He’s no Shohei Ohtani, but Aaron Judge’s AL MVP-caliber season is Ruthian in its own right

The charismatic slugger is lapping the field in production, threatening records, and achieving at a level that forces the baseball aficionado to hunt through grainy newsreels to find comparable talent.

Yes, Shohei Ohtani continues to wow us with his two-way exploits. But today, we’re talking about Aaron Judge.

The two are cooking up a nifty little race for the American League Most Valuable Player award, an honor that already puts the “suss” in subjective given the wide array of voting philosophies and occasional ballot malfunctions that can occur among the 30 electors.

This isn’t a screed on “unfair” or “ill-considered” ballots, though. As it stands now, there’s no wrong answer when it comes to Judge vs. Ohtani, just as there’s no singular manner that “value” can be defined.

And Ohtani proved last year that MVPs can finish next-to-last in the standings.

He outpointed Vlad Guerrero Jr. with a season like no other – 46 homers and a .965 OPS at the plate, 156 strikeouts, nine wins, a 3.18 ERA and nearly 11 strikeouts per nine innings. The vote was unanimous, as it should have been.

Now it’s 2022, and Ohtani is even more of a problem. Trouble is, so is that AL MVP field.

Ohtani has already blown away his ’21 strikeout total, fanning 181 and averaging a major league best 12 per nine innings. He’s trimmed his ERA to 2.58 and won 13 games, if that’s your jam. He’s added a 100-mph sinker. Oh, and has pounded 32 home runs, putting a second consecutive 40-homer season well within reach.

(Here’s a fun fact: Since Babe Ruth is Ohtani’s forever comp, Ohtani’s adjusted ERA of 156 this year is just off Ruth’s career best of 158. But also: Ruth never struck out more than 4.7 batters per nine innings in a season.)

Please, appreciate this man. It may never get as good as this again, though we thought the same thing a year ago.

Now, let’s take a moment to venerate Judge.

Sure, it might feel a bit extra when Judge gets the 100% True Yankee treatment, seeing as he’s going to break the AL record for home runs and surpass Roger Maris and Ruth, who hit 61 and 60 homers in 1961 and 1927, respectively. The record will stay in pinstripes, which will provide a nifty thrill for those who actually enjoy Michael Kay’s grating “See ya!” call for every longball. Good for them.

Yet the backlash to the Yankee Industrial Complex also shouldn’t work against Judge. He absolutely would not be getting the slam-dunk MVP treatment were he a Kansas City Royal, but that is more an indictment of how the media work and how we process statistics and narratives into a consumable stew.

That said, we can’t lose sight of arguably the most impressive part of Judge’s season: He’s doing it in a season, and an era, where it’s exceedingly difficult to hit.

He struck his 54th home run by Labor Day, putting him on pace to hit 64, and it’s a bit of a shame we became so numb to big home run numbers thanks to the game’s overtly chemically enhanced era (which produced the National League home run trinity of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa), along with various juiced-ball seasons that, generally, desensitized us to the long ball.

Well, it’s time we wake up a bit, because Judge is doing it into some pretty severe headwinds.

Home runs are down again, to just 1.07 per team game after peaking at 1.39 in the juiced-ball season of 2019. It’s the lowest home run rate since 2015, when teams managed 1.01 per game. Yet the leaguewide batting average that year was .254, just before shifts became even more prevalent and everyone from sluggers to slap-hitting infielders realized selling out for power was where the production – and the highest pay – could be found.

This year? The leaguewide batting average is .243, a 3% drop from ’15 and a depth not reached since 1967,

Yet Judge is outkicking the competition in every facet.

He’s going to top 60 home runs in a year nobody in the AL will hit more than 40, all while batting .302 and getting on base at a .403 clip. His adjusted OPS of 204 is more than 100% better than the league average and would be the highest mark since Bonds’ 263 in 2004. In fact, Bonds and McGwire are the lone players to top 200 in adjusted OPS since George Brett’s 203 mark in 1980.

His weighted runs created plus, perhaps the chicest measuring tool these days, is 202, again far beyond league average and well above No. 2 Paul Goldschmidt of St. Louis (189). Houston’s Yordan Alvarez (178) is No. 2 in the AL.

It’s the home runs, though, that truly paint this season in a historic light.

When Maris and Mickey Mantle battled to break Ruth’s record of 60 longballs in 1961, they had a good deal of company within shouting distance. Mantle finished with 54 homers. Harmon Killebrew and Jim Gentile each hit 46. Rocky Colavito hit 45. Norm Cash hit 41 longballs, batted .361 with a 1.148 OPS – and later admitted to corking his bat.

In the AL, only Ohtani might reach 40. Kyle Schwarber, Paul Goldschmidt, Austin Riley (36-35-34, respectively) could get there in the NL. That’s an eon away from Judge.

That gap takes on a Ruthian tone when you consider that when the Bambino hit 60 in 1927, teammate Lou Gehrig smacked 47 of his own. From there, it dropped down to Hack Wilson and Cy Williams at 30 in the NL (fellow Yankee Tony Lazzeri was third in the AL with 18). Judge figures to put a larger gap between he and No. 2 than you’d expect from the Roaring ‘20s.

We won’t belabor how Judge has at times singlehandedly kept the Yankees offense viable as they hang on in a pennant race. Or how he’s playing for a contract next year, after the Yankees decided to reveal the specifics of a $213 million offer they tendered in the spring.

Judge will blow away that number this winter, just as he’ll blow away the major league field in home runs, and probably Maris, Mantle and Ruth along the way. It’s fair and just and right that Ohtani backers counter with his many contributions from the mound, how the Wins Above Replacement may stack up, how his unbelievable focus allows him to do two jobs for the price of one.

That’s fine. And if you fill out your real or imagined ballot with Ohtani on top, it’s wholly appropriate.

But let’s not lose sight of the fact that Judge, too, is making history worthy of a look deep into the record books.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Yankees' Aaron Judge is no Shohei Ohtani, but he's been Babe Ruthian