A record by the Babe that Judge could shatter this year

Aaron Judge is best known for smashing homers, as befits a man who owns three 50-homer seasons – making him one of just five players in history to reach that level three times. You know this, because you’ve seen him regularly hit baseballs about as hard as a player can; over the last five seasons, his 60% hard-hit rate is No. 1 in baseball, well ahead of Shohei Ohtani.

“Big man hits ball hard and collects homers” is not exactly breaking news, particularly for a superstar off to as magical a start as he’s been, but there’s more to it. Judge takes a .395 average into Wednesday’s game in Anaheim, and while he’s almost certainly not going to hit .400 – a mark which is all but impossible to reach in modern baseball – the fact that he’s even this close, this far into the season, tells you a lot about what’s happening to opposing defenses when Judge steps to the plate.

It’s not, as it turns out, entirely about the home runs. It’s about the fear of what happens when he doesn’t take it out of the park.

We’re going to talk about Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) for a moment, and that’s a tool that is exactly what it sounds like: It’s batting average without strikeouts or homers, so using only batted balls that stay in the park, the kinds that – in theory, anyway – an opposing fielder might potentially be able to convert into an out. The Major League average is .290, and that’s the lowest since 1992. It is, even without strikeouts, harder than ever to find a hit.

Judge’s BABIP, however, is .467. It’s easily the highest in the Majors this year, but that understates it by more than a little. It’s the highest in a qualified season in modern Major League history.

Highest BABIP in a season, since 1901

• .467 // Judge, 2025
• .423 // Babe Ruth, 1923
• .422 // George Sisler, 1922
• .422 // Rogers Hornsby, 1924
• .416 // Ty Cobb, 1922
• .415 // Ty Cobb, 1913

As always, an unbreakable rule of any type of baseball analysis is, if Babe Ruth was the best at something, and now your name is ahead of his, then you’re doing something extremely right. Even if this is almost certainly not a pace that can be kept up all year, it’s still the third-highest BABIP in the first 54 games of a season since 1969, behind Jim Edmonds in 2000 and Yasiel Puig in 2013.

It’s not, also, good luck. That’s often what BABIP is used for – to express the good or bad fortune of balls finding gloves or not. For one thing, this isn’t exactly out of nowhere; Judge has the sixth-highest career BABIP in the live ball era, on a list where Hornsby, Cobb and Rod Carew are ahead of him. But he’s not a contact legend like Carew, and while he can certainly run, he’s hardly a burner consistently legging out infield hits.

Instead, it comes back to how incredibly hard he hits the ball. If it’s not luck, and it’s not really running speed, it’s this. It’s what his power forces fielders to do, even when the ball is not going out of the yard. This is what “making your own luck” looks like.

Consider these three factors …

1) Judge forces outfielders to provide him extra space.

When you’re an outfielder and you’re facing a hitter with 80-grade power, what are you going to do? Take a few steps back. Nearly 300 batters have stepped to the plate 50 times this year, and absolutely none of them – not Ohtani, not Kyle Schwarber, no one – forces center fielders to position themselves deeper than Judge. (We’ll look only at road games here, to try to avoid any home field advantages or disadvantages that might come up.)

Deepest CF positioning against batters (road games only)

• 331 feet // deepest: Judge
• 322 feet // MLB AVERAGE
• 301 feet // shortest: Chandler Simpson (TB)

Since it’s 127 feet from home plate to second base at each park, maybe it’s more useful to think about it as ‘distance beyond second base,’ to consider all that green, green grass that’s available for balls to fall in. For Judge, that’s 204 feet of land to find.

It’s the same in left field – where left fielders start 309 feet deep against Judge, well above the 297-foot average and dozens of feet deeper than the 269 feet that Simpson sees, and while it’s not quite as extreme in right field, we can still use an example or two there to show you exactly what we mean.

Like, for example, this single against Pittsburgh in early April. As it was, right fielder Alexander Canario had a small-but-not-impossible chance, a 15% Catch Probability based on the time and distance he had to go. But he was also positioned 309 feet deep, well beyond both the 299 feet that Judge is faced with in right and the Major League average, against righty hitters, of 292 feet. Had Canario merely been playing at an average depth of 292 feet, suddenly this is a 90% Catch Probability – or one that’s caught 9 of 10 times.

It’s almost the exact same story as this one in May in Sacramento. A’s right fielder (and former Yankees teammate) Miguel Andujar was 310 feet deep. He had a 15% Catch Probability. He didn’t get there. Had he been the average depth of 292 feet, then it is, again, a 90% Catch Probability. It’s almost a guaranteed out.

The point, of course, is not to say that these outfielders or teams are poorly positioning themselves. It’s that they kind of have to do this. You’d rather give up a Judge single than an extra-base hit behind you almost every time.

2) Judge gives infielders less time to make the play.

The most incredible thing, perhaps, is this: Judge has the highest batting average on ground balls – by a lot.

Highest average on ground balls (min. 50)

• .407 // Judge
• .397 // Hunter Goodman
• .396 // Jonathan Aranda
• .389 // Angel Martínez
• .387 // Bobby Witt, Jr.
• .379 // Xavier Edwards

It’s not, again, that he’s running them out like he’s an elite speedster. It’s that he’s hitting even the grounders harder than almost anyone, providing infielders with less time to react. Just look at when he smashed one at 116 mph past Willy Adames.

“That one was hit so hard,” said the Yankees broadcast, “that [Adames] couldn't even move to the glove side to come near it.”

Or 110 mph past a diving Javier Báez…

… or 110 mph past a diving Francisco Lindor.

These are top-level defenders, but even they need some time to make plays. The harder those balls are hit, the less time they have. When you look at Statcast infield defense metrics, you can see that the success rate on balls hit by Judge is lower than anyone else in baseball.

Which brings us to our final point …

3) Judge is forcing bad defense against him.

Fielders, cumulatively, have posted a negative-7 Outs Above Average when Judge is at the plate. It’s the weakest defense against any hitter in baseball.

Weakest performance on defense against hitters, 2025

• -7 OAA // vs. Judge
• -6 OAA // vs. Anthony Volpe
• -6 OAA // vs. Ryan Mountcastle
• -5 OAA // [several tied]

This, also, is not a sudden thing. Going back to 2018, only one hitter in baseball has seen weaker defense against their batted balls – Judge’s now-teammate Paul Goldschmidt.

Now, some of that can be about running speed or perhaps just pure randomness; there’s not really any compelling reason why Ryan Mountcastle would be blessed with seeing defenses play poorly. There’s not even really any particular reason why Toronto’s Bo Bichette couldn’t get a handle on this E-6 against Judge himself.

But it’s also not terribly likely to be a coincidence that Judge is at the top (bottom?) of this list, either, given all that we’ve just shown. These examples aren’t just balls that Judge hit hard, they’re ones where the fielders had a chance to make the play and simply couldn’t.

Like this 107 mph rocket past a diving Báez – a different play from the one above.

Or when Yoán Moncada couldn’t handle 104 mph hit right at him.

Or when Randy Arozarena, again playing deep, couldn’t quite handle this otherwise catchable ball.

Judge, again, almost assuredly will not hit .400, because it’s all but impossible to do so; there’s a reason no one has done it since Ted Williams way back in 1941. (Although if this is what he's doing while he "[doesn't] feel too great at the plate," as he said last weekend, then imagine what he'd do when he does.)

But piling up all this value even without hitting the ball over the fence isn’t about luck, either. It’s about hitting the absolute stuffing out of the ball, as often as you can. It carries with it so many different unexpected benefits.