Aaron Judge projected future dominance shows Yankees have truly squandered his prime

From 2017 through 2021, New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge was arguably the best hitter in all of baseball. From 2022 onward, the three-time MVP has been far and away the game's most productive hitter, and anyone who disagrees is either trying to frame the argument through a ton of qualifiers or is simply being disingenuous.

Judge is entering his age-34 season, bringing us to the point where it is fair to wonder when exactly Father Time will begin to play a role. It's not uncommon for sluggers to fall off a cliff in their mid-30s, though we've never truly seen a slugger like Judge before.

FanGraph's Ben Clemens took a look at the near future for Judge in an attempt to see if we're anywhere close to his reign ending. To do this, he ran some simple projections for 2026 and 2027 to compare Judge with the next 11 hitters in the game, and then ran some scenarios to figure out how far Judge would need to fall - and how far the others would need to rise - in order for the six-foot-seven behemoth to be dethroned.

The results were striking. But for Yankees fans, they were also sobering. Not because of anything having to do with Judge, but instead because this exercise fully underscores how much of an advantage he has given the franchise, and how little they've accomplished with that leg up.

The Yankees have squandered Aaron Judge's prime, as projections show him continuing to lap the field

To add some context to Clemens' experiment, what he did was use the Marcel projection system, which is one of the most basic prediction systems out there. It takes three years' worth of data, weighted by recency, and throws in some regression to the mean that gets weighted more heavily with age. From there, Clemens played with the numbers to figure out how far Judge would need to fall to reach the others or how high the others would need to rise in order for them to surpass his 2027 projection.

For example, in order for Judge to have the same projected wOBA as Bryce Harper's .361 forecasted mark in 2027, he would need to post a .217 wOBA in 2026 for his 2027 projection to fall from its current .430 mark down to where Harper lies. For reference, Oswaldo Peraza posted a .214 wOBA between the Yankees and Angels last season. So Judge would have to be as bad as Peraza for the entirety of 2026 for him to be projected to hit like Bryce Harper in 2027. Needless to say, that will never happen.

As far as catching Judge, the only hitter with any sort of shot would be Shohei Ohtani. Even so, Ohtani would need to be better than Judge ever has in order to catch up. A .481 wOBA in 2026 is what Ohtani would need to record to catch Judge in the 2027 projections, which would be five points higher than Judge's career-high of .476 in 2025, and 48 points higher than Ohtani's career high of .433 in 2023. Only by the slimmest of margins is that actually plausible.

We've seen just how much heavy lifting Judge actually does and how many flaws his greatness has papered over in the Yankees' lineup, but that's not the point. The point that should make you really mad is that the difference between Judge and every other top hitter in this game is so gigantic, yet the Yankees have not capitalized on this seismic advantage.

When he wanted them to go after Harper in 2018, they declined. When they had the opportunity to dip into an all-world free-agent shortstop class ahead of the 2022 season, they instead signed Isiah Kiner-Falefa to hold the seat warm for Anthony Volpe. The list goes on and on.

What these projections show is that had the Yankees truly invested in surrounding Judge with high-end talent, they could have built a dynasty that rivaled even their own late '90s run. Instead, we're left here wondering at what point Judge stops being otherworldly and starts being a mortal, and if he'll still be ringless by the time that happens. The Yankees have long had the biggest on-field advantage in baseball, and to date, they haven't capitalized on it.

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