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| Aaron Judge is the fastest ever -- in terms of games played -- to reach 300 home runs. But at age 32, how many more long balls does he have left? AP Photo/Erin Hooley |
Perhaps the best way to explain Aaron Judge is that you always have to keep track of him.
Increasingly, this has been true of big league managers who have taken to walking Judge in decidedly non-free-pass situations. That's where Judge's career is right now, on the day he reached the 300 career home runs club in fewer games -- by far -- than any player in history.
Zipping to 300 homers does not guarantee future career records. The record Judge set (300 homers in 955 games) previously belonged to Ralph Kiner, who needed 1,087 games. Kiner finished with 369 career home runs.
Judge is the 162nd player to reach 300. At 32, he is at an age creeping toward old for a baseball player, yet he's still young enough to tack on a whole lot more dingers.
How many home runs might Judge end up with? It's harder to guess than it is for other power hitters who have reached the 300 level. Why? Simply put, we've just never seen a career quite like the one Aaron Judge is putting together.
Judge first appeared in the majors in 2016 when he was already 24, making his New York Yankees debut on Aug. 13, almost precisely eight years from the time you are reading this. He homered in his first game, off Matt Andriese of the Tampa Bay Rays. In fact, he homered in his first MLB at-bat, right after teammate Tyler Austin did the same thing. Then he homered in his second game, too, going deep off Jake Odorizzi.
Judge ended up hitting just two more homers in 2016, so after his age-24 season, he was at four for his career. He was just getting started, but historically great players tend to debut well before that, sometimes before they hit 20. Eddie Mathews had 190 homers by that age, the age-24 record, followed by Alex Rodriguez (189) and Mel Ott (176). Babe Ruth, who had not converted to full-time hitting by the end of his age-24 season (though he was getting close to it) still had managed 49 homers.
It was a late start for Judge, one he has spent eight years making up for, putting up monstrous home run paces even through injury-marred seasons and another campaign kneecapped both by injuries and the pandemic. For his career, Judge is averaging 51 home runs per 162 games played. He established that pace by clubbing 52 homers in 2017 as a rookie, in effect morphing into Ruth immediately after becoming a regular in New York.
As we start throwing out some possible career outcomes for Judge, we are only going to concern ourselves with Judge's epic pace, his ripening age and one final wild card in all of this, which is that Judge hasn't just continued to pound baseballs into the stratosphere, he has gotten incessantly better as an overall hitter -- and that improvement shows no signs of ebbing.
The nine-year, $360 million contract Judge signed with the Yankees before last season runs through 2031, or after his age-39 season. To get to 20 seasons, he'd have to play until he was 43, which is asking a lot. Judge is an excellent athlete, as opposed to a slow-footed DH type. That will help his longevity, but it guarantees nothing. To hazard a guess at the number of seasons Judge has left, let's just give him the current contract plus a couple more seasons, taking him to 41. That means nine more seasons beyond 2024.
Using that guess and Judge's current rate of homer accumulation, we can turn to a version of Bill James' old Favorite Toy to create some estimates about his future. Then we'll get into reasons why that standardized sort of approach might not work for Judge.
The James tool automates the projected remaining seasons for a player, based on age, and for Judge that estimate comes out at 4.8. If we give Judge the 56 homers he's on pace for in 2024 and consider the 37 he hit last season and the AL-record 62 he bashed in 2022, the method calculates his established per-season homer level at a whopping 50.7. Thus, per the Favorite Toy, Judge has 4.8 seasons at 50.7 homers per campaign left, giving him 243.2 in his future, or a career total of 556.
That would surpass Mickey Mantle (536) for second on the Yankees' all-time list behind Ruth, who hit 659 of his 714 homers for New York. The Toy also gives us the ability to create probabilities for various milestones. Here are a few, based on these inputs:
The Favorite Toy is great, but we can see that applying the framework to Judge might generate some skepticism. For one thing, the estimate of 4.8 remaining seasons seems low when you consider his contract and his current level of play. Also, while we can be fairly sure -- as long as Judge doesn't suffer a major injury -- that he has more than 4.8 seasons left, it's not likely he'll average 50.7 homers for the duration of his career.
Now let's make another estimate using standard aging tables which, again, are a good tool but perhaps not so much for Judge.
Bringing back our initial stab at nine remaining seasons for Judge, then applying standard age-based degradation rates to his current established levels for games played and homers per game, we come up with an average of 122 games and 41 homers per season through age 41. In that last campaign, this simple method gives him 28 dingers over 98 games.
Seems high for most players but -- again -- Judge has averaged 51 homers per 162 games played for his entire career. That's how, in 2023, when he got into just 106 contests, he still churned out 37 bombs.
Add it up and the age-based method sees 419 more homers in Judge's future, or 719 when all is said and done.
If we consider the Favorite Toy's estimate of 556 homers and the age-based stab at 719, we're talking about a range of between 243 and 406 remaining homers for Judge beyond this season, given a sunshine-and-roses health outlook. But has anyone ever hit that many homers from age 33 on?
The answer to the upper end of the range is no, as the post age-32 leaderboard is topped by Bonds at 388. Per Baseball-Reference.com, nine players have reached 243 or more homers from age 33 and on. Here's that list, along with their rate of home runs per 162 games through age 32.
That 719 figure is remarkable, and perhaps wildly optimistic both in terms of remaining seasons and games played. Nevertheless, a crucial factor in this outlook is that, even at 32, Judge keeps getting better as a hitter.
Just in terms of homers, Judge's rate over the past three seasons is 8.4%, beginning with his age-30 seasons. Before that it was 6.4%. Judge hasn't really gotten stronger, but as he has matured, he has been able to put his immense raw power to work more often.
Judge will never be a low strikeout hitter, but he has cut his whiffs down considerably over the course of his career, as his swing decisions and mastery of the strike zone have improved. Through 2019, he had struck out in 31.6% of his plate appearances; since then that's down to 25.7%. His hard hit rates have gone up, and he gets the ball into the air more often.
The end result is that Judge has become far more than a pure masher. His aggregate batting average going back to the start of the 2021 season is an even .300, remarkable in an age when .300 hitters have become far less common. This season, he's hitting .333 and is in position to make a run at the AL's Triple Crown (he leads in home runs and RBIs, but trails Kansas City's Bobby Witt Jr. by 16 points in batting average). The homers make the highlight reel, but it's Judge's overall prowess at the plate that has earned him the Bonds treatment.
All of this makes predicting Judge's future a little more difficult, but in kind of an amazing way. To put it simply, it's hard to predict the downward trajectory for a player who has yet to stop trending upward. If the upper end of some of these career estimates strike you as fantastical, it's the full range of Judge's skills at the plate that redeems them.
For Aaron Judge to reach and surpass the 700-homer milestone, it's going to take a historic back end to his career. We have no way to know if he can pull it off, but what we can say already is that the front end of his career has been unparalleled.
In the 955th game of his career, Judge became the 162nd member of the 300-homer club. In many ways though, he's already in a class of his own.
- Bradford Doolittle, ESPN Staff Writer
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