A year ago, this headline appeared near the start of the Major League Baseball season:
“Aaron Judge’s toe injury could have lingering effects.”
As if!
It seems funny to read now, because with hindsight, we know that Judge in 2024 won the AL MVP for a second time after batting .322/.458/.701 with 58 home runs. It was the best season of Judge’s career so far. Until maybe this one.
It’s only been 12 games, but Judge is off to a fast start—let’s call it—batting .354/.446/.792 with six home runs and 20 RBIs. Has Judge let his toe injury linger, as the headline pondered? Apparently not. Not exactly.
Such an extraordinary pace would seem impossible; it projects Judge to hit 81 home runs, drive in 270 runs and score 189 runs. The homers would beat Barry Bonds in 2001 by eight, and the RBIs would dwarf Hack Wilson in 1930 by 79. Judge isn’t keeping pace with Hall of Famer Billy Hamilton in 1894, who scored 198 times. Let’s pick it up, A-A-Ron.
The thing is, it’s not too far-fetched for Judge to chase these records while having a real chance to eclipse them. A season ago, Judge’s adjusted OPS was 225—or put another way, 125 percent better than the league average player. This season’s adjusted OPS pace is 255. It would be another step toward Valhalla, but it’s one that Judge could take. He’s another year removed from his busted toe, after all.
Do you remember how Judge started in 2024? The old headline seemed relevant enough, because Judge looked quite mortal going into the first week of May. A season ago through the first 33 games, to pick a semi-arbitrary point, Judge was batting .197 with a .393 slugging percentage, six home runs and 10 double plays grounded into. He seemed unable to abide this toe injury.
Well, that was the low point. If you will, the toe point—which came about 11 months after June 2023, when Judge tore a ligament in his right big toe by jamming it into the right-field bullpen fence at Dodger Stadium. Pop went the gate, then pop went Judge’s gait. He missed the next 42 games and, overall, sat out 56 games that season.
The toe injury plainly put a dent in Judge’s production. Judge was better than 75 percent of the league’s hitters in 2023, which was great and fantastic, yet well below the immortal seasons he produced before and since. If not for Judge’s toe injury, he might have had another outsized year in 2023 and be working on his fourth consecutive immortal season.
Imagine what Judge’s final line in 2024 would look like if he didn’t limp through the first five weeks of the season. In that sense, the toe injury really does still linger over how we can judge Judge historically. Only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds put up at least three straight seasons this far above league average. Judge is Ruthian or Bondsian, but perhaps without some of the conditions that allowed each of them to take laps around the entire league.
Ruth no doubt was the best player of his era—as long as you exclude the Negro Leagues from equal consideration, as MLB did at the time. Bonds, too, was the best hitter of his time, even before it was said he started to abuse PEDs. But abuse them he did, and his stats have to be considered skewed in the context of comparing them to what batters produce today.
We’re only about 7 percent into the season, so perhaps Judge will cool off and regress into something less than he is now. If he doesn’t, we can always flip through the record book and look back at 2023, the year of the toe, for why Judge missed a four-peat of the immortals.
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