SAY IT AND WAIT UNTIL OCTOBER: AARON JUDGE IS BIGGER THAN SHOHEI OHTANI

His numbers are insane, capable of winning a Triple Crown and breaking his all-time home run record, and Judge is the real Babe Ruth — unleashing a better two months than even Ohtani is producing

     This will be tricky, on his solitary stage in Los Angeles, where 50,000 human beings appear each evening and gaze at him like a mythical creature. But Shohei Ohtani must take his $700 million and watch another man swing wood. He is not the cosmic dream of baseball, at the moment.

     Should he bow? Maybe it’s time because, in his last two months, Aaron Judge has hit 26 home runs with 65 runs batted in. His OPS for those 52 games is approaching 1.500. We are witnessing the most commanding power display in the sport’s history. Only Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams were in his vicinity. Ohtani is compared to Ruth because he slugs and pitches, but not this season. In our dreams, the Yankees and Dodgers will play in an autumn magnifique, but for now, Judge has 32 homers and could be on a magical pace to hit 31 more — to break his own all-time record, non-steroids version, presumably.

     And win the Triple Crown in the American League.

     “It’s hard to wrap your brain around what he’s doing,” said Aaron Boone, his blown-away manager. “He’s in that company all the time. It’s incredible what he’s doing, it really is. He’s in those conversations with Gehrig and Ruth and whatever superlative you can find.”

     Not that he’s into superlatives, as we realized two years ago in New York. “It’d be cool, but it’s not my focus,” Judge said. “Like a lot of guys in this room, we don’t play for stuff like that. We play to win. Anytime you put on these pinstripes and wear the ‘NY,’ you’re here to win. If that comes with it, it’d be great, but I think we’re all focused on getting a championship first.” 

     We live in an age when bats do not connect with pitches. Strikeout rates bore us, at 22.7 percent last year, and MLB has a collective 2024 batting average of .242 — which would be the lowest since 1968, after which the mound was lowered to 10 inches and the strike zone shrank. What does commissioner Rob Manfred have in mind now that pitchers are dramatically better since the last decade? At least he has Judge, atop league statistics in the three traditional categories — .321, 32, 83 — while leading in WAR and OPS and everything else. And he has Ohtani, who leads the National League with 27 homers and a .320 average and needs to make up ground in RBIs. He has hit 10 homers in 14 games and prompts this from Dodgers manager Dave Roberts: “No player moves the needle in baseball more than Shohei, as far as on a global scale.”

     That’s true. But in this week of red, white and blue-ism, Judge looks like a bargain for his $360 million. “He’s just kind of plugging away as we all expected. He’s able to go on historical runs, MVP-type runs, otherworldly-type runs,” said Gerrit Cole, the Cy Young Award winner, who has studied him more while rehabbing his elbow. This is exactly what baseball requires when we absorb quarterbacks and LeBron James about 12 months a year. Don’t we still love watching the privileged smack balls over fences? I see it often at Dodger Stadium, and with respect to the Texas Rangers, a fading sport needs Judge to win a pennant at Yankee Stadium with Juan Soto protecting him in the lineup. How about facing Ohtani and the Dodgers in a bicoastal conflict? Wouldn’t it be a nice way of celebrating the game amid the ugliness of a presidential election?

     As it is, baseball has too many ruts. Only four teams appear capable of a World Series — Yankees, Orioles, Dodgers, Phillies — in a bottom-heavy era when the 24-63 Chicago White Sox might lose more than the 1962 Mets. Scandals? Check out umpire Pat Hoberg, who was disciplined and remains sidelined for violating gambling laws. A Toronto infielder was suspended 80 games for trashing the ever-present PED policy. Edwin Diaz had an “extremely sticky … discolored” substance on his pitching hand and was suspended 10 games as the Mets closer. Certain spring holdouts of agent Scott Boras are regularly booed. The uniforms come from a basement sale at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Regional sports networks are dead. And players who quickly grab the mike for in-game interviews? We’ve had two errors in the process.

     Will Kike Hernandez reconsider? “No, because we’re getting paid,” said the Dodgers infielder. “I like money.”

     The All-Star Game is approaching. Forget about Home Run Derby. Judge hasn’t participated since winning as a rookie in 2017. Ohtani? “This time, I think it will move in the direction of me probably not participating,” he told the Los Angeles Times. He’s simply making sense — he can’t pitch as he recovers from an injured elbow ligament — that he refuses to put more stress on a functioning elbow.

     “The reason he came to the Dodgers,” said Roberts, “was to win a championship.”

     His role as a designated hitter generally keeps him safe — except when Hernandez cranked a line drive toward the visitors’ dugout in Chicago. If not for ball boy Javier Herrera, who caught the sizzler, Ohtani might be back in the hospital. “I was just doing my job,” said Herrera, 38. “I saw the pitch all the way through, it hit the bat, and the ball pretty much found me. But I was able to grab it.”

     “My hero,” Ohtani wrote on Instagram.

     “He needs an extension, or a raise,” Roberts said. “I was right next to him, but I didn’t appreciate how close it was, you know, going towards Shohei. And what a great play it was. So, very quick reaction from Javi and very grateful.”

     Every day, Judge bats third and generally plays center field. He is looking at his second MVP and first Fall Classic. Ohtani is in a one-way year, amid unprecedented two-way excess, and could win his third MVP and play in his first Fall Classic. Their meeting is meant to be, to save baseball.

     Until then, Shohei defers. Someone, somehow, is bigger than him.

     ###

     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.