Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani Are MLB’s Big-Market Superstar Dream Come True

But will that elevate the league into a higher echelon of the sports consciousness?

MLB’s two biggest names have been larger than life this season. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

One of baseball’s longest-running sources of worry has concerned its lack of household-name superstars relative to other sports like the NBA and NFL.

For years, MLB’s most famous player was Derek Jeter, and the sport faced a crisis when he retired: Its best player at the time, Mike Trout, was a budding GOAT — but God bless him, he was sort of boring. Meanwhile, Bryce Harper was too polarizing. Clayton Kershaw was too easy to take for granted. Other potential successors were either too old, not popular enough, or both. What baseball wouldn’t have given to have its own version of LeBron James back in the mid-2010s.

Fast-forward a decade, however, and the sport has not one, but two — each in their own way.

Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers keeps finding new ways to produce historic seasons. After winning MVPs with several of the best two-way campaigns by any player in forever, Ohtani was limited by injury to “only” being a hitter this year… and he became just the sixth member of the 40 HR/40 SB club when he hit a walk-off grand slam to beat the Rays last Friday.

At the same time, Aaron Judge of the Yankees keeps getting better, eclipsing 50 home runs for the second time in three seasons, setting himself up to potentially break his own American League HR record in September. And, oh by the way, he is also in the mix to win the AL Triple Crown if he can chase down Bobby Witt on batting average.

In many ways, this is the fulfillment of MLB’s dream. Judge and Ohtani are the game’s biggest stars, both having huge, historic seasons in the league’s two largest markets. Add in Juan Soto, also having a great season in the Bronx, and 2024 has been a banner year for the alignment of big names and big numbers in big cities:

In fact, it’s hard to think of a way that baseball might ever stumble across a better confluence of all these factors at once. In both Ohtani and Judge, MLB has basically maxed out its potential formula for star power + market size + elite performance. But has that mattered?

Maybe slightly. Let’s use Google Trends again to judge whether interest in Ohtani and Judge has increased relative to four mainstays of stardom in the NBA and NFL: LeBron, Patrick Mahomes, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant. We’ll look from late August one year to the next, to capture the past year and each of the previous three, looking to see how the search traffic Ohtani and Judge received compares with the big names from other sports:

Aided by his high-profile free agency decision — and subsequent massive contract — Ohtani’s online attention has risen relative to LeBron/Curry/Mahomes/Durant, though he still isn’t at their level yet. And Judge, who got a big bump for his record-setting end of the 2022 season (he broke the AL HR mark in October 2022), hasn’t gotten the same spike in interest yet this year. That may still be yet to come, if he cracks 60 dingers again and/or breaks his own record; for now, he still sits far below the non-MLB stars’ level of search traffic.

And as for each star’s respective sport, the evidence around a star-fueled rise for MLB is mixed. Conducting the same Google Trends research for teams in August-to-August windows instead of players, we see that each league has remained relatively flat over the past few years:

Google searches aren’t everything. July’s MLB All-Star Game defied predictions of declining ratings, remaining the gold standard for All-Star events across the major sports. The league has also seen rising TV ratings and attendance overall, with Ohtani’s Dodgers and Judge’s Yankees leading the way in driving national TV eyeballs.

And the postseason, of course, will be the real test of how much the sport’s big-name stars move the needle. Across the various different forecast models and the Vegas odds, there is about an 8 percent chance we get that classic Dodgers-Yankees matchup in the Fall Classic, which would make for a fitting end to MLB’s star-studded season — and provide a ratings bonanza. (As much as those still exist outside of the NFL.)

But we need look back no further than to last October for the record-low viewership of 2023’s Rangers-Diamondbacks World Series at the opposite end of the spectrum. And in the random world of the MLB playoffs, the odds are currently a coin-flip as to whether we’ll see both Judge and Ohtani flame out before the championship round, no matter what kind of rare fame and acclaim they’ve brought to their sport so far this season.

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Filed under: Baseball