


We were treated to one of the most spectacular individual seasons in MLB history in 2022, when Yankees superstar Aaron Judge broke the AL record with 62 home runs en route to near-unanimous MVP honors.
Ahead of the 2023 season, bettors are already banking on a similar effort from the Bronx Bomber.
Oddsmakers aren’t quite expecting history this time around from Judge, but the star slugger is dealing as the clear favorite at BetMGM to lead the league in home runs (+550) ahead of Thursday’s start of the regular season.
He also boasts the highest preseason total for home runs (43.5) — the only player priced to hit at least 40 homers entering Opening Day.
To nobody’s surprise, the over is juiced to -120 on his home run prop, and Judge is easily the biggest liability in the home run leader market with the highest percentage of tickets (12.3 percent) and overall money wagered (17.5 percent) as of Tuesday afternoon.
So, it’s fair to ask: will he repeat as the home run king?
There are some obvious reasons for skepticism.
First off, we’ve never seen a player sustain such a historic home run pace:
The previous eight times a player hit at least 60 home runs in a single season, they followed it up with 16.3 fewer dingers on average the following year.
That sort of drop-off would put Judge at just under 46 home runs next season — the same number that Kyle Schwarber had as the runner-up to Judge in 2022 and lower than the MLB leader in each of the previous six full seasons.
Judge’s epic home run pace in 2022 was also buoyed by historic outliers under the hood, which suggests some regression to the mean in 2023.
Last year, the Yankees star saw his hard-hit rate (61.9 percent) and home run rate (8.9 percent) both spike to career highs.
He benefited from easily his highest fly-ball rate (38.3 percent) — seven points higher than his career average (31.3 percent) and more than 10 points higher than his rate from the year before (28 percent).
To that effect, Judge also posted the fourth-highest single-season Home Run to Fly Ball (HR/FB) rate (35.6%) in MLB history, with two of the three seasons above him coming in that 60-game season in 2020.
All three of those players saw dramatic dips in their HR/FB rate the following year, and their home run production dropped by over 20 percent on average.
In fact, we’ve seen that exact type of regression from Judge before. In 2017, he hit a whopping 52 home runs and boasted an identical HR/FB rate of 35.6 percent to his 2022 campaign.
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The next year, that dipped to 29 percent, and he hit 25 fewer home runs despite playing just 43 fewer games.
That’s another issue for Judge: He has struggled to stay on the field.
While the former first-round pick has led the majors in home runs per game (0.31) since he became a full-time starter in 2017, he also has missed 168 of a possible 870 games (19.3 percent) during that stretch — good for roughly 31.3 missed games per season.
If he had missed that many games last year, he would have been on pace to hit roughly 51 homers, which would have been barely enough to clear Schwarber (46) for the MLB lead.
Yes, Judge played a career-high 157 games in 2022, but the last time he played more than 150 games was in 2017, when he subsequently missed 50 games the following year.
Outside of that 2017 campaign, Judge hadn’t even hit 40 home runs in a season until this past season.
If he can stay healthy, he feels like a solid bet to surpass that mark and cash the over on his preseason total (42.5), but that’s still a big “if” for the 6-foot-7 slugger.
And it’s even less likely that he maintains the historic efficiency that helped him pace MLB in homers a year ago.
If he doesn’t, that leaves this market wide open for someone else to claim his throne.
Keep an eye on guys like Matt Olson (25/1), Byron Buxton (40/1), and Kyle Tucker (60/1) — all players with the power and upside to make a run in this market at a much juicier price.