It’s Rivalry Weekend in MLB, and none of the other star players in the Subway Series compare like Yankees slugger Aaron Judge to the greatest hitters in baseball history.
The beauty (or misery) of rivalries traces back to pencil marks on a door frame.
Siblings track their height against their original rivals. Comparison is the point, at the start. Eventually, it becomes unavoidable.
The New York Yankees had a 59-year head start on the New York Mets, and the effects of having to see the unreachable tick marks every day, every year, over and over, is too deeply ingrained in the baseball ethos of the city to begin to explain. It’s more visceral than logical, more brutish than scientific.
The first Subway Series of 2025 starts Friday night at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and there could very well be another in late October. The Opta Analyst season projections favor the Yankees and Mets as the most likely World Series combatants, with their clubs at least tied for the largest division lead in each league.
Between Juan Soto’s crosstown move in free agency, Pete Alonso’s scalding start and Steve Cohen’s financial one-upmanship, there’s plenty of intrigue in the rise of the little brother. But the biggest brother in these games is towering above the series, above the sport.
Aaron Judge is the sort of behemoth who challenges raw measurement and demands comparison. How many buses would fit in that blue whale? How many times the GDP of Belgium is that dollar figure? The Yankees slugger has reached and sustained a new peak level of performance that requires serious work to put in the proper perspective.
Let’s give it a go.
Graphic by Graham Bell.Aaron Judge Against Pete Alonso’s Hot Start
To watch Alonso bat this year has been to take heart that the Mets first baseman is about to hit a hard line drive somewhere, possibly over the fence. He’s No. 1 in MLB in raw value (through May 14), which measure his performance on a pitch-by-pitch basis (discipline, contact and damage done upon contact), rather than just with the final result, although Judge is second (204 to 200 on the leaderboard).
Alonso also is fourth-highest in MLB with a 185 OPS+. That park- and era-adjusted metric helpfully tells us that Alonso has been 85% better than the MLB average hitter across his first 44 games.
Judge has been significantly better over a significantly longer stretch, with a 211 OPS+ over his last 464 games, or since the start of 2022.
Judge Against Juan Soto
Part of a dynamic duo with Judge last year, and a crosstown rival this year, Soto’s hitting superpowers and extreme youth combined to earn him the largest contract in MLB history. The numbers Soto steadily posts year in and year out bubble up from a one-two punch of exacting plate discipline and highly adaptable bat-to-ball skills. His slash line last year with the Yankees — .288/.419/.569 – was a dead ringer for his career line plus a few extra home runs.
The version of Judge we’re witnessing dwarfs those numbers. Starting with 2022, he’s batting .315. He’s running an absurd .439 on-base percentage (this season, he’s at .497). He’s slugging .685, and again, the arrow is pointing up as he enters this series with a .782 in the SLG column.
Judge Against Shohei Ohtani
For understandable reasons, I don’t think Judge is the most popular answer to “Who’s the best player in baseball?” Shohei Ohtani is. If you twist that even a little bit – most talented, most interesting, most historic – Ohtani is a hands-down winner. But if the operative word is “best,” Judge has the edge. He has topped the WAR (Wins Above Replacement) charts in two of the past three years and has soared out to a lead this year.
Also, about this year: Judge’s 2025 OPS advantage over Ohtani (who’s third, also behind Dodgers teammate Freddie Freeman) is as big as Ohtani’s over Steven Kwan, owner of MLB’s 42nd-best OPS.
Judge Against Mike Trout
How about Ohtani’s former teammate with the Angels? Mike Trout’s all-around excellence helped bring WAR into popular baseball discussion and illustrate the various ways a player can add value on the field.
Trout’s early seasons were huge and totemic markers of all-around play. And indeed, he logged five of the top 28 seasons by WAR since integration with a combination of stellar power hitting, center field defense and base running.
Judge is perfectly fine in right field, but his game doesn’t fit the multi-pronged Trout idea of WAR. Instead, he’s bashing his way onto all-time lists with focused force. Statcast, which came along shortly before Judge, has been the beneficiary of his greatness. His exit velocities are the headliner, but Judge has also sharpened his ability to end his at-bats on hittable pitches and crush them all over the park at the optimal angles for damage.
He delivered extra-base hits in 12.9% of his plate appearances in 2022, 13.5% of them last season, and it’s 14.9% this year. That’s a level of hitting so good that it pretty much doesn’t matter what else he does. In Trout’s best offensive season (2018), he got to 11%.
So since 1947, Judge can claim two of the three best seasons by WAR, trailing only Barry Bonds in 2001.
Judge Against Barry Bonds
There’s a big, glaring obvious caveat to Bonds’ greatness, but we’re going to skip the steroid note for the intentional walks note: Judge is not getting the Bonds treatment, and thus is not collecting the absurd on-base percentage bonus that Bonds did for existing. Bonds racked up more intentional walks in each season between 2002 and 2004 than Judge has totaled since the start of 2022.
I don’t know what to do with that other than ascribe it to a different era while noting Judge is still looking up at Bonds’ pure hitting prowess. By OPS+, Bonds owns the two best seasons and four of the top eight, although Judge’s current marks would wedge him into fourth place (with Babe Ruth third).
Judge is the first player since Bonds to eclipse the 200 OPS+ mark – meaning twice as good as the average hitter – in a full-length season, and he’s done it twice. (Soto did it in the shortened 2020 campaign; Freeman is there just past the quarter pole of this season.)
While Bonds hit the most home runs in a season – the controversial 73 in 2001 – Judge’s 62 in 2022 stand as the most in an AL season.
Judge Against All-Time Right-Handed Hitters
A shocking portion of baseball’s inner circle hitters are left-handed, for logical reasons. They get the platoon advantage against most pitchers.
Just last season, Judge posted the best offensive season ever by a right-handed batter, with his 226 OPS+ overtaking the 2022 version of himself, Rogers Hornsby, Mark McGwire and Frank Thomas. I’ll note while we’re at it that Hornsby, whose peak preceded Judge by a century, stood 5-foot-11 and weighed 175 pounds. I’d take Judge in arm wrestling, among other things.
By pure OPS, Judge currently trails only Jimmie Foxx and Negro Leagues standout Mule Suttles on the all-time leaderboard for right-handed hitters. Park- and era-adjusted metrics have him nosing ahead of Hornsby and Trout for No. 1. Now, the 33-year-old Judge has (clearly) not entered his decline phase yet, which will ultimately have something to say about these standings.
Today, though, as you watch the giant No. 99 in pinstripes, you can sit back and dream of that speech to hypothetical future grandchildren. You watched the best right-handed hitter in baseball history at the peak of his powers. You watched someone who was beyond compare.
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Aaron Judge Doesn’t Just Stand Tall in the Subway Series, He Rises to All-Time Heights Opta Analyst.
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