Can Aaron Judge Hit .400?

C'mon. No. Unless maybe

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If you like baseball, you probably love a good context. Without context, baseball’s numbers look like the Silly Putty versions of whatever you used to doodle on the back of your notebook when you were supposed to be studying geography but wound up figuring out batting averages and ERA instead.

Context matters this season, too. It’s one reason why I think we should all take a moment and acknowledge what Aaron Judge is doing. It is actually less interesting to me to wonder whether Judge can keep up this pace — Of course he can’t! Unless possibly he can — than to delve into just how far outside the MLB norm he is performing right now.

As I type this, Judge is batting .423 through 34 games, at a time when the league-wide qualified batting average is .242. He’s hitting nearly 200 points higher than Joe Replacement. And he’s played in every Yankees game.

That comes with a .513 on-base percentage and a .777 slugging percentage, because, after all, Judge has already hit 11 homers. It all works out to a tidy 1.290 OPS (that’s on-base plus slugging percentage), and for purposes of pure fun, Ted Williams finished with a 1.287 OPS in 1941 — the last time anyone in MLB history managed to hit .400 over an entire season. Ted batted .406; the league-wide average was .273.

And even if we consider the whole context, including the fact that you can’t really compare these two when Williams’ numbers comprise an entire campaign and Judge has only been going for about a month now, what Judge is doing is still unreal. Did you know that entering Monday, he led the next-best MLB hitter by 73 points?

He separated by 73 points from the second-best hitter over barely a month. (It was his teammate, Paul Goldschmidt.) That’s in the cold, crappy month of April. At a time when the early league-wide batting average is trending right in line with recent years that have produced some of the lowest averages in the post-1900s era of the sport.

Not human! But probably still doomed.

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There are plenty of reasons why Judge isn’t likely to hit .400 for a season. It’s a long season — that’s the first thing. A writer for The Associated Press, Noah Trister, came up with a quality look at the other reasons that explain how hard it is, but here are the problems in a thimble:

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1.) Judge strikes out too much, about 20% of the time. If you whiff that often, you need to hit .500 on the balls you do put in play in order to stay at .400 overall. (Teddy Ballgame struck out only 27 times in all of 1941 — a 4.4% whiff rate. Mind boggling.)

2.) You need to do some little things, like beating out infield grounders for singles, to keep a batting average so high over an extended period. Judge has been hitting .500 on the balls he puts in play so far this season, but his career BABIP (batting average on balls in play) is closer to .350 — still absurdly high, but not high enough for this holy grail.

3.) Like I said, the season is long. Williams appeared in 143 games in 1941, George Brett in 117 games when he hit .390 in 1980, and Tony Gwynn in 110 games in the strike-shortened season of 1994, when he batted .394. More games are not your friend when you’re trying to make history, unless your name is Cal Ripken Jr.

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So, you know — not likely. On the other hand, we should have absolutely no problem enjoying what is right in front of us. In his last two full seasons (2022 and ‘24), Aaron Judge hit 62 and 58 home runs, respectively, while batting well over .300 despite striking out quite a bit — and if anything, he is raising the bar here in 2025.

There’s nothing more fun than taking a relatively tiny sample size and extrapolating it specifically in order to flirt with the MLB record books. I never get tired of it. But watching Judge walk up to the plate right now has to be a very close second.

Don’t miss a chance. (That should be no problem — the Yankees are on national TV all the time.) My advice is to watch Judge here, now, while he stands in the absolute prime of his prime. If there’s another level for him, I can’t imagine it, but already I’ve been wrong at least six times while trying to project his ceiling. That’s the beauty of unicorns.