The entire baseball world is talking about Aaron Judge right now and for very good reason. The Yankees superstar is currently on an absolutely outrageous run, truly turning April showers into May flowers. After finishing April with a batting average of .207, Judge hit .361 in May, with a SLG of .918. Judge has had hot streaks before, but this is a level of ball-mashing that we have not seen in decades. Even during his record-breaking 2022 campaign, Judge never had a streak quite like this one, and we need to talk about how incredible it is.
Often times, the Going Deep team here at Pitcher List likes to shed light on underappreciated players. This is not going to be one of these times. This is going to be me ogling over one of the best players in baseball going absolutely ballistic, and talking about just how ridiculous he’s been:
MAYday
Judge entered May looking… unlike himself. He wasn’t bad, but he was not producing at the level you’d expect from a hitter the caliber of Aaron Judge. Here’s what I mean:
| Stat | Judge in May |
|---|---|
| WRC+ | 277 |
| Barrel% | 47.1% |
| FB% | 58% |
| K% | 23.8% |
Judge didn’t do anything too radical as far as approach is concerned, he still looked like Aaron Judge at the plate—striking out and whiffing plenty, but hitting fly balls like no tomorrow. The difference between April and May lies primarily in that Barrel% number, which skyrocketed to a pretty much unheard-of 47% of batted balls.
A Barrel is ideal contact. A ball hit in a goldilocks zone of hard contact and optimal launch angles. When a ball is barreled, it has a batting average of at least .500 and a SLG of 1.500. That’s why barrels matter so much, which is probably not news to you, but it does mean that Judge is having this batted ball quality on nearly HALF of his batted balls in May.
Let me put this another way. Here’s the top MLB hitters ranked by number of barrels they’ve hit in May:
And here is how Judge just in May ranks among the top sluggers in baseball for total barrels:
And now, let’s further contextualize this by comparing Judge’s May to the best calendar months in the Statcast era:
33 Barrels in one calendar month is unheard of. It’s such a ridiculous stretch of raw power, and we have not seen anything remotely like this in the Statcast era. We have, however, seen a month similar to what Judge just did…
Bonds
Barry Bonds’s statistics from 2001-2004 are so ludicrous that it’s like he was playing a completely different sport. I don’t need to tell you how absurd those seasons were, but while his 2004, 1.422 OPS season gets most of the attention, his 2001 73-HR campaign is what I want to talk about. Like Judge, 2001 Bonds also had an absurdly dominant May, crushing 17 home runs at the absolute peak of the Steroid Era. It was one of the greatest single offensive months since integration, so how does Judge compare to the absolute pinnacle of offensive production?
So, this isn’t just a great month, it’s the kind of month that can only be equaled by the most prolific months from the Steroid Era or pre-integration months from Ruth and Greenberg. Simply one of the greatest months a player has ever had.
Judgian
This is an ambitious claim, but there is a good chance there has never been a hitter better at barreling the ball than Aaron Judge. It’s impossible to truly know, and if you go back through baseball’s history you can find incredible sluggers, however, in the Statcast era, Judge stands almost entirely alone. Case in point: the 25% club—A club of hitters who have a season with a barrel% over 25%. Here is the full list of hitters who have accomplished that feat:
The 25% Club is one of the most exclusive clubs around, and Aaron Judge runs the place. Only 2019 Joey Gallo can rival Judge in terms of raw barreling ability. But while Gallo lives and dies by the home run, Judge is a much more complete hitter. A stat I love to measure the productiveness of a hitter is xwOBA, which takes wOBA and adjusts it based on launch angle and exit velo to try to capture a more true representation of hitter performance. The 25% Club is great and all, but how does Judge fare in the .450 club?