The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels on Tuesday night in the Bronx will begin a three-game midweek series. Both teams have playoff aspirations in 2023 – much more plausible aspirations for the hosts – so that’s what’s truly at stake here. The leading subplot, however, is that the last two American League MVPs, Aaron Judge of the Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Angels, will be central to the action.
Unfortunately, Ohtani isn’t lined up to pitch in this series, which means we won’t get the tantalizing-in-the-extreme direct encounter between these two super(duper)stars. However, we will get to see Ohtani and Judge indirectly match skills and wits at the plate. Each player is off to a strong start this season, and those starts plus this encounter give us a jumping off point to compare their 2023 starts to how they were faring at a similar juncture in 2022, when Ohtani wound up becoming the first in MLB history to qualify for the hitting and pitching leaderboards and Judge wound up crushing an AL-record 62 home runs.
Tidily enough, we’re roughly 10% through the 2023 regular season as this series is set to commence. First, let’s do Judge. We know about his homer tally from last year, and he also paced the majors in a number of other important categories – OPS, RBI, runs scored, and total bases, just to name a few. He also paced the AL with 111 walks. Onward:
- Through his first 16 games of 2023, Judge is slashing .286/.388/.589 (.977 OPS) with five home runs, eight RBI, 13 runs scored, 33 total bases, and 10 walks.
- Straightaway you’ll notice that Judge, at the rate-based level of the slash line (AVG/OBP/SLG) and OPS, is well shy of his 2022 final figures of .311/.425/.686 and and an OPS of 1.111.
- That said, through his first 16 games of 2022, Judge had a slash line of .263/.354/.509 (.863 OPS) with three home runs, five RBI, eight runs scored, 29 total bases, and eight walks.
- While Judge is behind his 2022 season-long paces at this moment, he’s actually ahead of where he was at the same point last year. That’s explained by the fact that Judge’s 2022 numbers didn’t truly take off until his two-homer game against the Guardians on…
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