ohtanijudge-getty-1.png
Getty Images

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 April 22. That contest began a stretch in which Judge hit 16 home runs in his next 27 games. 
  • In terms of his current 23 pace, Judge going into the Angels series is in line for 51 homers and a WAR of 6.1. Last year he had a WAR of 10.6 en route to topping Ohtani for MVP laurels. Let it be noted that Judge's current 2023 WAR is being dragged down a bit by some negative defensive numbers. Given his usual strong performances in the field, that's probably small-sample noise. Remove that from the calculus, and he'd be on pace for a 2023 WAR of more than 8.0, which would put him in the MVP discussion once again. 

And now for Ohtani. As the Angels' DH last season, he hit 34 home runs, topped 300 total bases, and had an OPS+ of 144. As the ace of the rotation, he pitched to a 2.33 ERA with 219 strikeouts in 166 innings. Now let's see where he stands in 2023 versus a similar point in his singular 2022 campaign: 

  • Ohtani at the plate this season has a 142 OPS+ – almost identical to last year's full-season figure – and three home runs in 15 games. He's also on pace for career highs in batting average (.298) and on-base percentage (.385). 
  • Last season as a hitter, Ohtani at this stage of the season had as many home runs (3), but was otherwise faring much worse. After his first 15 games of 2022, Ohtani the hitter had an OPS of .662 versus this year's figure of .876. 
  • On the mound this season, Ohtani has been otherworldly thus far: an ERA of 0.86 through four starts with no unearned runs allowed, zero homers given up, and 27 strikeouts in 21 innings. 
  • Through his first four starts on the mound in 2022, Ohtani had a 4.19 ERA with 30 strikeouts and two homers allowed in 19 1/3 innings. 
  • On another level, Ohtani this season is throwing his sweeper, or his more horizontally breaking slider, more than half the time. Last year, he threw it slightly more than one-third of the time. 
  • Last year, Ohtani had a combined offensive and pitching WAR of 9.6. So far in 2023, he's on pace for a combined WAR of 16.2, which is a stratospheric figure. In modern times, it would be second to only Walter Johnson's WAR of 16.5 that he authored back in 1913. Ohtani's current pace is driven by his pitching, and suffice it to say he's unlikely to run a sub-1.00 ERA for the entirety of the season.

Obviously, it's so early in the season you can't draw any conclusions from these paces beyond the simple fact that these are both generationally great players. All the same, you can factually state that Judge is doing better than he was at the same point in 2022 and that Ohtani has the controls set for perhaps the greatest season in the annals of MLB. Whether you apply the essential context to those observations is up to you.