At some point Aaron Judge’s baseline will not be “the best or second best player in the sport”. For at least one more year though, he’s expected to be the game’s best hitter, projected for more than a half-win better than poor Bobby Witt Jr. We’re witnessing perhaps the greatest right-handed hitter of all time, and arguably the best prime in baseball history, at least one that doesn’t come with cream and clear allegations.
2025 was Judge’s third MVP, third 200+ wRC+, and third 10+ fWAR season in the
last four. It’s hard to imagine that he’ll do all of that again in 2026, but that’s the thing about gamebreakers. That his 50th-percentile projected outcome is a 7.3 fWAR year, a mark that only four players eclipsed last year, indicates that the data underlying his performance suggests another monster year. Once again, the prayer is for health — Judge’s own body seems to be the only thing that could get in his way.
2025 statistics: 152 games, 679 plate appearances, .331/.457/.688, 53 HR, 114 RBI, 204 wRC+, 18.3 BB%, 23.6 K%, 3 Defensive Runs Saved, 5 Outs Above Average, 10.1 fWAR
2026 ZiPS DC projections: 149 games, 644 plate appearances, .285/.418/.588, 43 HR, 111 RBI, 172 wRC+, 17.9 BB%, 24.6 K%, 7.3 fWAR
It’s not Depth Charts’ fault, but that projected slashline is just such a remarkable stepdown from what we’ve seen Judge do that it’s hard to take seriously. It’s more than 100 points lower than what the Captain did in 2025, while all the underlying metrics indicate that the only thing that Judge really overperformed in last year was batting average — by Statcast’s reckoning, his xwOBA and wOBA were separated by just three points, and his xSLG was actually greater than that .688 mark!
Injury is the great enemy of any of Aaron’s single seasons — a stub of concrete in Dodger Stadium robbed us of what could have been four consecutive MVP campaigns. A nagging hammy or the spectre of a broken hamate are just about the only things that could derail what should be another MVP-caliber year. In the broad sense though, time seems to be the great enemy of Aaron’s career.
He’ll turn 34 in the season’s first month, and while the Yankees aren’t going to be a bad team this year, they’re not exactly the thoroughbreds the Dodgers are, and the AL East is shaping up to be tougher than it was in 2025 as well. The story of the club in the Aaron Judge era has been good, but never good enough, and while he’s under contract through 2031, as Yogi said it gets late early out there.
I hate the “World Series or bust” mentality that the Yankees claim to herald. The regular season matters, I watch 150 games over six months and having the entertainment, the joy, the marvel that a player like Aaron Judge brings every single day makes that slog worth it. There will be some game in August when the Yankees have three hits and the Rays have made six pitching changes, and Aaron Judge will hit a baseball to some part of Yankee Stadium that neither Mantle nor Ruth ever reached, and it will be worth it.
Still, it’s impossible to ignore that rings do matter. I wrote about Elston Howard yesterday, and how so much of his legacy as a player, great as he was, comes from the fact he won four titles with the team. You just carve out a space in the collective Yankee memory in ways that regular season performance alone can’t do. Aaron Judge is the best hitter in the world, and arguably the best natural hitter any reader under 60 has ever seen. I fully expect him to win MVP again in 2026, which is hilarious on the face of it.
But Aaron Judge needs a ring. We compare him to the greats of the Yankee past, but in an ironic twist that baseball is oh so happy to visit upon certain players, it may end up his best comp is Ted Williams, the finest player in the history of the Yankees’ most bitter rival. Ted was the dominant force in baseball from April to September. He was so great that his lack of a title is perhaps not forgiven but certainly more overlooked than most players of a certain talent level. Aaron Judge is quite possibly already one of the ten greatest Yankees to ever don the uniform, but I don’t think the lack of a ticker tape parade will be overlooked in quite the same way.
See more of the Yankees Previews series here.
