The AL MVP Award Belongs To The Best In Baseball, Aaron Judge

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Aaron Judge is the clear front-runner for the American League Most Valuable Player Award. I know, astonishing.

Despite a languid start to his season in March and April that gave the rest of baseball a head start - during which Judge posted a .207/.340/.414 slash line - Judge, at the time of this writing, leads the majors in almost every major statistical category. The $360 million Yankees captain leads the majors in home runs (41), RBI (105), ISO (.367), on-base percentage (.458), slugging percentage (.689), weighted runs created plus (wRC+ for short; Judge's is 215, with more on that to follow), and on-base + slugging percentage (OPS) - the final category is one in which Judge is 141 points ahead of the next closest player, his own teammate, Juan Soto.

Most fans will point to the turning point of Judge’s eighth Major League campaign being his first career ejection on May 4th - and they would be correct. Over the last 99 days, Judge has posted a slash line of .376/.508/.819 with a 1.327 OPS and 259 wRC+ - all of which easily exceed his competition. The next closest OPS? Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who has his own gaudy OPS of 1.044 in the same time span but is still 283 points behind Judge.

As for Judge’s behemoth 259 wRC+ since May 4th - in layman’s terms, weighted runs created plus is a statistic that attempts to measure a player’s offensive value by breaking it down into one number. It accounts for park factors, the era during which a player plays, and various other conditions. The league average wRC+ is always 100, and it goes a percentage point down or up, depending on the player’s performance; so, in other words, Aaron Judge has been generating offense 159% better compared to an average player.

Judge Is So Mortifying To Opposing Pitchers, That He's Not Even Given A Chance To Swing The Bat Sometimes

Still not convinced about Judge being the AL MVP? How about the fact that Judge was the first player this season to be intentionally walked with the bases empty ? That’s an occurrence that happened just three times across all of Major League Baseball last year, too. Not even Barry Bonds can lay claim to being given a free pass with no runners on. Judge is also on pace to hit 59 home runs, and possesses a full-season OPS of 1.154, which would be the highest of any qualifying player since Bonds’s 2004 OPS of 1.422 - and that was at the height of the Steroid Era.

Never mind the fact that Judge is lapping the field against the rest of the league; how about the fact that he is also just the fourth Yankees player to hit 40 or more home runs in at least three separate seasons, a feat accomplished by only Ruth, Gehrig, and Mantle? He just continues to create history, every single day.

Judge’s teammate, Juan Soto, along with Gunnar Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr., are all indispensable; they have an immeasurable value that statistics cannot sometimes quantify, and, in most other seasons, they would be in a tight race for MVP. But the AL MVP this season, much like 2022, belongs to Judge. Everyone else is competing for second place.

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