On the first day of the season, Aaron Judge and the Yankees offense didn’t make much noise. They scraped together four runs against the Brewers, led by homers from Austin Wells and Anthony Volpe. But for the next two games, they feasted on Milwaukee pitching. Saturday brought a nine-homer barrage in a 20-9 victory. They cranked four more homers on their way to double-digit runs again the next day. The Yankees are hot – and Judge is at the center of it.
Well, he’s one of the things at the center of it. Torpedo bats are getting their 15 minutes of fame as you read this. Several Yankees are using these bats, which reach their greatest width around the sweet spot and taper thereafter, to great effect so far this year. The bats have been around for a few years, and the Yankees aren’t the only ones using them, but now they’re a topic of conversation across big league clubhouses. Honestly? I don’t have a lot to tell you about torpedo bats that hasn’t already been written. But I do have this to say: Judge isn’t using one, and he’s the beating heart of New York’s offensive explosion to start the season.
It’s been only three games, of course, so you can’t read much into batting lines. But Judge is slugging 1.818 through those games, with a .545/.643/1.818 slash line that’s good for a 547 wRC+. He’s only struck out twice. He had exactly one three-game stretch this good last year – and he won MVP unanimously.
Not everything needs to be sliced into a million pieces and analyzed. You don’t need me to break down Judge’s bat speed or his performance in 2-1 counts to understand him. He was the best hitter on the planet last year, and he’s starting off this season playing just the same. Want a picture of what he does best? Here are the pitches that Judge hit for extra bases in the opening series:
Or maybe just watch the pitchers’ reactions to giving up those four homers. Disappointed, sure, but not surprised:
Anytime you get one of your teammates to do this during the second game of the season, you’re doing something right:
It’s easy to forget what baseball on the field feels like over the offseason. Plenty of players look like stars in spring training, and you can gaze at new rosters and potential rookie breakouts all day if you want to. In that dreamlike environment, the stars can get left behind. There’s no need to wish for Judge to break out; he’s part of the firmament, a known quantity. But when the games start, what fans hoped for all offseason stops mattering pretty quickly, and what happens on the field takes over. And yes, right, a lot of things have changed in New York, but Judge hasn’t, and he’s still absolutely dominant.
Notice how most of those home runs came against middle-middle or middle-in pitches? It’s not because pitchers are just flooding the zone and daring him to punish them. That hasn’t happened for years. Honestly, it might never have happened: One look at Judge, and pitchers convert from zone fillers to corner nibblers. You don’t have to have a vivid imagination to connect the 6-foot-7” titan in front of you with power on contact.
Brewers pitchers tried their hardest not to give Judge anything to hit. You might not think it from seeing the locations of his extra-base hits. But that’s because Judge is a hitting genius. Milwaukee pitched him carefully, rarely venturing into the center of the plate:
Out of the 52 pitches in that chart, only nine were over the heart of the plate. That’s a lower rate of dead-center pitches than he’s seen in any season of his major league career. That’s not to say this trend will continue – again, it’s three games, that’s not how baseball works – but don’t come away from this series thinking the Brewers just didn’t take Judge’s power seriously enough. In the 2024 season, no hitter saw middle-middle pitches as rarely (per pitch seen) as Judge did against the Brewers over the weekend.
The problem, from their perspective? He swung at eight of those nine pitches and only missed one. Two of the times he made contact, he fouled the pitch off. Out of five balls in play, three of them were hit 105 mph or harder, and a fourth was over 100. Dance around the strike zone if you’d like – Judge will mostly take those balls. He chased only 15% of pitches out of the zone in this series. Venture into his wheelhouse, though, and he’s going to try to put one in the seats. He won’t always succeed at this rate, obviously; 37.5% of his swings at pitches down the middle have turned into homers. Over the past three seasons, a time period during which he’s been the best hitter in baseball by a mile, that rate is about 8%. No one is this hot for long.
But these hot streaks matter. A week or a month down the road, Judge will go through a slump. It happens to everyone. He’ll see the ball a little worse, or his timing will be a little off, and he’ll go 10 or even 20 middle-middle pitches without even one of them leaving the park. It happens to everyone. To put up a season as good as Judge has been setting down like clockwork recently, your highs have to be very high.
If this series is any indication, he’s picking up right where he left off in 2024. No, he won’t hit like this all year. No one will. But this is what Judge does at his best. His bursts of dominance are like those of no other hitter, because his combination of power and discernment is unmatched. It’s not the torpedoes, and it’s not the Brewers: It’s Aaron Judge, the best hitter in baseball at the peak of his powers.
