The Ominous Part of Aaron Judge’s Hot Start
Aaron Judge, the Yankees rookie outfielder who has muscles on top of his muscles, currently leads the Majors in multiple offensive categories, including WAR, homers, slugging percentage and the all around batting stat wRC+. He’s also second in on base percentage and sports a .328 average that is top 10 in baseball. His leads in those first stats are impressive. Consider:
- His 4.6 WAR is 1.4 higher than third place, which is the same difference between third and 42nd.
- His 26 homers are 4 more than second place, which is the same difference between second and 19th.
- His .699 slugging percentage is .089 more than third place, which is the same difference between third and 37th.
- His 195 wRC+ is almost twice as good as league average.
- His 195 wRC+ is 28 points better than second, which is the same difference between second and 27th.
Simply: Dude has been absolutely dominant through the first half of the year.
But, there’s always a “but.” Judge also leads the league in batting average on balls in play (BABIP). BABIP is an easy way to think about how lucky someone has been. A high BABIP means that fielders generally have not converted many of his contacted balls into outs. Judge’s BABIP currently sits at .420, which would be the highest in a qualified season since Rogers Hornsby in 1924. I’ll put that in big letters for you:
Aaron Judge’s BABIP currently sits at .420, which would be the highest in a qualified season since Rogers Hornsby in 1924.
Now, this is not to say that there have been guys who have had BABIPs over .400 more recently, including Manny Ramirez in 2000 and Aaron Judge absolutely crushes baseballs both because he’s a major league baseball player and because his large muscles are large. (He leads the league in exit velocity, too.) But that figure seems to imply that at least some regression is coming.
Luckily, it’s 2017 and we have another level of stats to look at that might lend some insight into the relationship between Judge’s BABIP and his propensity for hitting the ball hard. Over at xStats.org, Andrew Perpetua has a set of baseball stats that captures how each ball is hit and assigns a value based on how the league usually performs with similarly struck baseballs. “Only the vertical and horizontal launch angles, exit velocities, batted ball distances, game time temperature, and ball park are taken into account.” Below are Aaron Judge’s xStats:
| AVG | xAVG | OBP | xOBP | SLG | xSLG | BABIP | xBABIP |
| 0.328 | 0.298 | 0.434 | 0.441 | 0.699 | 0.658 | 0.42 | 0.358 |
So what do we see here? Well, there’s honestly some really encouraging news. Aaron Judge has been lucky, but that’s not all that bad. His xBABIP suggests that Judge has been lucky in terms of how many hits he has collected, but the xOBP and xSLG show us that the power and general skill set are still intact. At the end of the day, do we really care if Judge is a .328 or .298 hitter, if he keeps his OPS above 1.000?
The xStats also show that he has “earned” 25.8 HRs, compared with his real life 26. Basically, BABIP doesn’t matter on balls hit over the fence and Judge has been hitting a lot of balls over the fence. A last thought for you: Judge is on pace for somewhere betweeen 58 and 59 homers. His BABIP really doesn’t matter if he can continue to hit homers at a Ruthian pace.
-Sean Morash
