Shohei Ohtani vs. Aaron Judge: Who’s MLB’s Most Prodigious Power Hitter?
Ohtani has built his case to win the debate this year — and he even has (longshot) odds to match Judge’s single-season American League home run record.
Last week’s news that Shohei Ohtani has a torn elbow ligament — and that he won’t pitch again this season — was a massive bummer for baseball fans the world over. The Los Angeles Angels’ megastar was nearing the end of the greatest two-way season in MLB history, but now it’s unclear if and when we’ll see Ohtani pitch again.
For now, though, Ohtani has one helluva fallback plan: to be arguably the best hitter in the game. As a batter, he currently leads the American League in home runs, runs scored, walks, triples, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS and total bases. Among all qualified MLB hitters, Ohtani also ranks first in isolated power; in fact, he’s the only qualified player whose ISO is more than 100% greater than the league average.
As long as Ohtani keeps being a designated hitter, he’ll be atop baseball’s must-watch list — meaning you drop everything, no matter what you’re doing, to watch him at the plate. When it comes to hitting balls very hard and very far, Ohtani is rivaled by only one other slugger. Sorry, Matt Olson, that would be the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge, the reigning AL MVP, who set the AL record for home runs last season (62) and still ranks among the game’s most potent power threats despite missing 54 games with injuries this season.
So, with a respectful nod but an unmistakable get-off-my-lawn to all the other candidates, let’s dig into the case for either Ohtani or Judge being the best power hitter in baseball.
Putting aside quirky spectacles like 115-mph doubles or opponents begging him not to break scoreboards, Ohtani’s best case is made through his sheer volume of dingers, big flies and assorted bombs this season. He has more home runs than anyone else in the majors (44), and he has led almost the entirety of the season since mid-June — with the exception of a few brief battles with Olson, after which Ohtani quickly retook the lead.
You’ll notice that Judge is absent from the chart; he was actually four homers ahead of Ohtani (19 to 15) on June 3 when he broke his right big toe, which cost him nearly two months of action. With just over a month left in the 2023 season, Judge’s 29 homers are 15 behind Ohtani, a rough distance that he’ll likely remain if both players stay in the lineup the rest of the way.
Case closed for Ohtani? Not quite.
Perhaps surprisingly, when we look at the two sluggers’ respective rate statistics, Judge might have the edge — at least when he’s been healthy.
During Judge’s remarkable 2022 season, he led the majors in home run rate, hitting one every 9.2 at-bats. Only 12 seasons in MLB history ever saw a home run hit more frequently. If Judge qualified for that leaderboard this season, though, he would once again lead baseball at 9.3 AB per HR — better than even Ohtani’s 10.8, and a rate that would tie Mark McGwire in 1997 and Josh Gibson in 1939 for 15th all-time in a single season.
This is not an uncommon theme across the various metrics that track power. While Ohtani is a better hitter overall thanks to his higher batting average and on-base percentage, and lower strikeout rate, Judge is either close to or better than Ohtani in the power stats this season.
And remember, this is for 2023 only — it doesn’t include Judge’s career-best performance last year. But when we look over the stats from the past three seasons, Judge gains the lead in slugging and isolated power, among other categories. As incredible as Ohtani’s power-hitting has been this season, a healthy Judge probably still deserves the crown as MLB’s most powerful hitter.
There is, however, one surefire way Ohtani could solidify his claim to Judge’s throne: By beating him at his own record-setting game.
Despite going homerless in five straight games (and eight of nine), Ohtani still has a chance — however remote — of either tying Judge’s AL record of 62 home runs in a season, or at the very least becoming just the fourth batter in AL history to cross the 60-homer threshold (joining Judge, Roger Maris and Babe Ruth).
Employing a method similar to our tracker for Luis Arraez’s .400 season — both methods use the player’s established rates to simulate the rest of the schedule 10,000 times, tracking how often a milestone is achieved — we calculated Ohtani’s distribution of possible HR totals if he plays the rest of the Angels’ games this season.
Most often, he adds another eight or nine over the rest of August, September and October, finishing the season with either 52 or 53 home runs. That would give him the first 50-homer season in Angels history, breaking Troy Glaus’ 2000 record of 47. It would also shatter his own record for most home runs by a Japanese-born player (46, set in 2021), marking the first 50-homer season in that category ever. Overall, the simulations give Ohtani a very strong 85% chance of hitting at least 50 home runs if he stays in the lineup.
But Ohtani can aim even higher. If he plays out the rest of the season, there’s a 1% chance he hits at least 60 HR, a 0.2% chance he matches Judge’s AL record of 62, and even a slim 0.1% chance he raises the record to 63 or higher. (To do that, he would need to have a number of multi-homer games down the stretch and probably even have the first three-homer game of his career; three of the six simulations with 63 or more HRs saw him hit at least three homers in a game, one of which was a four-homer game.)
Of course, there’s a chance that Ohtani has a surgery on his elbow, which would end his hitting season and accelerate the timetable by which he would return as an extremely bankable two-way free agent. Such a scenario would leave us with many what-ifs about the numbers he might have had in 2023.
If history is the lens through which players are ultimately compared, then it would be amazing to see Ohtani chase Judge’s home run record while it’s still fresh in the record books. That’s especially true since Judge’s numbers in a limited sample this season suggest he can come back as strong as ever next season, perhaps mounting a charge at 60+ homers again.
Then again, depending on his timetable for elbow surgery and returning to the lineup, Ohtani could be chasing Judge yet again in what becomes an annual race for the crown of being MLB’s most prodigious power hitter.
Filed under: Baseball