While I spent most of my weekend in various Pride spaces, there was a whole bunch of annoying Discourse on just exactly what kind of home runs Aaron Judge hits. Most of it was silly, easily disprovable stuff like how many meatballs he crushes and how many “garbage time” home runs he hits — in short, things I’m not overly interested in exploring.
There is something I am interested in getting into though, and it’s early leads. Aaron Judge has clubbed 16 dingers in the first inning this year, just two shy of Alex Rodriguez’s single-season record. While Judge has seemingly been chasing a variety of home run records every day for the past three or four years, the first-inning dinger bit is both fun to track and extremely helpful for the Yankees overall.
The first inning is a relatively high-leverage inning, which is something we learned a few years ago when teams began to dabble with openers. It’s the only inning where you’re guaranteed to see the top three hitters of a team’s lineup hit in order, but also, because the game starts tied, spotting either team a run to start the game drastically changes win expectancy.
Over the last 120 years, the home team has won about 54 percent of the time; that is home-field advantage. Judge typically hits third, and in fact, outside of two days off in June, he has hit third in every single game this year, which means the best possible case is for him to come up in the first inning with two men on. A home run as a visitor player changes the Yankees’ win expectancy thusly:
There just isn’t a substitute for an early lead. This is where we run into problems with what “clutch” is — is hitting a groundball up the middle in the seventh inning, down by one, with a runner at second “clutch”? The run scores and you’re tied. It’s a good outcome, but if the Yankees are at home, they would then have a 61-percent chance of winning the game, well below their odds if Judge just smacked a solo shot in the first inning.
If we accept then that “clutch” is doing the most when it counts the most, there’s not much more clutch than Judge’s 16 first-inning home runs. As he approaches and likely passes A-Rod’s 18, we just drive further and further the point that he, alongside Soto, are dragging this team by the scruff of its neck into October.
Soto and Judge are first and third in WPA, separated by a couple of points and joined only by Jurickson Profar — yes, him — above 4.00 on the season. Soto has a reputation for being a more “clutch” hitter, and posting an 1.178 OPS in the same World Series he turned 21 goes a long way to building that rep. Soto’s also been a much better hitter in the seventh through the ninth inning this year, the time we typically associate with being “clutch.” Then again, Aaron Judge has been about 60 percent better than his Barry Bondsian baseline in the first inning, so it all pretty much comes out in the wash.
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