The Launch Angle

Judge it Both Ways

One of the things Aaron Judge has been dogged for in his career is that he isn’t “clutch”, that is to say, when it matters most, he doesn’t come through. The allegation is low hanging fruit. More eyes are on baseball in October, and it’s hard not to pick up that Judge’s performance in the postseason dips from his level of play during the regular season.

That’s a drop of over 200 points. To be fair, an .822 OPS is still incredible, but it’s just not the “Judgian” standard people are used to. You should expect some postseason dropoff in OPS. Better pitchers are pitching in the postseason. But I’m sure it’s tough to swallow for Yankee fans who have seen their greats like Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter not let their OPS dropoff in October, even increasing it, delivering their Yankees titles, and who have seen rivals Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa do the same, knocking their Yankees out.

This isn’t meant to be a hit piece on Aaron Judge. His “depressed” .822 postseason OPS is still near the level that Jackson, Jeter, Altuve and Correa have. Judge is one of the best baseball players and hitters in the game today. Statistically, there’s an argument for him being the best of his era, in fact.

However, when Team Venezuela faced Team USA in the World Baseball Classic finals, I realized my allegiance to Jose Altuve might actually be stronger than my allegiance to my country, at least when my country is captained by Judge. Altuve may be the most beloved figure in the history of the city of Houston. The guy who admitted he deleted his congratulatory tweet to Altuve for winning the 2017 MVP is nowhere near that in Houston. So there’s some intrinsic bias to the piece.

Is Clutch Real?

It makes me wonder though: is clutch really a thing? I love analytics as much as the next person, and analytics people will rail on about how clutch is a myth.

You don’t need to know anything about baseball to weigh in on this. We should have billions of witnesses and their life experiences who can tell you that trying to do something when there’s pressure on you, when everybody’s watching, is not the same as when there’s no consequence to your success or failure. It doesn’t matter what it is.

Just like when you’re in a stadium and you need to pee but you’re in the most massively crowded men’s restroom, and there’s a line of people waiting for your urinal to open up, and you know you gotta go, but nothing’s coming, and you can just feel the line wondering “why’s this guy been standing at his urinal for so long?”, so you just bail and flush for optics, and wonder if you could maybe get into a private restroom. Just me? Okay, well, forget you read that.

Still, I’m sure all of you can draw from life experiences as well. It feels different when the stakes are higher. This is nowhere close to a new concept either; in Anthony De Mello’s book “Awareness”, he quotes Chinese philosopher Tranxu:

“When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.”

There is a VHS tape of 11 year old me trying to play “Silver Bells” at a piano recital that has this power-draining phenomenon on video.

I told that story to friend and fellow baseball nerd, skeptical of clutch, who conceded, “Well, maybe ‘clutch’ isn’t real, but ‘not clutch’ is, and that was you.”

Judge In Leverage

Ahead of Game 1 of the first Yankees-Astros series of the season, I thought I’d take a look into whether Aaron Judge is “not clutch”, by examining how his performance changes depending on the leverage of the situation.

As we’re less than a month into the season, there just isn’t enough sample size for meaningful splits, so I started by looking at Aaron Judge’s 2025 MVP season.

This doesn’t look great for Judge as his wRC+ drops from 223 to 191 to a below MLB average 95 as you move from low to medium to high leverage. But again sample sizes should be considered.

Judge had just 33 at-bats (49 plate appearances) in 2025 in high leverage. If it got to that point, teams were just walking him a third of the time.

For more meaningful samples sizes, we can take a look at his career leverage splits:

For his career, there is a similar trend to what we saw in 2025, although not as pronoucned. His wRC+ goes from 181 and 179 in low and medium leverages down to 143 in high leverage.

You would expect that players would do worse in high leverage situations. Opposing teams will put in their best pitchers and most favorable matchups in those situations. A player of Judge’s caliber doesn’t get to cherry pick his matchups; he’s not a pinch hitter, he’s in there no matter who’s on the mound.

During the course of most of Judge’s career, 2017-2025, MLB hitters as whole didn’t see as sharp a dropoff in high leverage, though:

How does Judge compare with the hitters with whom we compared regular season and postseason performances? (These splits were not available for Reggie Jackson.)

Altuve, Correa and Jeter all experience similar dropoffs when moving into high leverage. It may be that October represents a different kind of pressure cooker than that of a high leverage regular season game.

But it should be noted, that no matter the dropoff, the high leverage Aaron Judge still has a better OPS and wRC+ than any of these others. Does Judge lose something when the stakes are raised? Possibly. But Mike Tyson punching you in the face at 75% strength will still knock you out.

Really though, who’s the hitter on the Astros that is most similar in profile to Judge? Probably not the 5’5″ guy. So I’ll conclude with a comparison of the Yankees’ and Astros’ heavyweights:

So is clutch real? “Yes,” says 11 year old me as he is forced to listen to the polite clapping of an audience he know has just listened to him bomb at the piano.

I think it’s real. And I think Judge gets diminished a little when the chips are on the table, but I have no desire to test that theory, at least not during this series.

Yankees @ Astros Game Information and Gamethread Details

The Yankees come into this series, tops in the AL with a 16-9 record. The Astros hobble in at 10-16, last in the AL West and 3rd worst in the AL.

Once famed Yankees killer Lance McCullers, Jr. takes the mound for the Astros, having turned in two pedestrian starts after an electric first start of the season. Will Warren starts for the Yankees, a right handed pitcher in his second year, who has done well so far this season, 2-0 with a 2.49 ERA and 31 K to 6 BB across 25.1 IP in 5 starts.

The Astros don’t have a lot of experience against Warren. Altuve, Alvarez, Diaz and Correa each have 2 at bats against him (Yordan going 2-2), but none of the rest of the team has faced him.

Starting lineups are as follows:

The game will be broadcast at 7:10 p.m. CT on SCHN with radio coverage on KTRH 740 AM.

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Photo by KA Sports Photos. Creative Commons License. Cropped.