Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, MLB’s two best hitters, could pull off rare feat Yankees haven’t seen since 1930s

Report Card: Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are big fans of baseball hitting, and the 2024 season so far has been no exception.

In fact, the New York Yankees’ two sluggers did the heavy lifting for the first 63 games of the season — an early stretch that saw the Yankees post an MLB-best 44-19 record. This is exactly what the Yankees expected. Judge, when healthy last year, put up vintage numbers but got little help from the surrounding team. Aware of this deficiency, general manager Brian Cashman in December placed Soto in a blockbuster seven-player trade with the Padres. As a result, two of the best hitters in baseball wore pinstripes.

At this point, that already lofty statement could be changed to say the two best hitters in baseball. Judge overcame a slow start to 2024 and is now slashing .293/.423/.667 with 21 home runs in 63 games. As for Soto, in his walk year he has a current slash line of .319/.422/.605 with 17 home runs and 44 walks, also in 63 games. Obviously, each batter’s bat determines his overall value, but Judge and Soto are more than “just” two of the best hitters in the game thus far. Judge is once again the Yankees’ primary center fielder, and getting that kind of production from a middle infielder makes him even more valuable. As for Soto, he has long been a defensive liability, but that has not been the case thus far in 2024. Depending on the advanced fielding metric of your choice, Soto in right field has been average at worst and according to some measures a significant more defensive. Of course this is sustainable or not, but the point is that so far the work of each player on the field has increased their value at the base.

All of this brings us to the point of this exercise. Judge and Soto, as teammates in 2024, will have the chance to do something extremely rare in all of baseball history. Currently, Judge and Soto are ranked first and (tied with Bobby Witt Jr. for) second, respectively, in MLB on the Fangraphs version of Wins Above Replacement (WAR or fWAR in this case). This brings us to the tantalizing possibility that these two Yankees labelmates could finish the double in WAR all season.

As noted by the CBS Sports research team, teammates have occupied the top two spots on the fWAR leaderboard only nine times in modern baseball history. On five of those nine occasions, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were the duo. Here’s a look at the full list:

As you can see, if Judge and Soto can keep the fire burning, then they will be the first teammates to lead the league in fWAR since Junior and A-Rod three decades ago. Will they make it? It wouldn’t be a surprise given its established excellence on the plate. For a hitter, the best indicator of future success is batted ball excellence, and Judge and Soto are “best in class” when it comes to quality of contact.

There is an advanced metric called expected weighted average on base (xwOBA). xwOBA arises from wOBA, or weighted on-base average, which assigns appropriate value to each possible offensive event that happens while a batter is on base. These proper evaluations of singles, doubles, homers, walks, etc., distinguish wOBA from more traditional measures like AVG, OBP, and SLG. Also, for simplicity’s sake, wOBA is scaled to look like OBP, meaning that, say, .400 is elite and .290 is very poor. All of this brings us back to xwOBA, which is an estimate of what a hitter’s wOBA should be based on things like bat exit velocity and launch angle. xwOBA attempts to eliminate luck – good or bad – and defensive play from wOBA and identify a hitter’s basic skill. It is useful to get an idea of ​​how a hitter is expected to perform in the near future.

In Judge’s case, he now has a wOBA of .449, which is an absurdly high number. His xwOBA this season, however, rose to .476. As for Soto, he has a current 2024 wOBA of .438 and an xwOBA of .468. Like Judge, Soto has had bad luck in 2024, despite sky-high production levels. These strong fundamental indicators, in conjunction with Judge and Soto’s long histories of excellence, mean that they can absolutely maintain their position at the top of the FWAR list and join the names above.

The crux of the matter, however, is value in the service of winning, and in fact, the Yankees have benefited greatly from the work of Judge and Soto this season. Right now, the Yanks, coming off a disappointing 82-win 2023 campaign, are tied with the Phillies for the best record in baseball and are on pace for 113 wins and an AL East title. This isn’t necessarily shocking, as there is no better “step up” to success in the standings than having the two best players on the roster.

Speaking of which, let’s revisit the pairs above and see how their teams fared in their respective seasons:

Surprisingly, it’s a mix. These “best possible teammates” teams range in success from the ’27 Yanks, one of the best teams in baseball history, to the ’87 Red Sox, who somehow finished under .500 despite going 17, 7 WAR from Clemens and Boggs. For the most part, though, having the two best players as measured by fWAR correlates with success at the team level, which is what you would expect.

As for Judge, Soto and the rest of the current Yankee model, Sports Line currently gives them a 69.4% chance of winning the AL East and a 99.9% chance of making the postseason. Those are long odds and don’t account for the fact that reigning AL Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole is working his way back.

The Yankees have individual greatness so far in Judge and Soto, and the season so far suggests that team-level greatness is within reach. It goes without saying that one has a lot to do with the other.