Aaron Judges otherworldly season is beyond Ruthian

Is this what it was like to watch Babe Ruth play every day? No.Really.

That’s a fair question now.We know Babe Ruth was a great slugger — maybe the greatest slugger — because we can read the numbers, which seem hard to fathom if you look at them too closely.

We know he was great because his contemporaries went to their graves revering him, marveling at his power, at his skill, at his flair. For almost a hundred years, it’s been foolish to compare anyone else to him, even if there’s hardly anyone still living who saw him.Babe Ruth? I mean, Billy Joel is a terrific piano player, but does anyone ever say he was better than Ludwig van Beethoven — though there’s no one presently roaming the earth who ever heard LVB tickle the ivories? Some things we just take on faith. Babe Ruth, it’s always been taken on faith, lived on his own shelf as a slugger. Everyone else — starting with Hank Aaron, joined by Willie Mays, by Barry Bonds by Ted Williams, by a few others — had their own shelf, just below. But Aaron Judge makes you wonder. Is this what it was like to watch Babe Ruth play every day? “He’s able to go on historical runs, MVP-type runs, otherworldly-type runs,” says Yankees teammate Gerrit Cole, who’s had a front-row seat for so much of what Judge has done since 2020.

“He’s just a great player.” He is historical.He is otherworldly.

He is making a case for himself as the unanimous MVP this time around, to bookend the one he won two years ago when he hit 62 home runs, two more than Ruth did in 1927, the year when Ruth was the most feared baseball player who ever lived. In ’27, Ruth went on two 51-game tears that make you check your work three and four times when you’re done, to make sure the numbers are right because it feels like they couldn’t possibly be right. The first, from May 30 to July 26, Ruth had 20 homers, 57 RBIs, scored 55 runs and slashed .400/.526/.844.That’s a 1.371 OPS across two solid months of bas...