Walking is as good as Judge Aaron

If you were a kid playing baseball, you are familiar with “walking is just as good.” Your coach may shout at you. You may yell yourself when your friend counts three balls on the plate. Shouting bromide is one thing, but thinking it is another. We haven’t really bought it like kids, and it’s been a while now that we’ve been able to quantify the difference. This season, the shooting percentage is 1.129, while the WOBA for Walking is .694. As it turns out, the walking volume is 61.5% positive. All our coaches are liars.

On Wednesday, I was checking Alejandro Kirk’s Woba – where his Woba was related to other members of the other league when he made connections. The top of the list caught my attention. It couldn’t help but catch my attention. Aaron Judge is ahead of him and he may also be in another sport. He is currently running .685 Wobacon. The difference between the second judge and Cal Raleigh is the same as the difference between Raleigh and Brandon Lowe. It was the most shocking way I could find, a way to express how ridiculous Judge Aaron’s Waubakan is now: When Judge Aaron threw the ball into the game, he was almost as good as a walk.

I know this may not sound particularly sexy, but the number is amazing. Walking is for sure. This is a bird. Putting the ball in the game is a gamble. The entire league has 0.362 WOBA on batting. Walking is almost twice as valuable. That’s why we write a lot of articles about how batsmen are really smart every few years and they stop swaying. But there is Judge Aaron, so, very close to him hitting is as valuable as a walk. He only has Woba at nine o’clock. nothing. This is the value of the popup to the second baseman.

If all this discussion about judges and the value of walking brings you déjàvu, it’s because about a month ago, Ben Clemens wrote an article about when to walk the judge intentionally and intentionally. We’ll go back to this, but the first thing I’m going to do when I see this number is trying to figure out its particularity. It turns out that this is very special.

I first checked the pitch tracking era. Since 2008, the judge has been the only player in baseball to break the .600 Wobacon. He completed three times, .600 in 2017, .602 in 2022, and .617 in 2024. Shohei Ohtani, Yordan Alvarez, has done that except Judge Aaron Judge, who currently surpasses his 2024 score by 68 points this season. The judge may calm down at some point, and on MLB.com, Mike Petriello talks about his high Babip being the result of luck, and how much it is, it’s hard to hit the ball at sound speed.

However, this made me really curious. I started wondering if someone had ever been as valuable as a walk when he was throwing the ball into the game. This means a lot of math, as players before the era of pitch tracking were not easy to get Waubakken. I think it goes all the way back to 1901, so I had to reverse engineer it myself (when I said “self” I mean “with the help of Ben Clemens because he is good at math”). I’ve canceled statistics in every qualified player season since 1901, so I have Woba and count statistics for everyone. I divided the plate appearance of each player into three parts: the ball in the game, walking/walking/being hit by the court. To calculate the number of balls in the game, I picked up the bat, subtracted the strikeout, and added the number of sacrifices. Then I reached algebra and built an equation that looks like this:

Total woba = (bipwoba x bip%) + (bbwoba x bb%) + (kwoba xk%)

(I don’t actually need the third part since the strikeout woba is zero. It always equals zero.) At that time, my number didn’t look quite right, so I went to Ben, and he went to Ben, and he told me that for arcane reasons, I was hit by the court, pitching was different from walking and intentional walking, and intentional walking wasn’t counted again, so I had to rework some of the computer’s algorithms.

These numbers are still not perfect, sometimes due to rounding issues, but more because we don’t have all the data, such as intentional walking and sacrifice, for older players. With the help of Stathead’s Katie Sharp, I included intentional walking data from retrosheet into the top 20. Retrograde data is not formal, but it makes the numbers more accurate and I care more about that. So remember, this is not an iron hat, but you’re gone, and this is the highest Waubakonian in qualifying season record:

The eight vertices belonged to Judge Aaron and Babe Ruth; Ruth also ranked 11th with a .589-year Murder Scheme season in 1927. The judge is one point higher than the history record, so he will almost certainly lose at some point in the next 97 games, but he is still 50 points above the third and 90 points above the 10th. Unless something terrible happens, he will stay on the list of 10.

More importantly, the answer to our question is “no”. When they hit the ball into the game, no one is as valuable as walking. In fact, the judges are closer this season than ever. He may not beat Ruth from the overall Wobacon, but remember that Woba is a seasonal constant. It changes every year based on the scoring environment. As early as 1920, the WOBA for a walk was .741. This season, the judge’s Wobacon is 98.7% of the value of the walk. Ruth was 92.3% in 1920, and that was the only season where he reached 90%. If we look at things this way, the judge will have two of the two seasons of three ever, along with his current campaign, which is number one, and may stay there even after his Baba luck runs out:

The judge can still master the magic numbers, although he must play better in order to do so. I don’t think this is really something we can ask the judge right now. If you are Spartan and Pheidippides just ran from the marathon and shouted, “We won!” and then collapsed and died, then you started nudge him with your sandals and said, “That’s a great friend, but now you’re back, can you run and give me a sandwich?”

However, let’s go back to this article. Ben combined the judge’s statistics with the expected matrix of running over the past four seasons and won the expected numbers to figure out when playing the judge is smarter than having him hit. Ben allows for a wider range, but the math shows that the answer is very narrow: in the ninth inning of a single game, there are two outs and second or third. That’s it. Apart from this situation, judgment is smarter than walking. Much of the discussion focuses on risk aversion. Giving up Judge Aaron’s 500-foot home run is horrible, which makes you overreact and give him a free base when the numbers say it’s not a wise move. But maybe we are right to be afraid that Judge Aaron is. First, he runs the ridiculous 239 WRC+ since this post was published. It was worse than his ridiculous 248 mark at the time, but it also represented an improvement in Ben’s running figures. These figures date back to 2022, when the judge ran a pathetic 206 WRC+. It makes more sense to deliberately walk the judge’s itinerary than in May.

Knowing all of this, I want to go through your quick scenes. Suppose you are the pitcher that Judge Aaron faces. First of all, I’m sorry. No one should hold this position and you should check and see if you have any legal recourse, no matter who puts you in trouble. Secondly, take some time to ask yourself a question: Can I strike Judge Aaron? Seriously. The judge went on strike at about the average rate, which means nearly 77% of the time it went into the plate and he did not strike. So be honest with yourself. Do you have it today? Does the slider bite? Does the baller feel good or is the seams a little overblown than you want? Did you sleep well last night? If your answer to these questions is “hell, let me be against him”, it is a very firm “no”. If you can strike Judge Aaron, then be sure to advertise to him. You have a 51% chance to kick him out and only a 15% chance to give up the extra base. But if you don’t feel like you can kick him out, if your choice is to take a walk or hit the ball, you should probably put him on it. Anyway, he was in as good condition as walking.