A daily part of contemporary baseball observance is wondering: how much more history can Shohei Ohtani make on his own? The two-way star's career is downright littered with unprecedented feats unlikely to be challenged anytime soon. As such, there's already a compelling case to be made that he's the most talented player in Major League Baseball history -- for no one else has done what he's done for this long and against this caliber of competition. So, realistically, what single-season achievement remains for Ohtani to conquer?
Ohtani has provided an answer through the first half of the season by positioning himself as a legitimate threat to break Aaron Judge's year-old single-season American League home-run record of 62. Indeed, through Tuesday's game (a contest that he departed as a pitcher because of a blister), Ohtani was ahead of Judge's pace. Whereas Judge had homered 30 times in the Yankees' first 88 team games, Ohtani homered 31 teams in the Angels' first 88 team games. Judge would launch his 31st home run in the next game.
| Home run/team game | Judge, 2022 | Ohtani, 2023 |
|---|---|---|
No. 25 | 62 | 77 |
No. 30 | 82 | 84 |
No. 35 | 95 | ? |
No. 40 | 101 | ? |
As you can see, Ohtani was well behind schedule on hitting his 25th home run. His historic June has since allowed him to catch up and even surpass Judge's pace. It's become reasonable to ask: can Ohtani seriously break Judge's record? We here at CBS Sports decided to break out a spreadsheet to find out.
If you're familiar with projection systems, you know that prorating a player's current performance out over however many games is often a fool's errand. Without getting too nerdy, that ignores the concept of regression to the mean. The best projection systems attempt to suss out a player's "true talent level" by regressing their play against both the league and the player's past. The idea is, essentially, that extreme performances tend to correct in due time.
For the sake of keeping things accessible, we're going to leave out the regression part (at least to some extent) and offer two roadmaps. One is based on Ohtani's current home-run rate -- which is, as you may have guessed, elevated versus his norm. The other is based on his career averages, including this season. In addition to being easier for the layperson to understand, this method illustrates just how difficult it is to hit 62 home runs. To wit:
| Games/HR | Ohtani current pace | Ohtani career pace |
|---|---|---|
145 | 52 | 35 |
150 | 54 | 36 |
155 | 56 | 38 |
160 | 58 | 39 |
You might wonder how Ohtani can be ahead of Judge's schedule through 88 team games without projecting to break the record. There's one main dynamic at play: Judge did his best home-run work from that point forward. Put another way, Judge homered 31 times in his first 376 plate appearances. Judge then hammered 31 home runs over his remaining 320 plate appearances.
That second-half barrage meant that Judge homered in 8.9% of his seasonal plate appearances. Ohtani has homered in 8.1% of his plate appearances to date. The difference between those rates seems minimal, but over the course of 650 trips to the plate, it works out to about five or six additional home runs … or, roughly the gap between Ohtani's projected total and Judge's record.
Is it possible that Ohtani's best slugging lies ahead? Yes. It's just not likely, based on his career norms and whatnot. Low-probability scenarios unfold all the time, in real life and in baseball. For instance, it was incredibly unlikely that Judge would break the record until he went and did it. Even so, the odds are certainly against Ohtani. There's a reason Roger Maris' record stood for 61 years: it's hard to homer in around 9% of your trips to the plate all year.
It's also hard to play in nearly every game of your team's season. Ohtani will face an even steeper challenge in that respect than Judge (or anyone else in modern memory) did, given his pitching workload. He's left each of his last two starts alongside a trainer, and while those departures were caused by relatively minor issues -- a cracked fingernail and a blister -- it's a reminder that what he does is not easy. He's made it look easy, but it's daunting to ask one player to pitch and hit, and to do each at an elite level day after day, year after year.
Will Ohtani break Judge's record? We would guess not based on all the available information and the historical precedent. But if there's one thing you can write that sums up the Ohtani experience, it's that he's baseball's ultimate outlier.
