Aaron Judge is unlike anything we’ve seen before. In recent years people have begun to describe unique athletes like Judge as unicorns, a practice that’s become so common that now we’ve got an actual herd of unicorns galloping across the sports landscape. But in the baseball world, there’s Aaron Judge, and then there’s everyone else. (Okay, okay. Shohei Ohtani is probably the ultimate unicorn, an alien unicorn, but let me know the next time he puts on a glove.)

In Judge’s rookie season of 2017 he hit 52 home runs on his way to winning the Rookie of the Year and a questionable second-place finish in the MVP voting. He hit .284 that season, and he followed that with batting averages of .278, .272, .257, and .287 while hitting 27, 27, 9, and 39 home runs. That debut season seemed like a bit of an anomaly, but the waters he had settled into seemed just fine. He was the type of middle-of-the-lineup presence that a team could build around for years to come. Every team in baseball would be happy to have a player who could hit thirty to forty home runs while batting .275, even if it came along with a boatload of strikeouts.

And then 2022 happened. The American League record 62 home runs leap off the page, but Judge led the league in almost every batting statistic that matters, coming just five percentage points away from a batting title that would’ve earned not just the Triple Crown, but the ultra rare Triple Triple Crown (leading the league in runs, home runs, RBI, batting average, on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, walks, and total bases). It was an otherworldly season.

And then 2024 happened. Judge hit only 58 home runs, but he was arguably even better at the plate than he had been two years earlier, producing possibly the greatest single season of any right-handed batter in history, and he won his second unanimous MVP award.

This year, just for fun, he’s hitting .415 though 25 games. Hitting over .400 for any twenty-five game stretch is pretty impressive, but to do so while also leading the league in essentially everything else is absolutely ridiculous.

As Yankee fans we were blessed to watch Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer of all time, for nineteen years. It’s quite possible that fifteen years from now we’ll realize that we just finished watching the greatest right fielder of all-time also. So pay attention. You’ll want to tell your grandchildren all about it.

[Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]