NEW YORK — Aaron Judge is all but certain to win his first American League batting crown, which at 6-foot-7 would make him the tallest ever to do it. Going into Saturday, he was hitting .330, giving the New York Yankees star a 17-point lead over second-place Jacob Wilson (.313) of the Athletics. It was a similar gap to the distance between Wilson and the seventh-place Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays, with two games remaining in the regular season.
No 6-6 player has won a batting title, but five players listed at 6-5 have captured the crown: Dave Parker (1977, 1978), John Olerud (1993), Frank Thomas (1997), Derrek Lee (2005) and Joe Mauer (2006, 2008, 2009).
Due to his height, Judge has one of the biggest strike zones of all time — behind perhaps only Tony Clark and Nate Freiman, both 6-8 first basemen and the tallest position players in MLB history.
“You have so much more area to cover,” said Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton, who, at 6-6, knows what he’s talking about. “You have a lot bigger of an area to attack.”
Yet Judge has learned to manage it by being one of the smartest, most well-prepared hitters in baseball — and he’s only getting better, his teammates and coaches say.
“His plate discipline is elite,” injured ace Gerrit Cole said.
“The most impressive thing is to be as refined and as accomplished a hitter as he is at that size,” manager Aaron Boone said. “The reality is that, over time, you haven’t seen that many really tall people be great hitters.”
To Judge, it’s simple.
“My strike zone has always been my strike zone,” he said. “If I think I can hit it, then I think it’s a strike.”
The 33-year-old, who broke into the majors at age 24 in 2016, credits time as his greatest teacher.
“Just from experience,” he said of his improvements over the years. “From seeing more and more pitchers over the years, more pitches. Just becoming a better hitter.”
Mauer remembered playing against a young Judge.
“You could kind of see it,” said Mauer. “He was a little bit more advanced as a hitter in understanding the zone and what his strengths were and what he wanted to accomplish. He’s got more ground to cover, but it’s something he’s had to deal with his whole life. He doesn’t know any different but he’ll probably keep doing the same thing that he’s doing.”
Different ends of the spectrum: Aaron Judge towers over Jose Altuve, 5-foot-6, the shortest player to win a batting title in the modern era. (Bob Levey / Getty Images)
Judge came close to nabbing his first batting title in 2022, finishing in second place with a .311 average. Last year, he hit .322 and was third.
He’s second in the AL in home runs this season with 52, behind Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh (60), the only player possibly standing between Judge and a third MVP award. Judge leads MLB in on-base percentage (.458), slugging percentage (.687) and OPS (1.145).
His approach is unique. While he swings-and-misses more than almost anybody in baseball (34.8 percent this season; 33.4 percent career), he doesn’t have an ugly chase rate (22.6 percent; 22 percent). While he strikes out a fair amount (23.5 percent this season; 27.4 percent career), he’s constantly among the league leaders in walk rate (18.4 percent; 16.4 percent).
And Judge has done it despite getting more low strikes that should have been balls called against him than anybody else. Since his first full season in 2017, 2.8 percent of the pitches thrown to him out of the zone and low have been called for strikes. The next-highest percentage belonged to Matt Carpenter at 2.6 percent (minimum 10,000 pitches).
“It’s super frustrating,” Stanton said. “But that’s a test in itself.”
Boone said that though Judge understands his strike zone so well and often refuses to chase, it leaves him open to bad calls.
“Guys that get a lot of bad calls are guys that control the strike zone because they lay off really close pitches,” the manager said. “Guys who don’t chase a lot or control the strike zone are going to get a pitch called often that (less talented hitters), like me, are chasing and swinging at and trying to touch.”
“He’s had his fair share of bad calls throughout the year,” Cole said, “like he does every year, and like everyone does. But he’s got a larger zone. He’s more prone to having pitches called wrong, I think, sometimes. Even though his discipline is renowned among the league, and he handles situations with class every time.”
Mauer and Stanton said it helped them scout umpires. For Stanton, it’s more about recognizing which umpires are outliers in terms of how they call particular pitches, such as borderline down-and-in sinkers.
“I know the game’s changed a little bit even since I’ve been out of it,” said Mauer, who retired after the 2018 season, “but you really start to learn the umpires and their zones and what you can really get and have a good feel and be confident of where exactly that’ll be. Certain guys might be in a little bigger zones, certain guys might be a little tighter. Having that knowledge and working with my pitchers (as a catcher), or having more looks at it, helped me out as a hitter in regards to what the zone looked like on any particular day.”
At 6-foot-7, Aaron Judge will be the tallest batting champ ever. Five 6-foot-5 players have won a batting crown. (Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)
The Yankees drafted Judge in the late first round in 2013. Yankees primary hitting coach James Rowson was the organization’s minor-league hitting coordinator from 2014 through 2016. Rowson said that back then, Judge “wasn’t as polished.”
“Most major leaguers, early in their career, you could do a lot to get them out,” Rowson said. “But he’s closed the gap on that rapidly. Right now, there’s not much you can do to get him out.”
Judge does lots of homework on the pitchers he’s set to face, including often studying team-issued iPads between at-bats while in the dugout, Rowson said.
“His quickness,” Rowson said. “His body control. There are things he does, and he does them so well — things that people don’t do well. He controls the body well, which allows him to kind of be slow. He can see the ball as well as anybody. His reaction time is quick to the baseball. There are parts of that that come together that make him so special. But to watch it from going back years, the growth is immeasurable, to some extent. But it doesn’t shock you because of who he is, and the work ethic and the drive. That’s never changed.”
Cole said that having an outsized strike zone can actually help Judge, too. It can mess with a pitcher’s command.
“He’s got a bigger nitro zone because he’s bigger than everybody else,” Cole said, “and he’s got better barrel accuracy than most people. (Pitchers) want to make sure that the pitch at the letters is another four inches higher than it would be on average. You want to make sure you recalibrate for that. You don’t often get hurt too much at the bottom (of the zone). Slowly bringing the ball up is important, but there is going to be more damage not getting pitches elevated enough than there is leaving pitches at the bottom of the zone.”
“His plate discipline is elite,” Gerrit Cole said of Judge, who has hit over .300 in three of the last four seasons. (Al Bello / Getty Images)
Stanton said one of the things that impresses him most about Judge is his desire to improve.
“Just never satisfied,” Stanton said. “Understanding that the best in the world fail seven out of 10 times. OK? That’s still too much failure. There could always be improvements. Even when you get hits, you could have been more on time. That’s nitpicking, but if you could always want to do better without driving yourself crazy, that’s how you win.”
Winning a batting title is a feat itself for Judge. But being the tallest to do it?
“It’s very impressive,” Cole said, “especially when you put it in that context.”
— The Athletic’s Dan Hayes contributed to this report.
(Top photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)