Aaron Judge is carrying the Yankees’ offense to a historic degree

By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer

Aaron Judge is doing his best.

As the Yankees continue their long march toward total implosion, the skyscrape-ian outfielder has remained unquestionably elite. Heading into games Wednesday, Judge sat at 54 homers on the season. If he continues this ludicrous pace, he’ll become just the sixth member of the 60-taters-in-a-season club and the first since Mark McGwire to whack 65 dingers in a year.

But while Judge has maintained his near-record pace, his team’s offense has sputtered and stalled, nosediving the club into a month-long collapse. Nestled comfortably atop the AL East by 12 games on Aug. 1, the Yanks are now just 4.5 games up on Tampa Bay with three weeks left to play. The offense — which has scored the second-fewest runs in baseball in that time, despite Judge’s magnificence — is very much to blame.

Yankees hanging on by a thread: Can Judge lead the team to the playoffs?

Ben Verlander and Alex Curry talk about the Yankees’ continued struggles through their worst 50-game stretch since 1991.

Since Aug. 1, New York’s lineup has been a display in complete and utter baseball futility, a comedy of errors, a very difficult watch. Gleyber Torres is 20 for his past 111 at-bats. Aaron Hicks hasn’t homered since before the All-Star break. Even the typically consistent DJ LeMahieu has a .187 batting average and a .497 OPS since Aug. 1. Andrew Benintendi, Anthony Rizzo and Josh Donaldson are the only Yanks not named Aaron who’ve been above average, and they’ve all been more fine than great.

During that same stretch, Judge has continued to terrorize MLB pitching, with 12 homers and a .317/.470/.721 slash line. His OPS (1.191) is more than double that of the rest of his team (.577) in that span. In fact, there have been few hitters better than Judge and few offenses worse than New York’s. Without Judge, the Yankees are a Triple-A team. With him, they still kind of stink.

But to exactly what level has Judge put this team on his back? Can we quantify how dependent on his bat the Yankees’ lineup has become? Have we ever seen a hitter this great drag an offense this terrible to the postseason? How historic has Judge’s performance been relative to that of his teammates? 

To compare Judge to his teammates, we need an offensive metric that encapsulates a hitter’s production in a single number. Home runs are a decent start, but they don’t tell the whole story. After all, Judge has hit more than 25% of New York’s home runs this season, which is absolutely preposterous, but singles and doubles are cool, too!

Let’s refer to Weighted Runs Created, or wRC. The concept behind wRC is incredibly simple: Hitters create runs through walks, singles, homers, etc., whether or not there are runners on base. Think of wRC as a measure of how many runs Judge has created for the Yankees this year.

Per FanGraphs, Judge has posted a league-leading 130 wRC in 131 games, making him one of just four hitters over 100 so far this season (Paul Goldschmidt, Freddie Freeman and Austin Riley are the others). For context, over the past decade, the league leader in wRC is usually in the 135-150 range by the end of the season.

The Yankees as a whole have “created” just 648 runs this season — that’s lower than their actual run total because wRC doesn’t give credit for defensive errors — which means Judge has contributed a mind-boggling 20.06% of the team’s runs created. Since Aug. 1, it has been even more dramatic, with Judge contributing 35 of New York’s 110 runs, good for 31%.

If those numbers seem a bit low — “How can Judge be just a fifth of this offense? He’s incredible! The Yankees suck!” — take a look at how they compare historically. Using wRC, I went back and looked at the most impressive individual offensive performances relative to lineup strength among MLB playoff teams since 1947 (integration era).

Think of this as the “superstar hitter who dragged a bad lineup to October” rankings. The “he put a team on his back” list. The “oh, wow, that team was really dependent on that one guy” leaderboard.

A few quick notes unrelated to Judge:

* That ’02 Bonds season is the third-highest wRC season in the integration era. It was also Bonds’ third-highest wRC season. Yes, he has the top three seasons.

* Shouts out to Mickey Mantle for dragging a mediocre Yankees team to the World Series in back-to-back seasons.

* ’09 is slightly post-peak Albert Pujols on a limp Cardinals team.

* Luis Gonzalez winning the ’01 World Series on a jam-shot blooper is great when you remember that he was incredible the entire season.

* ‘67 Yaz is the Triple Crown season in which he almost ended the Curse of the Bambino on his own.

In the integration era, Judge is seventh. In the wild-card era, he’s fourth. Since 1993, only three players have done more offensively to carry a team to the postseason. Judge’s 2022 performance, as we all already knew, is historically great — particularly so when compared to the Yankees’ haplessness.

Aaron Judge continuing his historic pace

Ben Verlander dives into the MVP season Aaron Judge has been putting up as he tries to break the Yankees’ record for home runs, set by Roger Maris.

In baseball, it’s exceedingly difficult for a player to single-handedly lift his team to glory. This isn’t basketball or football; the Angels can’t have Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani each bat 18 times a game. But this season, Judge is doing his best LeBron James impression. Things have been rough recently in the Bronx, but imagine how much worse they’d be without him.

Maybe the Yankees hold on and find their footing before October. Maybe they totally capitulate and give the division away. Maybe they settle for a wild card with a puncher’s chance at the whole thing. 

Either way, they’ll have one man to thank: Aaron Judge.

Jake Mintz, the louder half of @CespedesBBQ, is a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. Follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.