The Aaron Judge Home Run Conundrum: What Does it Mean to Exist

Just a quick heads up before you begin reading this – this blog will be a bit of an oddball. It’s been about two weeks since I released a blog. In trying to focus on the podcast and cutting and posting clips I’ve neglected the one thing I’m good at, blogging. And there has been this Eddie Nunez draft sitting collecting virtual dust as I try incredibly hard to come up with some angle other than, “he might be good.” I’ve thus settled on talking about Aaron Judge and his home runs this season; this was supposed to be the “next” blog I wrote.

Disclaimer part two: I have always had this idea that Sunday blogs would be a more long-form and existential piece. (Even though today is a Monday, spiritually it feels like a Sunday). There is a Draymond Green and changing blog also collecting virtual dust that I’ve been adding to and furiously deleting from since March. Like an SNL skit, I just cannot figure out how to finish it. So, it’s stuck on the Island of Misfit Blogs until further notice.¹

These disclaimers are to say, that this post could be a bit wordy and nonsensical and unbearably pretentious. My short bio for ESPN Houston radio referred to the fact I like to pretend I am Hunter S. Thomspon on Page 2, and I will forcibly live up to that self-imposed moniker.

Aaron Judge, Yankee Stadium, and Home Runs

Aaron Judge

This blog was mentally created because of a tweet. This is actually how most blogs on this site start. I am incredibly susceptible to misinformation about a person I do not like. If a tweet told me that Jayson Tatum actually has a basement full of puppies he smashes with a bat every time he texts Kobe and the message bounces back, I would believe you without any fact-checking. Do they even have basements in Boston? No clue, but, mentally, they do now.

The tweet I’m referring to is this tweet.

So, as Aaron Judge slander appeared, I bought into it for a couple of seconds. I know this person was engagement baiting on purpose, but the fleeting moment of my life where I spent it thinking, “hell yeah Aaron Judge sucks actually,” was, in a word, exhilarating. If you take a look at the comments to the tweet, everyone calls out the number almost immediately.

Ever since ESPN decided we all needed to see every Judge homerun, I’ve been on a personal quest to discredit all of his achievements. The quest is like the quest for the Northwest Passage, going terribly with the possible involvement of (hot take) cannibalism. Also, I really need Shohei to get to 50-50 so he wins the AL MVP. Realistically, we should get rid of the AL/NL division and give him the perennial 2024 MVP if the 50-50 is achieved.

Yankee Stadium

It is genuinely crazy to me that we (I say we when it’s up to that blackout imbecile running the league) still haven’t done anything about Yankee Stadium. I have been on the “Yankee Stadium proportions are actually lies” conspiracy for a while now. Fangraphs broke it down years ago, showing how Statcast’ed home runs in Yankee Stadium versus other ballparks, with even “shorter” proportions showing something is up. Without making you read the article, something is definitely up with the right and center-right field. Balls of similar carry are caught for routine outs in one stadium, and are easy home runs in Yankee Stadium, even if impossible for stadium dimension standards.

The crazy thing about Yankee Stadium: it’s not that easy to hit at Yankee Stadium. According to Statcast’s Park Factors² metric, it’s actually kind of hard to hit Yankee Stadium. While hitting a single or a double is only slightly below average, the ease of hitting a tripe is significantly below average. There is one thing that Yankee Stadium is significantly above average for: home runs. The home run factors are a deep red only similar to that of Alabama in an election year.³

Unsurprisingly, at the time of writing this, Yankee Stadium has seen the most home run balls this season. The gap between Yankee Stadium and Great American Ballpark is only two. But it is two nonetheless.

Home Runs

With all that said, I can’t reference Statcast as a Yankee Stadium-deterrent and then not in a slight defense of Aaron Judge not bringing up the fact that he does hit bombs. Aaron Judge plays at the most prolific home run ballpark in all of the MLB. He, by nature of his home stadium, has been given an opportunity that other players have not. In some way, he is a nepo player.

That entire analysis breaks down with even a modicum of research. Aaron Judge, again, at the time of writing this, has hit 51 home runs. Statcast keeps track of home runs and how many parks that ball would have been a home run in. Statcast also keeps track of balls hit that, even if not home runs, would have been home runs in other stadiums. Turns out, Yankee Stadium isn’t really even an advantage.

For Judge’s home runs, only two of his home runs would have been home runs in Yankee Stadium. If you guessed correctly, yes those balls were hit to right-center and right field. There are also 15 hit balls that were not home runs, but would have been home runs at another park. Out of those 15, only two would have been a home run at Yankee Stadium. The balls were also in right and center-right, so that theorem continues. But, even on those at Yankee Stadium, the balls would have been home runs at other stadiums too; there are no Yankee Stadium 1/30s there.

On top of all of that, Judge would still have hit more home runs if he played at other stadiums. Statcast also has an expected home run stat (xHR). This stat is relatively accurate per season (at least for Aaron Judge), so I have no reason to discredit it now. According to the xHR, Aaron Judge would have hit more home runs this season if his home stadium were Chase Field, Citizens Bank Park, Nationals Park, Great American Ballpark, American Family Field, and, importantly, Dodger Stadium. That’s a relatively long list for a ballpark merchant.

I say importantly Dodger Stadium, because my MVP candidate, has 13 doubters in his repertoire. I haven’t fully investigated those, but I imagine playing at Dodger Stadium must help.⁴

So, this means Aaron Judge is vindicated? Right?

What Does It Mean for a Home Run to Exist?

For a lot of my life, especially my college years, if you had asked me how I knew I existed, I would have answered simply: “I don’t know.” There would have been a diatribe about how there is no way to prove I exist. It wasn’t a jump into nihilism; it was wading into nothingness not covered by a philosophical want to matter. Now, my answer has changed radically, which may be why I find myself to be much happier now than I was in my early 20s. I’ll explain what I say now a little later in the blog.

If you line 10 people up in a room and ask them “When does existence begin?” You are likely to get 10 different answers. Ramp that sample size up to 100, and you will receive 100 more answers. Existence is undefined, and, depending on who you ask, cannot be defined. Is it conception? Is it birth? Consciousness? Object Permanence? Brain Function? There are a multitude of ways to actually define what existence means. Sure, there’s an easy answer here. To be existing is to exist. The idea of existence is not quantifiable. Home runs are completely quantifiable; if the ball goes over the yellow line between the two foul posts it is a home run.

There may be someone who reads this blog and thinks, “This is stupid. Judge has hit home runs so the home runs exist.” But that’s reductive in some sense to the purpose of this blog. The home runs exist; I cannot argue that. You can go to each instance of a 2024 Aaron Judge home run and find the exact recording of that home run. Statcast literally has that as a function in the link above. The home runs, undoubtedly, exist. But how does one define existence when it comes to sports stats? Because there seems to be this inherent meaning tied to stats and their existence.

Take Angel Reese and her rebounding.

I have wanted to delve into that whole narrative for a second (I’ve come close), but I don’t want to. There’s too much outside conflict and non-sports people tied into the WNBA Rookie of the Year race that I don’t want to. Also, every take that could be made about the situation has already been made. Nonetheless, I put it here to show that even though Angel Reese is objectively the new single-season rebounding leader, the meaning behind those rebounds is up for debate. Sure, she has all those rebounds, but do those rebounds count if they’re off her bad shots?

The quantifiable number is there, but the meaning behind the number calls the entire statistic into question. And thus, you create the existence conundrum. Remember about the 100 people all having different meanings of existence – sports fans will do the same thing with stats. And that’s why I wrote this blog – how can you prove a stat actually exists? When existence is not enough to support the existence of a stat.

You may now think I have gone off the rails because I have entered this zone where I conflate existence with meaning. In some ways, we’re all teenagers having our first existential thought. “What is the meaning of all this,” I ask myself at 14 and now at 28, just for very different reasons. Sports fans are kind of the same way. For a statistic to exist it must have some infallible meaning that cannot be taken down through obvious questioning. Like Angel Reese getting her own rebounds. Or Aaron Judge’s home stadium being Yankee Stadium. Petulant teenagers from the beginning to the end.

Even with the advanced stats, I won’t change someone’s mind. If you are of the opinion that Aaron Judge is a stadium merchant who actually is not the home run leader, then nothing I can say will change that. And because those stats lack the inherent meaning of being home runs, the stat does not exist. It’s like the Jordan-LeBron debate. The believers in either generation have an inherent reason to discredit the generation of the other.

Meaning is Existence

Mountaineer George Mallory has one of my favorite quotes of all time. I actually fell in love with the idea of mountaineering because of him. His most famous accomplishment, though, was dying. That in itself has some sort of existential dread tied to it: everything he did in his life just to die and be remembered for it. George Mallory, like Aaron Judge and like Angel Reese, was obsessed with winning. But unlike both of those athletes, his goal was to ascend to a place that, at that time, had never been touched before – Mt. Everest.

I’ll spare you the entirety of the details, but there’s a chance he was the first person to summit Everest. Until a camera is found, and possibly even after the camera is found, we’ll never know. (He probably died on his way to the summit). But a reporter once asked him why he wanted to summit Everest. The foolish endeavor to go to the highest point on Earth. He answered simply:

“Because it’s there.”

I said I’d come back to how I respond when someone asks if I exist. So many years struggling with meaning and existence and all the thoughts that come with that, just to find meaning in a paraphrase of George Mallory.

How do I know if I exist? Because I do.

The home runs exist because they do. There is no qualifying the home runs because they do the only thing necessary to exist: doing so. As much as I am inclined to discredit the accomplishments of Aaron Judge because of the uniform he wears, how can I? Maybe it’s just sports, or maybe it’s life in general, but there is this want to qualify something that doesn’t fit into our personal worldview. Whether that be if rebounds are real, or whether it be how to get through the day. We qualify as a way of protecting our own existence.

Was this all too much to come to the conclusion that Aaron Judge hits a lot of home runs? Maybe it is. But sometimes it’s nice to explain to myself why home runs actually exist. Part of existence is finding the meaning in it. Even if that meaning is spending a Sunday and a Labor Day deep into Statcast.

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1. This is really only for me and the one other person in the world who will care about this: I almost didn’t include the “Island of Misfit Blogs” line, because the original Rudolph special never refers to the island as the Island of Misfit Toys. It’s retconned later, with the subsequent movie, which is still a Christmas favorite. ↩︎
2. Statcast defines Park Factors as “Statcast park effects show the observed effect of each displayed stat based on the events in the selected park. Each number is set so that “100” is average for that metric, and the park-specific number is generated by looking at each batter and pitcher, controlled by handedness, and comparing the frequency of that metric in the selected park compared to the performance of those players in other parks.
   
   For example, the 135 HR mark for 2018-2020 at Great American Ball Park does not mean the Reds hit 35% more home runs at their home park. It means for batters and pitchers who played both at GABP and elsewhere, 35% more home runs were observed at GABP.” ↩︎
3. You have to look at the link to get this joke. ↩︎
4. Ohtani does have a couple that would only be home runs at Yankee Stadium. ↩︎