Aaron Judge has 60 home runs, a number that’s part milestone (he’s just one more away from breaking the American League record, in case you haven’t heard) and part legend (while 60 isn’t the MLB record for a season or even close). plus, it’s a number that has been burned into the hearts of baseball fans for generations). It’s a pretty big deal. Apparently.
He also plays at Yankee Stadium, a park with a notorious short right-side porch, which makes it easier to get “cheap” home runs than anywhere else, and you know where that’s going. Aaron Judge breaks home run marks? Must be the ballpark.
Allow us to rid you of this notion because it is not true. What Judge does has very little to do with Yankee Stadium.
1) Start Here: Richter hits the street better
We have all sorts of fancy numbers and images to get into. Let’s start with the absolute simplest. While it’s true that Judge has been better at home than he has been on the road throughout his career, that’s not the case in 2022 — or, you know, the season where he hit 60 home runs. He’s split his home runs evenly, but overall he’s hit far better away from the Bronx.
home
.312/.412/.677 – 1,089 OPS – 30 hrs
Street
.317/.433/.713 – 1,147 OPS – 30 hrs
Judge may have baseball’s best slugging percentage at home, but he also has baseball’s best slugging percentage on the road — at 113 points. Which of course undercuts it. This .713 slugging is tied for the 8th best season in the wild card era (min. 250 road plate appearances). It’s the Yankees’ best streetfighting season since before World War II.
Or maybe this is the best way to say it. Judge’s Road home runs, all 30 of them, by themselves, without a single bang in home pinstripes … would be in the top 20 home run seasons this year. It’s as many as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. The same goes for NL MVP nominee Nolan Arenado. It’s only halfway through the season of Judge.
2) Yankee Stadium isn’t the home game you think it is
Despite the park’s reputation, you’d find something interesting if you went to the Statcast park factors: Yankee Stadium is one of several parks that fall between the 12th and 17th. It’s an average hitter park.
The reason for this is that it’s extremely difficult to get extra base hits that aren’t home runs there; Only one park in the last three years has had fewer doubles and triples, and this year it’s only four. If that’s partly because some of those deep flyballs end up over the wall, that’s reflected in the numbers too; Right-handed Yankee Stadium has had a home run factor of 111 over the past three years, with 100 being the average. That’s a good place to hit a homer, but it’s hardly a runaway. It’s tied for 8th best. Only in 2022 is it even lower, only 15.
Well: let’s not pretend that the short porch doesn’t matter, because it certainly does. Yankee Stadium has seen 15 home runs this year that would not have happened at any other park, by far the most in baseball. (Minute Maid Park [9]Wrigley Field [5]and Dodger Stadium [5] are the only other parks with at least five.) This applies to any period; If you go back to 2016, that number is 90, a full 20 more than runner-up Houston.
That was a big help to Anthony Rizzo, who has three of those shots. It was nice for DJ LeMahieu to have one. But judge? He doesn’t have any of these – and we can show you what happened to all of his.
3) Most of his home runs come from most stadiums
Judge has 60 home runs. According to Statcast numbers, which look at the trajectory of all his long-hit balls and give you an estimate of what he would have if he played in a neutral park, his expected number is…59.9. Or 60. (Contrast that to Rizzo, who has 32 home runs but has an expected count of 28.)
Let’s divide his 60 into three groups.
53 out of 60: Visited 20 or more parks.
These are the big boys that very few parks would have held. Of the 53, there are 36 that would not have been in any of the major parks. Another 16 would have made it from 25 to 29 parks. Overall, nearly 90% of all Judge’s home runs would have occurred in at least two-thirds of baseball parks. That’s not what you would get from a home field that would turn flyballs into home runs.
But you can only see that by the balls that reached the stands. The judge actually hit two balls that would have come from 25 or more parks that didn’t home run… and one of those was actually at Yankee Stadium.
That happened in April when he hit a ball at 110.2 MPH, a ball that would have been out in 25 of the 30 stadiums… except Enrique Hernández kept it in the park:
In May he was one of the first casualties of the new, lower and higher Left Field Wall at Camden Yards. He might have ended up getting a double off from Spencer Watkins, but only because it was in Baltimore. It would have been a home run at 29 other parks — and Camden every single year leading up to 2022.
There are actually two other wannabe homes that would have walked out of 21 parks (doubles in Minnesota and home in New York) but wouldn’t have or wouldn’t have left the Bronx. Yankee Stadium isn’t really helping his home run this year. It might even hurt.
Since we’ve already covered 53 of his homers – plus four near homers – only seven remain. But they also have a story to tell.
4 out of 60: In 11 to 19 other parks.
Four times, Judge hit a home run that would have been hit in about half the majors’ stadiums. Here’s the trick though: Only one of them got to Yankee Stadium and that was his July 29th Grand Slam against Kansas City’s Jackson Kowar (out in 19/30 parks).
The other three hit the streets — one each in Boston, Tampa Bay, and Chicago — like this one against the White Sox in May (at 16/30 Parks).
3 out of 60: Visited 10 or fewer parks
If you want to get to the “cheap” ones, these are them. The two Yankee Stadium-best homers of his year came on July 30, when he hit the short porch against Kansas City (out in 3 of 30 parks) and on June 15, when he did the same against Tampa Bay (out in). 5 out of 30 parks). But one of them also got on the road when he hit his 51st homer of the season against the Angels in Anaheim.
All of which means: Of the seven home runs he has that didn’t clearly come out of more than two-thirds of the parks, four of those blasts didn’t even make it home. Going back to the Statcast numbers, Judge would have hit 61 homers if he played all of his games at Yankee Stadium…compared to 69 in Cincinnati or Colorado, or 65 in Milwaukee, or 64 in Texas. (Or just 48 in Detroit. Poor Tigers thugs.)
And that’s really because Judge doesn’t hit wall-scrapers like you’d expect from a hitter who’s at the top of the hard-hit leaderboards. In flyballs, his average distance of 349 feet is the highest in baseball.
If it feels like most of his blasts clear the fence with quite a bit of space… well, they do. See for yourself:
We looked up the 68 hitters with at least 20 home runs and checked how much their home runs over the fence, on average, were. Judge being second, not first, tells you a little bit about how strong CJ Cron is and a lot about what it’s like to play at Coors Field.
Highest average distance over the fence on home runs (min. 20 hrs)
52ft – CJ Cron (a Rockie)
46 feet – Aaron Richter
45 feet—Christian Walker
45 feet – Byron Buxton
44 feet – Isaac Paredes
44 feet – Joc Pederson
44 feet – Anthony Santander
Judge, it seems, has been stuck in 60 home runs for quite some time. If it happens in Toronto in the finale of this series, it would almost be appropriate. Nine of his last 12 home runs have hit the street. He’s better beaten on the street. He might play in somewhat friendly home park for home runs, a situation he’s exploited in the past. But that’s not what this year is about.
As Judge continues to chase team and league records, it’s not because of his park. That’s because he’s hitting baseballs just as well as anyone before him.