Is Aaron Judge the GOAT?
- E.J. Fagan
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
by EJ Fagan
April 2025
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NOTE: The following comes from EJ Fagan's substack page and is shared with permission.
Please check out EJ's substack page for more great articles.
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Aaron Judge is doing it again. I could stare at this Statcast page all day:
Incredible. Somehow he improved his batting line from last year. He’s hitting the ball about a mile per hour faster on average, hitting more line drives and striking out less. On top of that, he’s back in his natural position and no longer a defensive liability.
Remember his slow start in 2024? We’re almost beyond that point in the 2025 season. Over his last 365 days, Judge is hitting an unbelievable .350/.481/.751 with 62 home runs. That 365-day split might actually continue to increase until April 27th, the one year anniversary of the end of his early season slump.
We’re also now getting pretty deep into Judge’s peak. He was certainly a great hitter at the beginning of his career: .280/.391/.563 and 26.7 bWAR through his age-29 season. Given his late start and early career injury history, Judge wasn’t really on track for the Hall of Fame when he turned 30. Since then, he’s hit .308/.436/.678 with 27 bWAR even you include the post-Wall injured second half of the 2023 season, good for a 209 OPS+.
Who else has pulled off a 205 wRC+ for more than three seasons? None of his contemporaries come close. Mike Trout never exceed 189 in a single season. Shohei Ohtani’s miraculous 2024 season only amounted to 181. Here’s a list of 200 wRC+ performances over the course of two or more consecutive seasons since 1947:
Judge from 2022-2024
Barry Bonds from 2001-2004
Mickey Mantle from 1956-1957
That’s it. Even at the dramatically lower level of competition that was pre-1980s baseball (most of the top-30s are players from the 50s-70s), no one else has done it in integrated baseball.
When Judge broke the home run record in 2022, I assumed that it was the Yankee season that I would watch in my lifetime. It’s stupid to predict that a player follows up the best right-handed hitting season ever with anything close to his prior level of performance. But Judge has been arguably improving each healthy season since, including his start to 2025.
Judge’s Hall of Fame case is no longer much of a question. The question now is how long does his peak last and can he go down at the greatest right-handed hitter of all time?
Let’s start with longevity. Barry Bonds was a great hitter who took it to another level around his age-35 season. He was already a great hitter, but saw what other hitters were accomplishing by taking steroids and decided to bulk up. He put on a ton of weight to his 6’1” frame and put together the best five year stretch since Babe Ruth. It lasted until he got injured during his age-40 season.
Instead of bulking up with steroids, Aaron Judge was born bulked up. He has the natural advantage that Bonds does, but its all legal. Bonds had more pure baseball skill than pretty much any hitter alive, but Judge might be even stronger.
He’s also younger. Judge is 33. If he follows Bonds’ career path, he could keep doing this for a long time. If he keeps it up for another season or two, you might even argue that his peak surpassed peak Bonds, even though Bonds’ early career is a big cut above.
What about Judge’s status as the greatest right-handed hitter of the modern era? What is the modern era really? I actually addressed this question in my first ever post on this blog. Here is a graph of my measure of quality of competition over time:
Around the mid-1970s, it became harder to stand out as an MLB hitter. You stopped seeing hitters routinely put up batting lines that feel like video game numbers. So I’m going to cut the line off with players who spent the bulk of their careers in the modern competitive era. No Mays, Aaron, Williams or Robinson.
In my book, that leaves the following as candidates for the best right-handed hitters of the modern era:
Aaron Judge
Albert Pujols
Mike Trout
Mike Schmidt
Mark McGwire
Frank Thomas
Manny Ramirez
I think Judge is pretty safely ahead of Thomas, Ramirez and McGwire. All had longer careers than Judge has had so far, but were worse on a rate basis and never had a peak that really approached Judge’s. He’s a pretty safe bet to surpass all of them in bWAR over the next two or three seasons with plenty of career left to go.
But what about Pujols, Schmidt and Trout? Neither quite reached the 200 wRC+ level of Judge, but were incredible over a longer time period than Judge has so far. All three had incredible 7-10 year peaks during which they posted 70+ bWAR, although Trout and Schmidt got a lot of wins from defense.
Judge doesn’t match any of those guys yet. Not even close, really. He’s posted 27 bWAR since the 2022 season. Even if you want to isolate the hitting contribution, he’s well behind peak Pujols.
But maybe he’ll get there. If Judge puts up another three seasons at his current level, he’ll have posted something like 60 bWAR over a six year stretch. He probably won’t pass any of the Big 3 in career bWAR due to longevity and defense, but would have a brighter peak. Couple that with a soft decline, and I think Judge could make a strong claim as the GOAT, even if he won’t top Schmidt or Pujols in bWAR.
Obviously, “put up three more 10+ bWAR seasons” is a tall task. Judge is clearly capable of performing at level, but will need to avoid injury and age-related decline. But I’m not betting again him yet.
