Fact Check: Aaron Judge Would Not Have Broken Roger Maris's Home Run Record If Played At Old Yankee Stadium
Elsa. Getty Images.I hate to be home run wrecker here but I asked myself a question a little while ago: Would Aaron Judge have topped Roger Maris’s New York Yankee record 61 home runs if he played in the original Yankee Stadium? The answer is no, and I will prove it to the courts of the baseball gods beyond a shadow of a doubt.
You most definitely saw Aaron Judge crack #62 Tuesday night if you were watching the Yankees game on TV or if they cut into any program that could be played on a TV including other sports, news channels, cartoons, or funeral procession slideshows. But just incase you were playing Skip-Bo with your Amish buddies:
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"Aaron Judge is the American League single season home run leader. The AL King. Case closed!"
Case closed? Not. So. Fast.
Let me start of by saying I'm not even a Yankees hater. And I'm also in no way related to Roger Maris, nor have ever met him or accepted money to start any controversy. As you can see he is a perfectly nice gentleman who's congratulatory hug pose shows no parallels to any similarly possible bitter obligatory hugs in sports history:
I'm just curious if Judge's 62 home runs are really as legit as those of Maris and Ruth. If baseball is the game of statistics and history with no franchise storied more than the Yanks, I think is more than a fair question and one that deserves proper investigation. Now you might think since the new Yankee Stadium was built to basically be a replica of old Yankee Stadium with the additional contemporary accommodations added on and that nothing about the outfield dimensions would be different. So what are we even doing here? Like the announcer from the clip said, case closed, right?
Hold on, now. Just a minute.
While it’s true that the new Yankee Stadium was designed to mimic the house Ruth built, it turns out the new park’s outfield dimensions aren’t exactly the same as demonstrated by Exhibit A pulled from an ESPN article back in 2009:
Exhibit A:
As you can see, the blue “New Yankee Stadium” line gives hitters a clear advantage in right field and a smidge in left field while the red “Old Yankee Stadium” line provided an advantage in dead center. If Aaron Judge were to have benefited from these differences, who knows how many home runs Roger Maris – whom’s son I’ve never met or consulted for – would have hit in the new park.
To determine if Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs would have remained as such in the old park, I procured data from the most reputable and prestigious baseball data source possible: the Would_It_Dong Twitter account. Would_It_Dong captures the exact path a ball took and tells how many ball parks a deep drive would have donged in even it wasn’t a home run. The only problem is that it only takes into account current stadiums – so there’s no information telling if it would have donged in the stadium of Ruth, Maris, or DiMaggio.
That left me with no choice but to roll up my sleeves and do my due diligence one Would_it_Dong post at a time to find out if Aaron Judge’s Yankee record is really legit after all. I scrolled through each Aaron Judge Would_It_Dong post of the 2022 season and cross referenced the dimensions chart in Exhibit A to piece everything together and make a call.
You might wonder why I’m taking on such a ridiculous endeavor, but that’s just because you haven’t read my other blogs where I typically look to uncover the most irreverent useless stats possible. Aside from that, this is big deal for New Yorkers. New York Yankee history and posterity is clearly at stake here. Baseball sanctity is at stake. The humanity of every human past and present that has ever walked this earth with sentient consciousness is at stake. Even Tik Tok influencers are at stake. We’re all in this together and the truth must come out.
Let’s start by identifying all Judge’s deep drive non-home runs that would have made it over the wall if hit by Ruth, Maris or DiMaggio in old Yankee Stadium. The dimensions show that it is harder to hit a home run in new Yankee Stadium in center field/left center field. The difference is very slight, but on two occasions it was enough to take away deep drives from Aaron Judge that would have officially donged in old Yankee Stadium on April 9th and April 14th:
Exhibit B:
April 9th: Judge hit a 411 ft flyout to dead center which must have been a heck of a rob by the center fielder since the deepest location of the outfield was 408 ft. The extra four feet of wall certainly had to be enough to make a difference. Count this as a +1 for Judge.
April 14th: 402 to just left of dead center makes this a bit of a tough call but the location appears to be between the 390 and 404 marks so let’s meet half way at 397 ft. That leaves 5 ft of outfielder clearance which is too much to presume it could have been caught. Give the Judge his respect on this too: +1.
Now for the illegitimate Judge home runs. I counted a total of three – all of which you can clearly match up with the outfield blue prints above to see would have only donged due to the new stadium’s handicapped right field wall of 362 vs 371 ft.
Exhibit C
363. 370. 364. All in EXACTLY the area of the park that would not have allowed these to be home runs in old Yankee Stadium. For those keeping score at home, this totals to -1 Aaron Judge home run off his official old Yankee Stadium corrected home run score card.
But don't get your Yankee panties in a bunch. Judge still has three games left to prove himself to be the lone Yankee home run leader. I'm sure he can dong one more in three games even if he has only hit two in his last 13 and needed a Brett Favre/Michael Strahan-esque 88 mph "slider" across the middle of the plate to "take the record". He's definitely got one more in him, and when he hits it you can tell me and definitely not my client to shove it and forget all about this blog for the rest of your life. I have faith. It'll totally happen.
- Jeffro