At the end of the ALDS, I wrote an article about Aaron Judge’s playoff run. In 7 games and 31 plate appearances, the grown-up slugger posted a 253 wRC+ with a .500/.581/.692 slash line. If you assume a 30-game minimum, the 253 wRC+ ranks 14th among all postseason performances. That last sentence contains a ton of statistical misinformation; the 30-PA cutoff eliminates most players in playoff history, but it’s still low enough to allow an outlier like Judge to shine. Nonetheless, my goal is to highlight Judge’s brilliance while also trying to create a framework that puts the playoff numbers into context. This is really hard to do with a small sample size, and that’s part of the point. But Judge wasn’t the only player to perform well in the postseason. In the same division series, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. batted .529 with a 324 wRC+ in 20 appearances. Ernie Clement hit the same 324 runs in 16 games and batted .643. I didn’t mention them in the article due to the small sample size, but I plan to keep an eye on them. They did not disappoint.
Guerrero hit .385 in the ALCS with three home runs and a 250 wRC+. As you may have heard, he also had a pretty good run in the World Series. He batted .333 with two home runs and a 192 wRC+. All told, Guerrero slashed .397/.494/.795 with eight homers, 18 runs and 15 RBIs in the postseason. He was intentionally walked six times. Should we watch all eight home runs? Of course we should. There’s no reason to watch all eight homers.
Throughout the playoffs, Guerrero has a wRC+ of 241, just 14 points behind Judge. Going back to our 30-game minimum, that’s the 25th-highest all-time. But Guerrero did not eclipse Judge’s record of 31 appearances, setting the all-time record with 89. His sample size was nearly triple that and he was still only 14 points behind!
As we established, Guerrero continued his stellar play with 69 additional games in the ALCS and World Series, so it’s time for an update. Let me show you a chart I made a few weeks ago to show you how unusual the judges are. The red circle is the judge. The green dot is Barry Bonds’ ridiculous 259 wRC+ performance in the 2002 Giants World Series. I added an orange dot to highlight where Guerrero was at that time.
“It would certainly make Judge look less compelling,” I wrote at the time. “He’s risen to the top of the list among players who have appeared in 30 or so games, but he doesn’t stand out like Bonds. According to this chart, the most impressive performance in postseason history is undoubtedly Randy Arozarena’s miraculous home run in 2020 with the Rays, all the way to right.” At that time, Guerrero was performing higher than Judge in raw wRC+, but he was about the same spot on the trend line. He’s near the top, but at the 20-PA mark instead of the 30-PA mark, which makes it less impressive. Three weeks later, we can now update this chart. Judge, Bonds and Arozarena are no longer highlighted. The only point I highlight is Guerrero’s, and it’s not hard to see why. He is alone. There’s a brand new spot in town.
What we are essentially illustrating with this diagram is the creation of a weighted run – removing the bonus from the created weighted run. The higher and further to the right you run, the more runs you get. We converted that back into statistics to see which player produced the most offensive value in a single postseason, and Guerrero just set the record. Here are the top 10:
Created the most weighted runs in the playoffs
| season | Name | team | World Radiocommunication+ | PA | world radiocommunication commission |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Vladimir Guerrero Jr. | Torre | 241.5 | 89 | 25.3 |
| 2020 | Randy Arozarena | hot melt glue | 240.3 | 86 | 24.9 |
| 2002 | Barry Bonds | SFG | 259.3 | 74 | 23.6 |
| 2004 | Carlos Beltran | Hou | 284.2 | 56 | 20.6 |
| 2020 | Corey Seager | young man | 203.3 | 80 | 20.5 |
| 2023 | Corey Seager | tex | 204.7 | 82 | 20.0 |
| 2011 | David Freese | STL | 244.8 | 71 | 19.8 |
| 2004 | albert pujols | STL | 230.0 | 67 | 19.7 |
| 2004 | David Ortiz | Bosch | 221.6 | 68 | 19.4 |
| 2009 | Alex Rodriguez | new york year | 223.6 | 68 | 19.2 |
If you want to argue for the best single-season postseason hitting performance ever, you have plenty of metrics to choose from. The highest postseason wRC+ in history without a minimum PA belongs to Jim Mason, who hit his only postseason home run with the Yankees in the 1976 World Series. Since his OPS in the league that year was a paltry .681, his home run was more significant than the other three players who hit their only home run in the postseason. His career playoff wRC+ is 1,432 points, much better than the 53 points he posted in the regular season.
If you set the 15-game minimum to include players whose World Series made up the entire postseason, you get Lou Gehrig’s 419 wRC+ when the Yankees swept the Cardinals in 1928. Gehrig went 6-for-11 with a double, four homers, and six walks! He struck out just five times in four games, with a slash line of .545/.706/1.727.
If you’re interested in increased win probability, the Cardinals got revenge with David Freese’s ridiculous 2011 performance. His WPA of 1.91 puts him at the top of the list. There’s no way he’s retiring, and because he’s batting behind the trio of Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday, and Lance Berkman, who had a .444 on-base percentage, he’s always on base with the runner on base in high-leverage situations.
But if you’re just talking about sustained excellence, the answer is clear. The crown once belonged to Bonds and later to Arozarena. It now belongs to Guerrero.
