing to a 1.198 OPS. Only eight times since integration has a player finished a full season with a higher number.
Judge also sits at 9.8 wins above replacement, according to FanGraphs, and since that site began tracking WAR in 2008, only Mike Trout and Mookie Betts have finished a season with better. Judge still has 30 games to play.
“I’m lucky to see him every time hitting behind me. It’s really cool to see it,” Soto said. “It’s cool to see it from the other side. But when you’re with him, you really enjoy it.”
Judge is also doing all of this under the weight of pinstripes. He came up a Yankee. He signed a nine-year, $360 million deal to remain a Yankee, inheriting the title of captain as he tries to play his way deeper into the organization’s treasured lore.
Yet precisely because of his embrace of the Yankee way, Judge has tacitly accepted a pressure that stars in other places do not face: No matter how many homers he hits or how many OPS titles he wins, his legacy in the Bronx will be determined, in large part, by whether he wins a title.
The irony of that pressure is that, in recent years, the Yankees’ main problem is they have been unable to win enough on the rare occasions when Judge is not carrying them. The Nationals, for example, were able to win a series this week by simply keeping Judge at first base and not letting him slug. When he slumps, so do the Yankees. When he missed almost two months with a toe injury in 2023, the Yankees missed the playoffs.
Even this year, with Soto in the lineup ahead of Judge, the Yankees’ success is largely tethered to his. The Yankees are 22 games over .500 when he homers (34-12) and exactly .500 when he doesn’t. That the Yankees have not won a title in his tenure sometimes feels like a knock on his stardom. But the Yankees of the past eight years have been formidable largely because of Judge, who has lifted them to multiple American League Championship Series in that span. In any other town — see Ohtani’s Los Angeles Angels tenure — the story would be that the Yankees have not been able to take Judge to a World Series, not the other way around.
This year could be different, in large part because of Soto, who has looked like a perfect complement to Judge in almost every way. Judge is right-handed, Soto is left-handed. Judge is 32, Soto is 25 — funnily enough, only a year older than Judge was when he debuted. Judge is stoic, Soto shuffles. If Judge can’t carry the Yankees, Soto is more than capable. He is the best hitter Judge has played with, one of his few credible competitors for the title of best hitter of this age.
Soto will be a free agent after this season. He is thriving with the Yankees, and the Yankees are expected to try to keep him. The Nationals might not have the money. The Mets might not offer the same appeal. All things being equal, Soto would probably love to hit in front of Judge for the foreseeable future. After all, there are no hitters quite like him in baseball. You could argue there never has been.
