So, Aaron Judge is quite good at baseball. Through Wednesday night’s night’s win over the Royals, which featured a laser opposite-field homer, on the heels of his mammoth 460+ foot shot from Tuesday night, Judge is hitting .394/.490/.779, with 5.9 FanGraphs WAR in 66 games played this year. He’s played every game so far this year, and if he ends up playing 162 and staying at the same pace, he would finish with a 14.4 fWAR this season. Even if you account for rest days over the course of the season and he only plays 155, that’s still a 13.8 pace.

Over on the Yankees’ reddit, one poster made the observation that with his impressive start to the year, Judge has made it to 14th on the Yankees’ all-time fWAR leaderboard. Anyone that’s followed the Yankees could tell you that Judge is on a Hall of Fame and Yankee great trajectory, but putting into those terms really drives it home.

It also got me thinking, just how far up the leaderboard could Judge get up?

For the purposes of this season, we’ll assume Judge ends up at an even 10 fWAR instead of the 14.4 or 13.8 numbers. Ten is still a fairly ridiculous season, even if he’s already over halfway there in less than half of the games. Even just adding that 4.2 more for 2025 would get him to 61.4, within touching distance of Yogi Berra (63.8) for sixth on the Yankees’ leaderboard. FanGraphs’ ZiPS projections — which don’t account for this year’s hot start — expect him to add 11.6 more over the 2026 and ‘27 seasons.

Let’s first take a pessimistic view of things. Say Judge does end up with those projected figures, and gets him to 73 for his career. And also say he then nets out at zero more for the rest of his career, having some good years cancelled out by some below replacement ones at the end of his Yankees’ contract. Judge won’t actually turn into a pumpkin, but as they say “Father Time is undefeated.” The 73 WAR would tie him exactly with the previous Yankee captain — Derek Jeter — for fifth, behind just four guys named Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, and DiMaggio.

What if, instead, he had a more gradual aging curve. He puts up the 5.2 WAR season in 2027 that ZiPS expects, and then his WAR halves over the remaining years of his deal. That would be a 2.6 WAR 2028, a 1.3 WAR 2029, a 0.6 WAR 2030, and a 0.3 WAR 2031. That gets him to 77.8, definitely ahead of Jeter, but still a couple wins shy of DiMaggio for fourth.

Now, let’s imagine he does manage to get to the 14.4 WAR he’d be one pace, considering his current 2025 numbers. Doing that would have him on 63.2 through 2025. Now let’s assume the WAR halves like we did above, but starting with that 14.4 figure. That would equate to a 7.2 2026, a 3.6 2027, a 1.8 2028, a 0.9 2029, a 0.4 2030, and a 0.2 2031. That gets him to 79.9.

What if the aging curve was even more gradual than even that? What if instead Judge loses just three WAR person after putting up 14.4 this year. That makes the figures 11.4 (2026), 8.4 (2027), 5.4 (2028), 2.4 (2029), -0.6 (2030), and -3.6 (2031). That would take Judge to a remarkable 89.6 and trailing only Ruth, Gehrig, and Mantle.

Of course, all of this is assuming no massive injuries. Judge would probably already have several more wins had he not dealt with injury issues in his early year, plus COVID shortening the 2020 season.

The actual answer to all of these is probably somewhere in the middle. As long as, knock on wood, nothing catastrophic happens, my best bet is that he definitely passes Berra for sixth and will end either a bit ahead or behind Jeter. Either way, Aaron Judge has had a remarkable career so far. Again, he is good at baseball.