It is accurate to say that Aaron Judge is doing stuff that hasn’t been seen since Babe Ruth, from a clean player.
The New York Yankees star became the fourth player in MLB history to post four seasons with at least 50 home runs on Wednesday, joining Ruth, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Obviously, those McGwire and Sosa feats come with asterisks.
Judge got there with a three-run homer against the the Chicago White Sox.
It’s been another stellar season for Judge this year, one that currently has him favored to take home a third AL MVP award in four years. His only competition at this point is Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, who’s ahead of him in the home runs column but not much else.
Judge’s other 50-homer seasons are his rookie year in 2017, his first MVP year in 2022 (when he broke the AL record with 62, also considered the clean record) and last season’s second MVP year.
In addition to Judge and Raleigh, Shohei Ohtani and Kyle Schwarber have also crossed the 50-homer threshold. Before 2025, the only seasons with more than two 50-homer campaigns were 1998 and 2001, making this the first non-steroid-tinged year to see this kind of power display. If Eugenio Suarez (47 homers) has one last power burst, it will be the first season to have five such players.
It’s hard to overstate just how impressive Judge’s run over the past four years have been. After his 49th homer Saturday, Judge was hitting .310/.438/.673 since the start of 2022. The next-closest MLB player to his 1.111 OPS was Ohtani, at .996. The distance between Judge and Ohtani was greater than the one between Ohtani and the seventh-best player on the list, Ronald Acuña Jr.
In a world where seemingly every hitter has to choose between contact and power when facing today’s velocity-driven pitching, Judge is a unicorn.
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