Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1054: An Aaron Judge Appreciation Podcast

Episode Date: May 6, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s preseason predictions, voiding contracts, and Matt Albers’ most recent close calls with his first career save, then discuss the contact-rate improvements of Aaron Judge and Joey Gallo, with an emphasis on Judge’s performance so far and potential for superstardom. Audio intro: Tom Verlaine, "Cry Mercy, Judge" Audio outro: Robyn […]

Cry mercy, church, this church is gone, mercy, cry mercy. I think the verdict's coming in. I guess you got it some sweet tooth Hello and welcome to episode 1054 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I realize now that we have the exact same introductory words for this podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, talking as always with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. Yeah, I've honed those words over a thousand episodes before you got here and started delivering them yourself. So it's really a Darwinian process.

I really cut out all the strange things that you would say at the beginning of a podcast. So yeah, we were just talking before we started recording about your boy, Keon Broxton, who is starting to hit. And if he does deliver and you say he's been one of the best hitters in baseball since the middle of last month, which he started terribly. But your record's looking pretty good, right? Who were your guys before the season? You had Broxton, you had Paxton, you had Hanager. Paxton, you had Hanager, you were like the low man on Gesellman, not because you hate Gesellman or anything, but just because people kept asking you if he was suddenly the best pitcher in baseball and you kept saying no. So four for four on those guys so far. I don't remember

any other Jeff Sullivan preseason predictions that really stood out. I guess maybe you were higher on the A's and the Angels than most people, I remember. I don't know if there's anything else you were flogging particularly hard. So we'll see. We'll see on Broxson if he actually continues to hit. He still does strike out a bunch. But one thing that I do want to make clear,

and this came up in my Friday chat as well, is I know that people love to look at other people who make predictions and maybe people want to give credit or cast dispersions too depending on how things go but i i would like to insist no matter what keon broxton does this season i don't think that i need or deserve any credit for that because he's i i didn't say i think keon broxton is going to be good because i see something in him no i saw that he was yeah right this is and it's kind of the position same with paxton too yeah exact same thing with paxton with paxton it's easier to see

because no matter what his numbers might have been earlier last year he was throwing more strikes than ever he was missing bats and he was throwing super hard like james paxton is not having a breakout james paxton broke out last season so right I think it's more a matter of if it was the start of last season and I thought I had James Paxton he's going to break out that would be something because that would be identifying something impacts and that you think is going to lead to success but yeah I think that the issue it's not really much of an issue I guess but the semantics of it is with the information we have now I don't think that people, including

myself, are any better at predicting players who are going to get better. It's more being quicker to identify players who have gotten better. And that's what Paxton did. I could tell from his first last year, I think in his first start in San Diego, he gave up like nine runs or something in three innings. ZRA was terrible. But even in that one start, I was like, oh, he's throwing strikes and he's throwing hard. This is very encouraging. And so that was for me, that was one start where I saw Paxton, he was throwing differently and he had some control and velocity. I thought he's going to be good. And that's all it took with Broxton. That wasn't me going out on a limb. That was he was statistically a great defender in centerfield and he was statistically hitting the ball harder, more consistently than almost anybody else so uh now granted he hasn't started this year so well but i i would like to deflect any no matter what kian broxton becomes if he's a good player that's not me that's kian broxton and statcast that made him good i just had to write about him yeah right that's what i always say about breakout picks either they are singling out players who already broke out and maybe just people didn't notice, or they are making a real attempt to pick players who have not been good yet, in which case they're probably just wrong.

Or often they're just like a former top prospect who everyone thought was going to be good but hasn't been good yet. And so you kind of hope that maybe he will be good finally. So, yeah, I don't think there's all that much value to that exercise over and above just looking at projections it's the same with all the hanniger stuff where it's like oh you fangraffs is high on mitch hanniger well fangraffs is high on mitch hanniger because he made a swing change and beat the crap out of the ball in triple a last season right if you could say hey if this guy changed his swing in this way right be great right exactly which i guess is what baseball teams do.

That's what they try to do. Right. So if you can, if you can look at a player and go through his, like parse the player's mechanics, hitting or pitching and say, this is what the player needs to do. And I think he's going to be good if he does it,

then that's great. That, that shows a skill that I think a baseball team could use. So maybe it's like Eric Hosmer, you could be great if you just did this one weird thing which was not hit everything on the ground yeah otherwise yeah it's it's just picking up on things after the fact yeah you want to update the thing we talked about on the email show about voiding contracts we got a an email from matt one of our many matt named listeners who had a couple

counter examples to what we were talking about? Yeah, so we were talking about voiding contracts and how it's very difficult to do and one of the I think the only case we could find that really, again, googling I didn't find it so much as somebody else found it and I found what they found was Sean Chacon who had his contract voided because

he choked his general manager repeatedly which seems like the wrong thing to do and especially the wrong person to do it too so uh over to sean jacone which i think resembles his save effectiveness in the latter part of his career so we got an email that reminded us i guess of the the case of aaron boone with the yankees who should not have been playing basketball, but did tour his ACL missed year. Also, Ron Gant, who in 1994 was on a dirt bike and he broke some stuff. And the Braves cut Ron Gant right after signing him to a five and a half million dollar contract. So what happened with Boone and Gant 10 years earlier, to the best of my knowledge, is that they were both playing on one year contracts.

They both got hurt during the offseason and so because they weren't supposed to be doing what they were doing the teams successfully i believe converted those guaranteed contracts into non-guaranteed contracts which is effectively what an arbitration awarded contract is when you have a non-guaranteed contract then if you drop that player during spring training then that player is entitled you have a non-guaranteed contract, then if you drop that player during spring training, then that player is entitled to only a fraction of the contract's worth. Depending on when the player is released, then the player is entitled to either a 30 days termination pay or 45 days termination pay.

Essentially, Boone and Gant were dropped for roughly a sixth of what their contracts were initially supposed to be worth because they violated the contract. That's not exactly the same as voiding a deal. They just had the contracts converted in a way that certainly with Madison Bumgarner doesn't apply because he's signed for multiple years. And also his team does not want to get rid of him because he is Madison Bumgarner and he will be fine. But there is some form of longer precedent here. Mm-hmm. Okay. And I just wanted to update. Also, we talked earlier in the week about Matt Albers and Ryan Webb and their endless pursuit of saves. And if Albers doesn't get

one this week, I just don't know if it's ever going to happen because he came so close. This week, Sean Kelly has been unavailable. He was sort of the de facto Nationals closer in the absence of other pitchers who were unavailable. And so I think it was on Wednesday, I got a tweet. Someone was saying, hey, Albers is warming up in the eighth and the Nationals have a one-run lead. And I tuned in and I was just on the edge of my seat watching this. And Jacob Turner had pitched three innings, I think three scoreless innings, and the Nationals were up by one run going into the ninth. Albers had been warming. Dusty Baker

instead chose to bring Turner out there for a fourth inning and Albers continued to warm. Turner out there for a fourth inning And Albers continued To warm Turner got the first two Outs then he gave up a double so the Tying run was on second with Two outs a righty I think Chris Owings was coming up and Albers Was ready for a righty and I

Thought this is it this is the moment he's just gonna Have to come in and get one out Nope Dusty Baker let Turner Finish the game go for full Innings and Albers just stood there watching. And then I think it was Thursday he had another chance because he pitched a scoreless eighth. I think he entered with a three-run lead, so easy eighth. And instead of letting him come back out for the ninth, Baker went to Joe Blanton, who promptly gave up a home run

and was removed in favor of any Romero. So any Romero ended up getting the save. So this is just, I don't know how to explain it. These are situations where the typical pitcher just lucks into a save, whether he's the closer or not. And with Albers, it just comes up whatever other reliever is in the bullpen at that time. So I don't know what to say, but we got really close this week. A couple of close calls and thrills for watchers of the Matt Albers and Ryan Webb pursuit of the all-time games finished without

a save record. Do you want Albers to have a save? I don't know. When he had a close call last year and I was watching it and describing watching it, Sam asked me how I felt while I was watching it because I always say I'm not sure whether I want it to happen or not. And so Sam said, well, this was the moment when it could happen. So were you rooting for it or rooting against it? And I still couldn't quite tell. I think I was rooting for it in the moment. I think when I'm watching it and I'm seeing him as a human being on the mound, I'm rooting for him to do it just because I want him to succeed. When I think of it abstractly as just this quest that I enjoy following, then I kind of like that it's still out there. So when I remember that Matt Albers is a human being and has hopes and dreams, and maybe some of those hopes and dreams are saving a game at some point in his career, then I kind of pull for him.

All right, that's all I got. Okay, so it's Friday, which means it's my topic, right? So on this podcast, let's talk about Daniel Discalso. I'm kidding. We're not going to talk about Daniel Discalso. Aaronaron judge episode i would like to have an episode focused on aaron judge just by coincidence you uh wrote about him and joey gallo which was perfect unintentional synergy for this podcast however i would like to have an aaron judge episode because i think there has been there's been no bigger individual story right so far in the season i don't think no been no bigger individual no no bigger individual and i guess it would be easy to

chalk this up to maybe yankees bias because oh why why aaron judge a podcast instead of joey gallo podcast well i can tell you it's because aaron judge has been a hell of a lot better than joey gallo in this season yep so yeah i think this is going to be, I would hope, that it's just going to be sort of an open-ended conversation about the potential blossoming of a Major League Baseball superhero. Because Aaron Judge has been written about several times by everybody. He had one of the better first months for a rookie, if not just in general, ever. He ranks among the Baseball League lead in pretty much every metric you could imagine. I will even throw out that right now,

and this will get into the conversation a little later, right now among all qualified outfielders, he's even second among players in defensive runs saved behind only Kevin Kiermaier, ahead of Jason Hayward, Alex Gordon, and weirdly, Nuri Aoki. So I don't know what's going on there. Small sample sizes in any case. All right. Nori.

Aaron Judge. Let's talk about Aaron Judge. Why don't you, while we're here, why don't you just kind of quickly go over the article that you wrote, except skip the Gallop parts. Yeah, as we were talking, Trout and Judge are tied for the Major League lead with 2.2 war, according to Fangraphs. Yeah, so I was writing about the two in tandem because their

stories are somewhat similar in that they are large human beings who have incredible power and in the past struck out too much to unleash that power and this year have not so travis sacek has written about him a couple times, talked to him in spring training, got Judge's thoughts on what he was going to do differently. And I should say that Judge's strikeout problems have always been less acute than Gallo's and are still less acute than Gallo's. Like, Judge struck out close to half of the time in his 95 plate appearance debut in the big leagues last year. But if you look at his minor league strikeout rates, they're in the 20s maybe in the mid to high 20s like not great but for a guy who hits with his power perfectly acceptable and that's been what he is this season too so sounded from what Travis said that he made some mechanical changes designed to have his bat spend more time in the strike zone, make more contact, also studied other

big hitters and watched video of guys like Chris Bryant and Giancarlo Stanton and made some unspecified mechanical adjustments based on that. So if you look at both of those guys, but particularly Judge, they are on track. And of course course it's very early and this will probably change but they're on track for what would be a couple of the largest single season improvements in contact rate that we have seen in the pitch fx slash stat cast era they have dramatically cut down on their contact in judges case he is swinging much more selectively he's just not swinging At balls outside the strike zone the way he was before In Gallo's case he still Is in both of their cases they

Are making much more contact on Balls in the strike zone and With these guys that's kind of All they needed to do because obviously The strength and the power was not An issue the only issue was That they didn't get to apply that power enough Because when they swung they missed So now they're not missing and they're awesome so and i kind of wrote about them

in the context of the sky high home run rate which we are all fascinated by and we're if anything on track for an even huger home run year than we were last year. And so home runs are everywhere. Marwin Gonzalez is hitting home runs every day. And home runs, I've seen the sentiment expressed that home runs are getting kind of boring, that it's sort of overkill, that it just doesn't feel like as much of an accomplishment or an achievement when someone hits a ball over the fence.

But when Gallo and Judge do it, it is still appointment viewing these are highlights you have to watch these are guys you want to tune in to see because they hit the ball so incredibly far and it's they're such huge humans that they're just fun to watch it's the spectacle of sheer raw power that you are not getting from marwin gonzalez so these guys are keeping home runs fun even though they've become more common yeah and uh just so people understand uh joey gallo of course very very strong he has struck out 38 of the time this season which is crazy aaron judge is all the way down to 26 look at that through any other more i don't know detailed

metric and all the numbers hold up judges as you said swinging more selectively swinging through the ball a lot less often so gallowed looks better judge looks like he is an mvp candidate if not the best player in baseball right now so if you look at the exit speed numbers they are what you think they are if you look at just the percentage of balls above 95 miles per hour that these guys have hit no one has hit a higher percentage of their batted balls that fast or faster than judge and gallo in the stat cast era and if you go to like the extreme elite level of 110 miles per hour stanton is still the king but just just barely over Judge. And then Gallo is third, but by a long way. So really, Stanton and Judge are complete outliers in their ability to hit the ball extremely, extremely hard as opposed to very hard on a consistent basis.

Satcast helping us better define our terms. There are obvious, I guess, Miguel Sano parallels to be drawn here because Sano also shines when you look at Satcast. But Sano has seemingly maybe a greater contact problem than Judge does, which is an absurd thing to say. But it is where we are. Sano has bigger defensive problems and Sano has bigger potential work ethic, I don't know, motivation problems that have been whispered about in the past. And with Judge, it's interesting, kind of similar to Gary Sanchez, who used to be the big thing on the Yankees, but oh my God, look at where we are now. They both came to the majors and have exceeded their minor league power numbers, which is one of those things that you or anyone would have looked at to say they're just hitting the ball for more power than they should. But I mean, day and age with the stack s information we have especially with judge

it is not an exaggeration to compare his raw power or game power to jean carlos stanton who is more powerful than anyone and so when we have the information that we have when you see judge just flicking his wrists and hitting he has the fastest home run hit in the stack s era he just hit it what the other week 119.4 miles per hour or something which is just an absurdity i looked at it i watched the highlight it looked like a gapper off the bat and then it just never came down until it eventually did 715 feet away yeah that's the thing with stanton you've gotten posts i've gotten posts out of stanton home runs where just he hits them in a different way than anyone else. So he'll hit them on trajectories or at angles

where no other hitter has been strong enough to hit the ball at those angles and trajectories and still have it go over the fence. And Judge, it seems like, will be in that same class where he will just hit home runs that don't look like anyone else's. Yeah, and they just come so easy to him. It's interesting, you mentioned, and I guess Travis Sotick wrote in his article about Judge watching like Chris Bryant and Giancarlo Sando,

because they have two very different swings. Bryant is trying to put everything in the air, and Stanton, kind of more surprisingly and less in line with the modern trends, he kind of hits the ball horizontally, and he gets so little launch angle on his home runs, but it doesn't matter because he hits the balls as hard as any human could possibly do.

So in a sense, Judge has kind of maybe benefited from flattening his swing plane a little bit because he hits the ball so hard. But I think it would have been really easy even a year ago. You see Judge come up. He was not good for the month and change he spent in the majors. He wasn't a disaster, but he was clearly kind of behind his opponent striking out all the time and he had a couple home runs it was easy to look at him and think oh if this guy could just put it together like any other big beefy power hitter from the minors he could be a superstar well all

of a sudden we're confronted with the possibility that yeah of course it's been a month and a part of a week but he topped out in the minors with 20 home runs in a year he's already got 13 against the best competition he's ever faced he's made these insane adjustments home runs come so easy he's so strong to what extent is it an overreaction to think we we could really be looking at the birth of a superstar of a generational player yeah i mean the things that we're talking about contact rate and exit speed those are like the first things you can look at with a hitter and say, this means something. And so in that sense, what he has done seems to be completely real. Can he keep doing it as the league adjusts?

We don't know for sure. That's kind of what you're asking. So I've been getting tweets over the last couple of days. I've been getting tweets over the last couple of days. This one guy has been asking me about Trout versus Judge, of course, just because he was talking about like if Billy Epler were like a secret Yankees agent and if he offered Trout back to me as the shadow Yankees GM in exchange for Judge, would I do it or what would I have to add to that to do it? And I basically dismissed it out of hand because it's crazy. I mean, even as great as Judge has been this year, Trout has been equally good. And Trout is almost the same age. That's the thing. Like, Gallo's still 23. Judge is 25. And Trout and trout is 25 trout is an older 25 but the difference is not that great and you know trout has been doing this for five years and judge has been doing

it for five weeks so obviously you wouldn't do that but if you just want to talk about their performance so far as i mentioned at the beginning of this segment, they have been equal to this point. So how close to equal will they be going forward? I don't know. Like, obviously, the power is totally real. And so the only question is, I guess, whether the contact is real, whether he can keep making contact as consistently as he has. And the fact that he has not only made more contact in the zone, but has also seemingly all of a sudden learned to lay off of bad pitches, which he could probably hit hard anyway, because he's Aaron judge. I mean, I think, yeah,

like in the same way that we were talking about Eric themes earlier in the season and how, what he was doing seemed to be pretty real, you can say the same about Aaron Judge. And if he is this good, then he's definitely one of the most compelling and eye-catching players in baseball and potentially one of the best, too. Clearly, when people talk about numbers that stabilize fast and things like contact rate do, in theory, stabilize fast, but we still don't know where Aaron Judge's contact rate is going to stabilize because players are just constantly adjusting back and forth. So, you know, I don't know what his true talent, I guess, contact rate is, but I'll throw out there Jean-Carlos Tanton, who was the easy comparison judge even before, has a career contact rate of 68 percent that is against an average of roughly 79 or 80 percent aaron judge this year so far is up to 72 percent he's struck out a little less often than stanton has over his career stanton of course broke in when he was like 20 years old and judge is a half decade older than that right so even now stanton is only like two

years older than judges and i guess i'll throw out just for the hell of it that stanton is also making a career high contact rate this season for some reason he's also having his career worst offensive look i don't know what's going on with john carlton's hand it's fine it doesn't matter stanton has been a superstar one of the things that maybe the only thing that's really held stanton back is that he's gotten hurt so often that he hasn't been able to put together too many full seasons and you wonder it's only been again this month I don't know how many times I have to keep repeating it's only been a month Mike Trout's still the best player in the world this will just turn into another Mike Trout appreciation episode I guess but Aaron Judge it no longer seems far-fetched to think he could be

Giancarlo Stanton and he could be a healthier version. Yeah, which we've been waiting for a long time to see what a healthy Stanton could do. And maybe we won't, but we got the next best thing, it seems like. And it's kind of incredible watching him now that Judge was not that highly rated a prospect. He was a top 100 guy, but not anywhere close to the top of the top 100. I think entering this year, Baseball America had him at 90. Baseball Perspectives had him at 63. MLB.com had him at 45. Of course, Gallo was a top 10 guy, I think a consensus top 10 guy as recently as last spring. And you wonder what the

difference was. I guess Judge is a couple inches taller, seemed even maybe less likely that he'd be able to control the strike zone and make contact often enough, but his raw power seems to be at least equal to Gallo's, if not greater. And yeah, I mean, we were just talking about the ability to predict whether someone will make an adjustment before he's actually done so, or to say that he should. A lot of scouts and prospect people looked at Aaron Judge and certainly didn't see this coming and it's happened all of a sudden. So like there evidently was a mechanical change that it was possible for Aaron Judge to make and completely corral his strikeout issues almost overnight and I don't

know that that many people saw that happening yeah and as you mentioned even in the minors his strikeout rate was not out of control it's just he didn't quite have the power numbers you would have expected but it seems like that would have been something easy for scouts to pick up on i can't imagine that judge is hitting the ball harder now maybe he's hitting the ball more consistently now but i imagine he's he's long been there's a at the top of judges fan graphs player page there is a box of scouting report okay so it turns out this is actually two years old so i don't know how useful this is. But even two years ago, Judge was given on the 20 to 80 scouting scale. He was given a very low hit tool, but with a future rating of 50, future game power rating of 60. That seems like it's wrong.

Future raw power rating of 70. That seems like it's wrong. They're both 80s. How could Judge, like if Judge is a 70, how could anyone possibly be an 80? What would that look like? So maybe he has taken some kind of step forward the last couple years that has allowed him to tap into this. I don't know.

Future speed rating of 45, whatever, field 50, throws 60. So even back then, he was like, this guy could be a capable defensive outfielder with a good arm, some speed, and big power. Well, he has exceeded his power that much is beyond clear his uh his ability to make contact has improved and i guess maybe we can now transition a little bit into ken rosenthal wrote about judge the other day wednesday or thursday i don't remember which one he's just adding on to the pile of people who have written about aaron judge and that was an article about

mostly what the yankees saw in Judge, why they drafted him, why they believed in him. I love Ken Rosenthal's work. Great dude. Great writer. He does a good job of blending reporting and analysis. I think maybe sometimes you can be a little too hasty to have someone compared to Derek Jeter make up

just as it's hasty to compare Aaron Judge to Mike Trout on the field. It might be hasty to draw parallels between Judge and Jeter off the field, but whatever, I've never met Derek Jeter or Aaron Judge. But it was an article about how the Yankees really liked Judge. Even before he was drafted, how well he was able to deal with the adversity he faced last year in the majors when he struck out almost literally half the time that he batted. He seems very receptive to making changes.

He seems very level-headed. I will point out that however much the Yankees loved Judge, they still did not use him with their first draft pick in 2013. They drafted Eric Jagielo. Jagielo? I don't know. Shigilo, I think. I think it's Shigilo. Well, I'll tell you what. His name is not bold on baseball reference,

so for now I don't even know how that's pronounced. They drafted somebody else who they ultimately traded in a non-prospect trade for Aroldis Chapman. You remember all that. So they still waited six more picks after Gigallo to draft Aaron Judge, who they then drafted in front of Ian Clark. And so they didn't love Judge the most in that draft. didn't love Judge the most in that draft. So whenever you have a piece that's written about an overachieving major leaguer, I think you are then selective for positive coverage. I'm sure Gigallo had a really good makeup too, because they would have interviewed him as well. In any case, it seems like it's hard to find anything written negative about Aaron Judge right now, which obviously he's done tremendous

things. If I guess one had to be kind of a wet blanket on Aaron Judge, is it just the one obvious thing to point out or is there anything else? Is it just a matter of it's early and he's going to make less contact? Yeah, I guess so. It's hard to find any other flaws there. I don't know whether you said his defensive ratings are really great, right? Yeah, apparently. I have no idea whether, I mean, did you look at his like stat cast ones or are you going by UZR DRS? I looked at the stat cast stuff briefly, but it's so early there's not a lot that I can do with it. He hasn't made, so I don't know, I'm not going to sit here and explain five-star, four-star catches to the audience.

You either know them or you don't. He hasn't made like an outstanding highlight play yet, but he also hasn't messed up any of any plays in the easiest three categories. So he's been fine. He's not, you know, Kevin Kiermaier out there. Actually, he's not Keon Broxton, but he seems like he's pretty good.

He also has a good arm, so he's going to get Broxton but he seems like he's pretty good he also has a good arm so he's going to get some extra value there and this is silly but just splitting what he's done so far this season in half which is just dumb but I'm going to do it anyway in the first half of his one-fifth of the season that he's played he had a 173 WRC plus since then he's had a 303 wrc plus so he's gotten even better as i look at how he's been pitched early on he saw 44 fastballs that's very low he was great since then he's seen 55 fastballs which is a lot higher he's been great so he just in terms of that adjustment he's had no problem in terms of swinging and missing his rates have been exactly the same since then.

So really, there are plenty of adjustments to come, but he's hit non-fastballs. He's hit fastballs. He's stayed disciplined. Nothing yet. Interesting that they're throwing him more fastballs. I guess maybe they were trying to get him to chase early with breaking stuff out of the zone, and he wasn't really his reputation coming up. Then again, neither was hitting 13 home runs by May 5th. So I don't know if he's maybe underrated as defender too, but even if he's just a capable defender who hits for awesome power and plays in

Yankee Stadium where it's easier to hit for awesome power, then yeah, I mean, he's going to be a star. And of course, when a guy comes up at this age, you expect it to mean that maybe his ceiling is a little lower than someone who comes up at 19 or 20 or 21. Could be the case though, that he has just made this change to unlock himself the way that batista did or jd martinez did and he's just done it earlier in his career and in his life and will be a star from now on so anyway it's it's awesome because he had the potential to be interesting regardless just because physically he's a freak compared to other baseball players. And it's been fun to watch him get photographed next to Ronald Torres, who is a tiny person, comparatively speaking. And Judge just doesn't look like someone who should be playing baseball with that body. And it's great that he is not only a physical marvel in that way, but also in his production. And yeah, I mean, I'm sure the Yankees have seen the power coming. I'm sure they've been monitoring his exit speeds all the way through the minors.

When I wrote about Gallo at Grantland in 2014, I got someone to send me minor league, I guess it was hit FX data at that point about exit speed. And Gallo was like the hardest hitting hitter in the minor leagues and was hitting the ball even harder than Miguel Cabrera was in the majors at that point, which seemed pretty impressive. now also just because whatever swing changes he has made probably has not only allowed him to put the bat on the ball more often but put it on the ball in a more optimal way with the perfect timing and positioning and angle and all of that so maybe he peaked at the same sort of exit speeds before but i'm sure that even when he makes contact, he's hitting the ball harder than he ever did before. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun. So much of what I think, at least I write about, and what a lot of people write about, essentially boils down to here's a player that we think is

going to perform differently from how he is projected. We're trying to get ahead of the projections, either pointing out a better player or, less commonly, a worse player. I think we try to focus on what's good and again that's the topic for another podcast but just for fun so far this season aaron judge according to fangraphs has already been worth 2.2 war the updated projections for the rest of the season project him to be worth 2.1 or which seems funny when you look at it he is projected the rest of the way to be no more or less valuable than players like carlos santana chris davis troy to lewiski salvador perez russell martin

jock peterson hilariously byron buxton and marcel ozuna so i don't know maybe you agree with that those are all pretty good players maybe depending on what you think about buxton but as i like to do i'm going to put you on the spot and I'm just going to start reading off some names and I would like you to speak up when you think there's a player that judge is as good as let's go with not better than as good as something like that so I'm just going

to read down this list but not one by one Mike Trout yeah Francisco Leandor Corey Seeger Josh Donaldson healthy version yeah keep going Christianian yelich yeah i'll say there yelich okay i'll read up from there just in case andrew mccutcheon oh that's positive uh yeah i'm gonna take judge yeah okay uh miguel cabrera yeah yeah i'll take cabrera as at least offensively overall maybe not okay, and look at this.

Giancarlo Stanton. Hmm. Yeah, that's tough. I mean, I guess you just based on, let me see what a judge's health record is in the minors. Cause I'm not sure if he's been very durable or I haven't heard of serious injuries, but let's just see. Cause that's been the big thing, holding Stanton back.

So I'm going to check Corey Dawkins' site, Baseball Injury Consultants, and it has, for Aaron Judge, the only entries on his injury table. And Corey does have minor league injuries, too. minor league injuries too. All he's got here are a PCL, that's a knee ligament injury, last season, which cost him 24 days in the minors. And then in the majors, he missed a couple of weeks with an oblique strain and that is it. So evidently prior to 2016, he had nothing in his injury history or at least nothing significant enough for Corey to include it. So that's a good sign. So if I had to pick one, man, I mean, I guess I'd go with Judge. of the rest of the year between roughly three and three and a half wins above replacement which if you combine it with what he's already done would make him something like a a five and a half win player at the end of the season which one more time i'd like to make absolutely clear to everybody

mike trout so much better yeah he's so good mike trout appreciation podcast every podcast yep judge not on that level although so far this season as we've already mentioned judge has been as good as trout who just missed a game with a hamstring injury. Judge didn't just miss a game. Interesting. Yeah. So it will be fascinating if like a month or two from now we revisit and Judge is still performing on Trout's level because, you know, he's clearly demonstrated he can do that. His batting average on balls in play is not insane.

It's the fact that so many of his average on balls in play is not insane it's the fact that so many of his balls aren't in play that's insane he can't quite keep up this level of hitting just as marwin gonzalez can't keep up his but it's just it's so easy to look at judge and he can have an at-bat and you think about when brian dozer goes deep brian dozer goes deep a lot but when he goes deep he has to do almost everything perfectly. He has to maximize all the Dozer that he can into every swing, whereas Aaron Judge can miss hit any number of pitches and still hit them out of the yard. And he's not even a lefty in Yankee Stadium, which is the crazy thing, because he could be even more flattering for him. But I know that I am inclined toward hyperbole when i look at a player with so many

and such impressive physical skills but the to actually see a player like this delivering on it it's a very exciting thing indeed agreed all right is that our week i think that's our week i don't have anything else to say i'll maybe we'll have another aaron judge podcast in a month i hope so until then i look forward to writing about all the adjustments that people try to make against him. All right. By the way, for anyone wondering, our Paxton talk at the beginning of the episode came before the news that he was placed on the 10-day DL with a left forearm strain.

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