Perhaps the best way to describe Aaron Judge is that you always have to keep an eye on him.

This is increasingly the case with major league managers who are willing to send Judge off the field in situations where he definitely won’t get a free pass. That’s where Judge’s career currently stands, on the day he hit the 300-career home run club in fewer games – by far – than any other player in history.

Reaching 300 home runs does not guarantee future career records. The record set by Judge (300 home runs in 955 games) previously belonged to Ralph Kiner, who needed 1,087 games. Kiner finished his career with 369 home runs.

Judge is the 162nd player to hit 300. At 32, he’s almost old for a baseball player, but he’s still young enough to hit plenty of home runs.

How many home runs could Judge end up hitting? That’s a harder guess than other power hitters who have hit .300. Why? Simply put, we’ve never seen a career like Aaron Judge’s.

Judge made his first major league appearance in 2016, when he was already 24 years old. He made his debut with the New York Yankees on August 13, almost exactly eight years to the day you are reading this. In his first game, he hit a home run against Matt Andriese of the Tampa Bay Rays. In fact, he hit a home run in his first MLB at-bat, right after teammate Tyler Austin did the same. Then he hit a home run in his second game, too, hitting a home run against Jake Odorizzi.

Judge hit just two more home runs in 2016, making his career home run total four by the end of his 24th season. He was just getting started, but historically great players often debut much earlier, sometimes before they even turn 20. Eddie Mathews hit 190 home runs at that age, the record for 24-year-olds, followed by Alex Rodriguez (189) and Mel Ott (176). Babe Ruth, who had not yet become a full-time hitter at the end of his 24th season (though he was close to it), had hit 49 home runs.

For Judge, it was a late start that he spent eight years making up for by posting monstrous home run rates even in injury-plagued seasons and another season marred by both injuries and the pandemic. In his career, Judge has averaged 51 home runs per 162 games played. He established that pace by hitting 52 home runs as a rookie in 2017, practically turning into Ruth immediately after becoming a starter in New York.

As we begin to throw out some possible career prospects for Judge, we’re only concerned with Judge’s epic pace, his maturing age, and one final unknown in the whole thing, which is that Judge has not only continued to hit balls into the stratosphere, but has also continually gotten better as an overall hitter – and that improvement shows no signs of slowing down.

The nine-year, $360 million contract Judge signed with the Yankees before last season runs through 2031, or after his age-39 season. To get to 20 seasons, he would have to play until age 43, which is a lot to ask. Judge is an excellent athlete, as opposed to a slow DH type. That will help his longevity, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. To hazard a guess on Judge’s remaining seasons, let’s just give him the current contract plus a few more seasons, which brings him to 41. That means nine more seasons after 2024.

With that estimate and Judge’s current home run rate, we can use a version of Bill James’s old favorite toy to come up with some estimates about his future. Then we’ll dive into the reasons why this standardized approach might not work for Judge.

The James tool automatically calculates a player’s projected remaining seasons based on his age, and for Judge, it comes up with an estimate of 4.8. If we give Judge the 56 home runs he’s projected to hit in 2024 and factor in the 37 he hit last season and the AL record of 62 he broke in 2022, the method calculates his established home run per season level at a whopping 50.7. So, according to Favorite Toy, Judge has 4.8 seasons of 50.7 home runs per season left, giving him 243.2 in his future, or a career total of 556.

That would put him over Mickey Mantle (536) and second on the Yankees’ all-time list behind Ruth, who hit 659 of his 714 home runs for New York. The toy also gives us the ability to create probabilities for various milestones. Here are some based on those inputs:

The favorite toy is great, but we can see that applying the framework to Judge might generate some skepticism. For one thing, the estimate of 4.8 seasons remaining seems low given his contract and current level of play. And while we can be fairly certain—barring a serious injury—that he has more than 4.8 seasons left, it’s unlikely that he’ll average 50.7 home runs over the course of his career.

Now let’s do another estimate using standard aging tables, which again are a good tool, but may not be so suitable for Judge.

If we go back to our first attempt and assign Judges nine seasons remaining and then apply standard age-based degradation rates to his currently set values ​​for games played and home runs per game, we arrive at an average of 122 games and 41 home runs per season through age 41. This last season, using this simple method, he hit 28 home runs in 98 games.

Seems high for most players, but Judge averaged 51 home runs per 162 games played. for his entire careerSo it happened that in 2023, when he only participated in 106 competitions, he still produced 37 bombs.

Adding those numbers together, using the age-based method, gives Judge 419 more home runs, or 719 when all is said and done.

When we factor in Favorite Toy’s estimate of 556 home runs and the age-based estimate of 719, we’re talking about a range of 243 to 406 home runs left for Judge after this season, assuming his health outlook is rosy. But has anyone ever hit that many home runs starting at age 33?

The answer to the high end of the range is no, because the list of all-time home runs for players age 32 and older is led by Bonds with 388. According to Baseball-Reference.com, nine players have hit 243 or more home runs since age 33. Here is that list, along with their home run percentage per 162 games through age 32.

That 719 number is remarkable and perhaps overly optimistic, both in terms of seasons remaining and games played, but a key factor in that outlook is that Judge continues to improve as a hitter, even at age 32.

In terms of home runs alone, Judge’s rate is 8.4% over the last three seasons, beginning with his 30th season. Before that, it was 6.4%. Judge hasn’t really gotten stronger, but as he’s matured, he’s been able to use his tremendous raw power more often.

Judge will never be a low-strikeout hitter, but he has significantly reduced his misses over the course of his career as his swing decisions and command of the strike zone have improved. Through 2019, he had a strikeout in 31.6% of his at-bats; since then, that has dropped to 25.7%. His hard-hit rates have increased, and he’s getting the ball in the air more often.

The end result is that Judge has become far more than just a hitter. His overall batting average since the start of the 2021 season is exactly .300, which is remarkable in an era when .300 hitters have become far less common. This season, he has a batting average of .333 and is in position to make a run at the AL’s Triple Crown (he leads in home runs and RBIs, but trails Kansas City’s Bobby Witt Jr. by 16 points in batting average). The home runs are the highlights, but it’s Judge’s overall batting ability that has earned him the Bonds treatment.

All of this makes predicting Judge’s future a little more difficult, but in an amazing way. Simply put, it’s hard to predict the downward trajectory of a player whose upward trend hasn’t stopped yet. If the upper limits of some of these career estimates seem fantastic to you, it’s Judge’s overall skill at the batting plate that makes up for them.

For Aaron Judge to reach and surpass the 700 home run milestone, his career will have to have a historic finish. We can’t know if he can do it, but what we can say right now is that the beginning of his career was unprecedented.

In the 955th game of his career, Judge became the 162nd member of the 300-homer club. But in many ways, he is already in a class of his own.