Aаron Judge wіns 2024 AL Hаnk Aаron Awаrd

The best hitter in baseball is justly named so.

Aaron Judge had perhaps the best season ever from a right-handed hitter, and while the year didn’t end the way any of us wanted, he’s still receiving laurels for his performance. For the second time in his career, the Yankee captain has been named the winner of the Hank Aaron Award as the American League’s top offensive player. Batting .322 with 58 home runs, as stark a power-contact combination as you’ll see in this generation, made Judge an easy choice despite strong seasons from the likes of Bobby Witt Jr. and his own teammate, Juan Soto.

Judge’s 218 wRC+ is tops by a right-handed hitter in AL/NL history, with only Josh Gibson and Mule Suttles better in their best seasons. The gap between Judge and baseball’s second-best hitter, Shohei Ohtani, was 37 points of wRC+. That’s the same delta as exists between second and twelfth on FanGraphs’ leaderboard, perhaps the best mark of how dominant Judge was this season. For his own credit, Ohtani took home the NL award, but there’s no question that right now, Aaron Judge is the best hitter in baseball.

With two Hank Aaron Awards, and a likely second MVP coming next week, we can begin to reflect on the peak of Judge’s career, and what a peak it is. We don’t know what the decline will look like for Judge of course, but as it stands after 2024 he is the seventh-best hitter in baseball history by wRC+. Now, he’s played in about half as many games as Ted Williams, so there’s a downside coming and he will likely not finish his career quite this good.

Still...

One of the hardest parts of last year’s Top 100 Yankees series was picking where exactly Judge fit. We put him at No. 16, which I generally consider as just outside the all-time Yankees slots. This is not the time nor place to argue whether he means more to the franchise than Thurman Munson or Ron Guidry, but he’s unquestionably one of the very best hitters to wear pinstripes, and there have been a lot of ‘em. Yes, the decline will come, but that 173 career wRC+ is now second-best in the history of the New York Yankees and he could continue to zoom up PSA’s all-time list in a later version.

He needs a ring, but for now, congratulations to the game’s best hitter, and congratulations to the NL winner, Shohei Ohtani. I hear he’s pretty good, too.