MLB spring training games are officially back in full swing. With that, there is excitement about baseball's best players and how they project in 2025. And if you're a New York Yankees fan, there's a lot of good news regarding the most prolific power hitter in baseball, Aaron Judge. I want to review some key analytics from 2024 and explain why I think some projections for Judge are a bit low, even though they are phenomenal. Let's dig in.
Looking at Baseball Savant, Judge obliterated the competition in several key categories that left fans in awe. From expected stats to stats that make you worry certain things were good luck (i.e., BABIP, wOBA, wind, poor defense, etc.), take a look at these numbers.
100th percentile (the best of the best):
- Batting Run Value (99)
- xwOBA (.479)
- xSLG (.723)
- Average exit velocity (96.2 mph)
- Barrel% (26.9%)
- Hard-Hit% (61.0%)
- BB % (18.9)
99th percentile:
- Bat speed (77.2 mph)
98th percentile:
- xBA (.310)
97th percentile::
- Launch angle sweet-spot% (40.8%)
- Chase% (18.7%)
For starters, a 99 Batting Run Value is insane. For reference, next-best on the list was Juan Soto with a mark of 79, followed by Shohei Ohtani (73) and Bobby Witt Jr. (57). We love to look at "expected stats" vs. regular stats in today's game because they measure the actual skill of a player more accurately.
Example: Judge hits a ground ball to the third baseman. The third baseman appears to have a routine play but bobbles the ball in a way that makes it go down as a hit rather than an error. He makes that play nine times out of ten, so Judge's fortune awards him a higher batting average on paper than he should have, if we're being fair.
Another example: Judge smokes a ball 110 mph off the bat and an elite center fielder robs him of a home run. The batting average goes down, but we all know he got unlucky regarding how close he was to a homer. Make sense? Expected stats remove those instances and give you a more accurate sense of a player.
So, when you have expected stats like a .723 slugging percentage vs. an actual .701 slugging percentage, like Judge recorded in 2024, it indicates that for as good as he was, his slugging percentage should have been even higher. Elsewhere, his xwOBA was slightly higher (.479) vs. his actual wOBA (.476). His 218 wRC+ led all of baseball, compared to the next-best mark of 168 by Witt Jr.
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Why are Judge's 2025 projections too low?
Another good luck/bad luck stat is Batting Average on Balls in Play, or BABIP. A league average BABIP is typically around .300: Basically, you put the ball in play, and 30 percent of the time you're getting a hit in today's game. Whenever you have a mark well above or below .300, you can look at specific expected stats and determine if that player is in line to bounce back or regress to the mean.
Let's also keep in mind that when you have a hard-hit ball (any baseball put in play with an exit velocity of 95 mph+), your average batting average skyrockets to .500. So if you ever see a BABIP below .300, and a player with an above-average hard-hit rate, that's one indication that positive results are quickly on the way.
Judge's BABIP in 2024 was .367. Is regression coming? No, not when you lead the league in hard-hit rate at an incredible 61 percent. Looking at ZiPS for Judge, Fangraphs projects him for the following statistics:
2025 ZiPS: .282/.409/.600, 46 HR,102 RBIs, .323 BABIP, 180 wRC+
Let's keep in mind these are still MVP-level projections. The point is there is no indication that he should slow down. Juan Soto is gone, and although that may account for fewer RBI without Soto's elite on-base percentage in front of him, there's still not much to go off of to project Judge lower than what he was doing just a few months ago. Yankees fans are in for another magical season from their captain.