When we last checked in on Aaron Judge on April 24, the big slugger was scuffling, hitting just .180/.315/.348 through the Yankees’ first 24 games. He had homered just three times, and was approximating league-average production thanks mainly to his 15.7% walk rate. A smattering of fans had booed him on his own bobblehead day at Yankee Stadium, when he struck out in all four plate appearances, and the haters on social media were sure that he was washed. Since then, he’s turned his season around in emphatic fashion, destroying opponents’ pitching, taking his place atop a few key leaderboards, and helping New York assemble the AL’s best record at 42-19. Judge homered three times in a three-game series against the Giants at Oracle Park this past weekend while helping the Yankees to a sweep. It was the Linden, California native’s first time playing at the park of his favorite childhood team, and the ballpark he would have called home had Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner’s last-ditch effort to re-sign him in December 2022 not succeeded. He went yard twice off Jordan Hicks in Friday night’s 6-2 win, first with a three-run shot and later a solo one, then connected off Logan Webb for a two-run blast in a 7-3 win on Saturday; the 464-foot projected distance on that one made it his third-longest of the season. He merely went 2-for-3 with two singles, two walks, and two steals in Sunday’s 7-5 win, with Juan Soto filling the power vacuum by homering twice. Judge is now hitting .288/.417/.658, leading the majors in slugging percentage home runs (21), wRC+ (198), and WAR (4.0); he’s also in a virtual tie with Soto for the AL lead in on-base percentage. On Monday, he was named the AL Player of the Month, his seventh time winning that honor and his third consecutive May doing so.
In terms of both slugging percentage and wRC+, May was the best calendar month of his career:
| Month | Season | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | wRC+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 2024 | 122 | .361 | .479 | .918 | 277 | |
| Sept/Oct 2022 | 136 | .380 | .533 | .790 | 261 | |
| May 2023 | 97 | .342 | .474 | .882 | 252 | |
| July 2022 | 112 | .333 | .446 | .806 | 250 |
Judge’s 14 homers in May was one shy of his career high, set in September 2017. Even that line undersells the rampage he’s been on, because he’s stretched a similarly strong performance across another 53 plate appearances.
Here’s the split since my April 24 article:
| Aaron Judge Not-Quite-Arbitrary Endpoint Splits | Split | PA | HR | AVG | OBP | SLG | wRC+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Through April 23 | 108 | 3 | .180 | .315 | .348 | 95 | |
| Since April 24* | 164 | 18 | .362 | .485 | .869 | 267 |
That .869 SLG — which Judge actually matched in two overlapping spans, the first one beginning on April 23 and running through June 1 — is his highest mark for a 37-game stretch, surpassing an .840 mark in a wraparound stretch from September 9, 2017 to April 19, 2018, or an .824 mark for July 14 to August 26 in 2022 if we’re limiting spans to single-season ones. Meanwhile his 1.354 OPS is the highest of any such span, outdoing a 1.346 mark from August 19 to September 30 in 2022.
