Last weekend, the Yankees played the Dodgers, which provided the perfect prompt to re-live last year’s World Series (much to the Yankees’ dismay). It also offered another chance to see, on the same field, the two best players in baseball: Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Or should that be Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani?
With apologies to a pair of players perched between Judge and Ohtani on both the Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs WAR leaderboards—the Mariners’ slugging, framing, untiring catcher Cal Raleigh and the Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong, an elite fly catcher who has more than sustained last season’s second-half surge at the plate—the conversation about baseball’s best player comes down to two men. Judge and Ohtani, who both became first-time fathers this year, didn’t need additional dad strength to lap the league. Combined, they’ve won five of MLB’s last eight MVP awards, even though they played in the same league until last year. Collectively, they’ve claimed all 150 first-place votes on the last five MVP ballots for which they were eligible. And after their unanimous victories in 2024, they’re thus far on track to make it seven out of 10 awards in 2025.
It didn’t take long for the two titans to display their prowess in their first head-to-head matchup since the World Series. Both went deep in the first inning on Friday, which marked the first time two reigning MVPs had homered in the same frame. Ohtani added another tater later in the game (his 15th of the month, which tied a franchise record) as the Dodgers claimed the first contest, en route to taking two of three in the series—including an 18-2 drubbing on Saturday. Naturally, the Yankees’ two runs in that game came on solo shots by Judge (his 20th and 21st bombs of the year). While Judge’s Yankees were idle on Monday, Ohtani homered again to tie Raleigh for the major league lead at 23. After all of that belting, who holds the belt as baseball’s best player?
A recent remark by one contender suggests that the title could be up for grabs. Last October, Judge called Ohtani “the best player in the game.” But last week, Judge twice referred to Ohtani as “one of the best players in the game.” One of! He hedged!
Does that slight amendment mean that Judge’s mind has changed vis-à-vis Ohtani’s preeminence? Not necessarily … but if so, he’d have a point.
When Judge anointed Ohtani the best player in baseball last fall, it wasn’t a controversial call. Judge had the higher WAR in 2024, but Ohtani had a huge edge on him in 2023 (when Judge missed time with a torn toe ligament). And Ohtani’s history of two-way play—pitching plus hitting and power plus speed—made him more of a unicorn than Judge, the 6-foot-7 slugger.
Ohtani hasn’t done anything since then to fumble the belt: This year, he’s essentially having the same season as last year, minus the 50-50 part (probably; last year, he didn’t really ramp up his base stealing until July). His 182 wRC+ is a dead ringer for last season’s 181. He’s on pace to produce a virtually identical full-season offensive WAR total, though he’s slightly ahead of where he was through the same number of games in 2024. However, he hasn’t done anything to bolster his case, either; he’s merely been similarly spectacular.
Judge, meanwhile, has become even better—or, at least, he’s shown that his blistering finish last year was entirely repeatable. Judge slumped early last season, by his standards, but after deploying an overhauled stance on May 5, he caught fire and recorded a 249 wRC+ the rest of the way. In 2025, he’s posted a 243 mark: roughly the same per-plate-appearance production, sans the slow start. (His swing hasn’t needed a tune-up.) He’s now sustained a 247 wRC+ over 181 games dating back to that day in May (excluding last October, when he wasn’t so hot).
Barry Bonds’s best wRC+ in a single season was 244, during his 143-game 2002 campaign. Babe Ruth topped out at 234, in 1920. Judge is making a strong case for himself as the best hitter ever, in terms of peak value. And he’s doing it despite hitting right-handed—which deprives him of claiming the platoon advantage as often as lefties like Bonds and the Babe enjoyed it—and playing at a time when the sport’s caliber of play is higher than ever, which makes it more difficult for stars to stand out from the pack. To name just two of several significant differences in difficulty level: Judge’s MLB isn’t segregated, as Ruth’s was, or awash with steroids, as Bonds’s was (seemingly to Bonds’s benefit).
Bonds’s era was a heyday for old dudes (possibly because of rampant PED usage before testing was instituted), but Judge’s era is the opposite. Yet Judge, who turned 33 in April, has peaked past 30, defying the trend toward getting old early. Judge’s main claim to fame is homer hitting: He set a rookie record by launching 52 in 2017, then smashed 62 in 2022, a less homer-happy season leaguewide. But by wRC+, those historic campaigns currently rank fourth and third, respectively, on his player page. Judge is now such a complete offensive force that in addition to challenging for the league lead in dingers, he’s striking out at a rate below the league average and also flirting with a .400 batting average thanks to Ruthian results on balls in play. Hence his renewed run at a Triple Crown.
Somewhat surprisingly, Judge is seeing a career-high percentage of pitches in the strike zone—a higher rate than Ohtani—even though he’s been Bondsing it up. In 2002, Bonds saw the league’s lowest percentage of pitches in the zone—and that doesn’t count all the wide ones that yielded 68 free passes. (A number that would nearly double in 2004.) Judge leads the majors with 12 intentional walks, but he’s not even on pace to match Bonds’s tally of 43 in 2007, when the 42-year-old played in 126 games and was months away from going suspiciously unsigned as a free agent. Granted, modern analysis doesn’t support issuing free passes at the rate Bonds’s opponents did decades ago, and the batters behind Judge have been good, but it still seems like rival teams aren’t showing sufficient fear. At least pitchers are throwing Judge fewer fastballs than they are to all but a handful of other hitters.
For now, another differentiator for Judge in the “best in baseball” debate is defense. Ohtani, a DH, doesn’t play it. Judge was miscast as a center fielder last season, though he’d previously held his own in center even without a traditional center-field frame. (He’s huge.) But he’s still solid in right, where he’s been stationed this year. If Judge is (a) the best hitter in the sport (certainly now, and possibly ever), (b) a pretty decent defender, and (c) durable, then he’s hands down better than DH Ohtani, no matter how well the Dodger (designated) hits. Indeed, Judge’s two best seasons (2022 and 2024) grade out as more valuable than any of Ohtani’s, and if Judge doesn’t falter, he’ll make that three this year.
But Ohtani has two points in his favor. For one, while Judge has preserved his eye-popping slash stats long enough to make “better than Bonds” look like his true talent level, the gap at the plate between him and Ohtani may be a bit smaller than it appears. Although there’s an 81-point gulf between their weighted on-base averages—which is wild, given how good Ohtani has been—the two have posted similar expected weighted on-base averages: Judge has outperformed his by 39 points, while Ohtani has underperformed his by 34. There’s almost no daylight between their Statcast percentiles when it comes to quality of contact. (If you’re wondering, there’s virtually no difference in park factors between Dodger Stadium for left-handed hitters and Yankee Stadium for righties, either.)
And then there’s Ohtani’s literal ace in the hole: pitching. Ohtani has hit so well since his elbow surgery in September 2023—albeit not that much better than he hit during 2023—that the calls for him to specialize have begun again. (Please stop.) Fortunately, the Dodgers haven’t heeded them, both because Ohtani’s preference is to pitch and because Los Angeles, as usual, has a whole pitching staff on the injured list. On May 25, Ohtani faced hitters on a major league mound for the first time since his second elbow reconstruction. Hours after throwing batting practice to teammates, he homered. Six days later—between his two-dinger day on Friday and another two-hit performance on Saturday—he pitched to teammates again. L.A. is slow playing Ohtani’s real return to pitching, which isn’t expected to take place until after the All-Star break. Then again, Judge has reached such rarefied air that even Ohtani’s two-way play isn’t the argument-ending trump card it once was.
All in all, the tale of the tape is pretty even. Since the start of 2021, Ohtani edges out Judge by 0.8 fWAR (38.4 to 37.6) and 4.0 bWAR (40.8 to 36.8)—2.4 WAR, on average. By B-Ref’s wins above average, Ohtani is on top 29-28. Over a four-plus-season span, these are negligible leads. (Unlike their leads over the rest of the league: No other player is within 10 WAR of them.) So even though Ohtani’s exploits have taken a flashier, more fascinating form, he hasn’t outplayed Judge by much.
In fact, Judge has been better than Ohtani lately, while the latter has been limited to one-way play, which leads to rosier short-term projections for the Yankees captain. FanGraphs projects Judge to accrue 5.1 WAR over the rest of the regular season, surpassing Ohtani’s projected total by 0.6 WAR—even after accounting for Ohtani’s projected seven starts and 41 innings pitched.
It's a simple question—Ohtani or Judge?—but the answer is complicated. Right now—and most likely for the remainder of this season—Judge is better. If you had to win one game, though, you might take Ohtani as soon as this summer, assuming his arm still looks like some semblance of its presurgical self. Going into 2026, a fully operational Ohtani would probably be favored to amass more value—in fact, even now, he is projected to be more valuable next season. But if he hurts his arm again, Judge could be back in the catbird seat. Unless Ohtani gives up on pitching and plays outfield instead, in which case the calculus changes.
As with all “best” debates in sports, this one will expire sooner than we’d like. Ohtani will turn 31 in July, and Judge is more than two years older. It likely won’t be long until neither of them is the answer and the contentious discussion centers on younger players: Bobby Witt Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr., Juan Soto, Gunnar Henderson, Corbin Carroll, Elly De La Cruz, Julio Rodríguez, one of the Jacksons, etc. But Judge—who, amazingly, might be underrated, because his excellence takes a more conventional shape—deserves loud plaudits for even making the conversation worthwhile during Ohtani’s incredible run.
As an international icon and heartthrob, Ohtani is much more famous than Judge—which is saying something, considering Judge is the biggest (both figuratively and physically) star, for the most storied team, in the country’s largest media market. Ohtani has almost five times as many Instagram followers, even though Judge joined the platform close to eight years earlier. But we’re focusing on the field, not on follower counts. And when they’re in action, they’re quite comparable to each other, and to almost no one else. Judge set the single-season AL home run record—widely perceived as the overall record for a player unblemished by steroid scandal—and Ohtani became the first 50-50 player. And somehow, they’ve both had better years than those.
In a 2022 mash note to Ohtani and Judge, I observed that while everyone was stacking each star’s campaign up against the other, only American League MVP voters had to pronounce one of their awe-inspiring seasons superior. The rest of us had the option of simply drooling over both. Now, even MVP voters are excused from playing “would you rather”—which won’t stop them, or us, from doing so anyway. Arguing about sports is fun. But nothing is as fun as the fact that each of these players is compiling a legendary, riveting, possibly unprecedented peak—yet the sport is so blessed with god-tier talent that neither of them has an uncontested claim to the title of baseball’s best.
