Aaron Judge, Juan Soto offensive production as duo

This story was excerpted from Bryan Hoch’s Yankees Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

As the Yankees approach the midway point of their season, the “Aaron Judge and Juan Soto Show” has been everything they could have expected — a patient, potent duo atop the lineup that may rank among the best the game has seen.

When Judge and Soto arrive for the season’s 81st game on Tuesday at Citi Field, they’ll do so with their names painted all over the Major League offensive leaderboards. The Yankees have seen their share of memorable names hitting back-to-back: they are, after the franchise of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.

It has only been a half-season, and there is no guarantee that this tandem will stick together beyond this year, but it’s not outlandish to at least place Judge and Soto in the conversation.

“That’s about as good a one-two punch as you can have,” manager Aaron Boone said on Sunday. “Left-right, both guys that get on base over a .400 clip, both with huge power. They complement each other really, really well. Just two great all-around players. I don’t know that there’s a better one-two punch.”

(This would be an excellent time to cast a ballot for the 2024 All-Star Game at MLB.com/vote, where Judge [2,375,199] and Soto [2,136,383] were the top two vote-getters across the Majors after the latest update in Phase One voting.)

Judge paces the Majors with a 1.109 OPS, with Soto third at .994 behind the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani (1.030). But there’s more: Judge leads the Majors in homers (28), RBIs (70), slugging (.686), extra-base hits (51) and total bases (192). He’s just the fourth Yankee to record 51 extra-base hits through 80 games, ranking alongside names like Ruth (1921, ’28), Gehrig (1927, ’31, ’36) and Joe DiMaggio (1937). If you prefer the more advanced alphabet soup stats like wRC+, wOBA and xwOBA, they adore Judge too, ranking him tops this season.

Soto and Judge are atop the Majors in on-base percentage, at .431 and .423, respectively — accordingly, they are also leading the league in walks (63 and 58). With Judge hitting behind him, Soto is second in the Majors in runs scored (62); only the Orioles’ Gunnar Henderson has more (65). Judge and Soto have reached base multiple times in 48 games this season, most in the league.

“I come to play every day,” Soto said. “It doesn’t matter how it’s going; if it’s going good, if it’s going bad. I just come to the field every day and come to play. … For me, I just try to be on base for the guys who are hitting behind me and try to give the team a chance to win a ballgame. That’s what it’s all about.”

Your eyes may be glazing over from all those numbers — I know, we said there would be no math on the final exam. So let’s try this: a quick and dirty way to evaluate player performance is fWAR (FanGraphs’ wins above replacement), where Judge and Soto rank in the Majors’ top five. Amid a stellar sophomore campaign for Baltimore, Henderson’s 5.6 has moved to the top of the board. Judge (5.2) and Soto (4.2) are close behind, with plenty of time for numbers to move.

We weren’t talking about fWAR in the dial-up modem days of 1996, but that’s the last time a couple of teammates finished one-two in that category, when it was the Mariners’ Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez. Roger Clemens and Wade Boggs achieved that feat for the Red Sox in 1987 and 1988.

The only other circumstances involved the Yankees: five times for Ruth and Gehrig (1926-28, ’30-31), plus Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio in 1937. So what does it all mean?

“You’re watching greatness,” right-hander Marcus Stroman said. “Sometimes you kind of take it for granted, to be honest. This is something that I’ll be sitting with my grandkids at some point and say, ‘I got the opportunity to play with Aaron Judge and Juan Soto and Gerrit Cole.’ Those are going to be the best players, I think, to ever play this game.”

If you’re having flashbacks to Judge’s fantastic 2022 season, you’re not alone. For all of the pageantry of a run in which he chased down Maris’ 61-year-old single-season AL home run record, Judge’s 2024 has been comparable thus far — and that’s even including a slow start that saw Judge hitting .197 as he walked out of Baltimore’s Camden Yards on the evening of May 2.

At the time, Judge insisted that he wasn’t concerned, noting: “I’m going to make a couple of adjustments, and I’ll be right there.”

A man of his word, Judge now sits just one homer off the pace from his 2022 tally; through 80 team games that year, Judge had 29 homers. In 45 games since May 3, Judge is batting .380 (60-for-158) with 22 homers and 52 RBIs — nearly averaging a home run every other game in that span, a 162-game pace of 79 homers. Not surprisingly, Judge has no interest in thumping his chest about how great he’s been. The numbers can do that for him.

“I’m just trying to take it one day at a time and do what I can for the team, get on base, especially with the lineup we have,” Judge said. “If I just get on base, I know they’re going to do their jobs.”