Baseball Bytes: Aaron Judge's Impossible Progress
Baseball Bytes: Aaron Judge's Impossible Progress
Plus, which pitchers tell us early when they're "on", and rookies hitting for the cycle.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a new column I’m experimenting with, in which I point out three byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Judge Keeps Getting Better — And Better Still
When Aaron Judge of the Yankees blasted his 43rd home run of the 2024 season last Wednesday, it didn’t just increase his major league-leading total, but it also catapulted him in major league history. Coming in just the 955th game (and 3,431st at-bat) of his career, it made Judge the fastest to ever reach 300 career HRs — beating out the previous record held by either Ralph Kiner (1,087 games) or Babe Ruth (3,831 ABs).
As of Sunday morning, Judge is currently on pace to hit 57 homers and generate 11.2 Wins Above Replacement. The former would be his third career 50+ HR season, while the latter would signify a new career high after he posted 10.8 WAR during his remarkable 62-homer season of 2022. By continuing to push his numbers ever upward, Judge — now in his age-30 season — is defying the traditional expectations of how a baseball player’s career should progress.
Think back to 2017, when a then-25-year-old Judge first broke out with 52 home runs and 8.4 WAR to prove that the Yankees’ new generation of talent had officially arrived. It was an amazing season — though at the time, it was far from guaranteed that Judge would ever return to those heights: Of the 27 retired batters to ever hit 50 home runs in a season, only nine (or 33 percent) made it back for a second time over the rest of their careers.
Those odds were better for players who did it at age 25 or younger, of course; Prince Fielder was the only member of that club who didn’t return for at least one additional 50-HR season. But from an overall value perspective, even an 8-WAR season by the age of 25 likely means you’ve already peaked as a player. Just 35 percent of retired batters in that club ended up improving on their career high for WAR (per 162 team games) over the rest of their career.
Judge already bucked both trends when he set new highs for HRs and WAR/162 (among other stats) in his magical 2022 campaign. But that just seemed to set the bar for the rest of his career to an even higher — and less attainable — level.
Among retired players with at least 2 seasons of 50+ HR through age 30,2 more than half (57 percent) never got to 50 again in their careers. And just 28 percent of those who had at least one 10+ WAR/162 season through age 30 went on to produce another later on. Only one — Barry Bonds — ever actually improved his career high after age 30.3
Again, though, Judge’s career hasn’t followed the normal rules. If he gets to 50 dingers again, he’ll join Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Ruth as the only hitters with multiple such seasons at age 30 or older. And if he goes on to break the 11-WAR threshold at age 32, Judge would be one of only three players to accomplish that feat at that age or older — Bonds and Honus Wagner being the others.
There’s a bittersweet quality to the idea of a “peak season” in sports. While it represents the highest point of a player’s career, there’s nowhere left to go from there but down. That’s why it’s been so amazing to watch Judge find new peaks, defying the odds with every step.
⚾ You Know When They “Have It” (Or Don’t)
My friend (and former editor)
wrote in the other day with this question for the column:“Which pitchers are the ones who most telegraph how their start will go based on their first inning?”
He guessed that Blake Snell would show up high on the list, particularly after Snell’s no-hitter on Aug. 2 was hinted at with a near-immaculate inning (three strikeouts on 11 total pitches) in the bottom of the first inning.
So I decided to examine this by grabbing every start of at least 3 innings by each 2024 starter qualified for the ERA title — plus Snell, who doesn’t have 1 inning per team game — while looking at what I’m calling their “dominance score” in the first inning and the rest of their start. Dominance score is based on Tangotiger’s updated formula for Game Score, but with the constant term set to make the average across each pitcher in the group zero in each segment of the game.4
The pitchers who have the highest correlation between their dominance dcores in inning 1 and the rest of the game are, in theory, the ones who tend to give us the most early clues (good or bad) about how the rest of their starts will go.
Indeed, Snell (0.44) is among the starters with the highest dominance score correlations between the first inning and the rest of the game. But that lags behind Hunter Greene (0.45), Garrett Crochet (0.50) and, especially, Shota Imanaga (0.63) for the most positive correlation in MLB this season. Here’s a plot of Imanaga’s dominance scores in inning 1 versus the rest of the game for all 22 of his starts going into Sunday’s action:
Meanwhile, the anti-Imanaga is Kyle Gibson of the Cardinals, who has the largest negative correlation in the league — meaning, when he comes out strong early, he typically loses it after the first, while he tends to settle down after a poor early performance.
Is any of this predictive? I doubt it, but I didn’t check. Either way, though, it’s still fun to think about and keep an eye on.
⚾ Weston Wilson and Rookie Cycles
Back in early June, I posted a Note in which I joked that Phillies rookie OF Weston Wilson was just an excuse for me to remember former Marlins and Rockies OF Preston Wilson. But the joke was on me last week, when WESTON (not Preston, who retired in 2007) hit for the cycle against Nationals.
Weston was the first Phillies rookie to ever hit for the cycle, but he was not the first rookie of 2024 to hit for the cycle — Rangers OF Wyatt Langford also did it on June 30 — nor were they the only rookies in recent seasons to hit for the cycle — the incredible Elly De La Cruz did it on June 23, 2023. According to SportRadar, only 27 rookies since 1906 have hit for the cycle, and 11 percent of them have happened in the past 14 months.
Here’s a plot of every rookie cycle since 1906:
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
That’s not a long list: Álex Rodríguez, Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr., Mickey Mantle, Ralph Kiner, Jimmie Foxx and Babe Ruth.
I’ll leave it to you to guess why that was.
The base formula for Dominance Score is: 2*Outs + Strikeouts - 2*Walks - 2*Hits Allowed - 3*Runs Allowed - 6*Home Runs Allowed. The constants to add are -2.358 for the first inning, and -12.037 for the rest of a start.
Too often, we miss historically important events while experiencing them in the moment without the benefit of reflection. I feel that way about Aaron Judge. His performance is something more than just great numbers.
Not that long ago, any player with his career arc would raise immediate suspicions and outright skepticism from leery and jaded fans. "Juiced" many would say when numbers such as these were talked about and occurring late in a career. The fact that these suspicions are not raised at all in connection with Judge strikes me as important for the sport.
Judge seems to represent something more than just home runs and gaudy WAR numbers. He reflects a newfound confidence in the public in the purity and integrity of his performance that has been missing in baseball for a long time.
For that reason, I think when we look back on Aaron Judge's career years down the road, we will come to appreciate his career as something more than mere numbers - a watershed moment when baseball reclaimed its innocence again and finally turned the page away from the steroids era.