Aaron Judge is having an incredible season, but there’s one way in which his achievements are actually being underestimated by modern statistical methods.
Rich already posted on the incredible season Aaron Judge is having, but there’s one way in which his season is actually being underestimated by modern statistical methods.
In recent decades, there’s been a shift away from many standard statistics for measuring a baseball player’s value, to a number of new formulations — one of the most prominent being WAR (Wins Above Replacement), which in theory is supposed to measure how many more wins a team gets by having a given player at a position relative to just slotting in a typical player.
This season, Judge is the clear leader in this category, with 9.6 WAR — or nearly one win higher than his competitor for Most Valuable Player, Angles pitching/hitting sensation Shohei Ohtani. But a closer look at the numbers shows that Judge’s WAR is all based on his offensive production. His defensive WAR is -0.1, which would suggest to somebody just looking at this narrow statistic, that he’s an average (even slightly below average) fielder.
Anybody who has watched him, however, knows that he’s actually an elite right fielder, whose height has enabled him to rob home runs and his incredible arm strength has allowed him to gun out runners (though as his reputation has grown, fewer baserunners are willing to challenge him). For several years at right field, he was among the best in the league when it came to saving runs. In his injury plagued 2018 and 2019 seasons, when he missed out on about 50 games a year, he recorded defensive WAR of 1.3 and 1.8, respectively. So has his fielding totally deteriorated? Actually, quite the contrary.
Part of the issue is that he has played DH over 20 times, a way of giving him rest without having to take him out of the lineup. But the same was true last season, when though down from earlier seasons, he still had a positive defensive WAR of 0.5 — and he had 19 DH appearances in 2018.
In fact, what happened this year, is that due to injuries and underperformance of other players, Judge has had to play a majority of his season out of position at center field (through 142 games, he played 76 at center). The fact that Judge was able to shift to center allowed the Yankees to maintain a more flexible defensive alignment and better lineup. If we’re speaking objectively, the fact that Judge was able to change positions and be perfectly respectable was a huge asset to the Yankees. It no doubt makes him more valuable than another right fielder who was not capable of making the switch to center. And yet, while he is an elite right fielder, he is merely a competent center fielder, so he ends up with a slightly negative defensive rating, because the popular metric is unable to give credit to his versatility. If it were, Judge’s season would look even more statistically insane.