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Aaron Judge is off to one of the worst starts of his career. He looks like a shell of the player who hit 62 home runs in 2022 and 37 in an injury-shortened 2023. Once considered the best hitter in baseball, Judge is not performing like one of the better hitters on his team. After 24 team games, it's fair to wonder what's going on with the slugger.
Reasons for bad start to Aaron Judge's season
Aaron Judge is not in his best form. A sub-.200 batting average and only three home runs to his name thus far are well off his usual numbers. He has struggled pretty much consistently throughout the early going.
One of the biggest issues facing Judge's early season are just missing pitches he usually hits well. The timing is off, perhaps slightly caused by the interrupted and abbreviated Spring Training he had.
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He also had an abdomen injury that caused the interruption, and it may be lingering. His toe is also still requiring maintenance, although he returned last year in top form after the toe injury.
Judge's underlying metrics don't necessarily imply that he's been strictly unlucky, though he was very unlucky in his recent outing. He crushed a ball to center field that had an .880 expected batting average and would've been a home run in a couple of parks that resulted in an out.
Overall, his batting form is not good, but it should come around. He currently ranks in the 65th percentile ox xwOBA, which effectively measures the quality of contact and the overall plate appearances. This is far from an elite number, but it shows that he's hitting the ball better than one might assume.
His average exit velocity is still very high, sitting in the 95th percentile. Eventually, those batted balls like the one mentioned above will fall for hits. His barrel percentage, meaning how often he perfectly strikes the ball, is in the 80th percentile, so he's making decent contact.
He is also not really chasing. The numbers are this: 95th percentile for walk percentage and 84th percentile for chase percentage. These suggest that he's not swinging at bad pitches at all.
Therefore, once he stops fouling off pitches he usually hits, he will rebound quickly. Yesterday's win over the Oakland Athletics might be a turning point, as he hit a double hard in the first inning, crushed a flyout later on and was hit by a pitch.
The slash line of .180/.315/.348 is far from what anyone expected from Judge this year. But assuming he hasn't just completely forgotten how to hit, the other numbers bely an improvement soon. Early season struggles are very prevalent and not just towards Judge.
He's had brutal cold stretches before, but a player with a career OPS of .973 across nine seasons most likely did not just suddenly drop all the way off. Regression to the mean is coming, which is bad news for New York Yankees opponents.
