Aaron Judge Home Run No. 62 Estimate: 17 Solid Pitches Left

Of course, Judge could homer off a pitch outside the strike zone, and not every pitch within the strike zone is home-run material. There are also discrepancies in M.L.B.’s various interpretations of which pitches crossed the strike zone. But this serves as a rough estimate of the number of hittable pitches Judge may still face.

We estimate that Judge has a 63% chance of reaching 62 home runs.

In the 2022 season through Monday, Judge received 1,315 pitches in the strike zone and homered on 58 of them, as tracked by M.L.B.’s zone charts. (His other three home runs came on pitches that were recorded by M.L.B. as either high or inside, or both, but we’re excluding those from this analysis.) That means he has homered on roughly 4.4 percent of pitches in the strike zone.

Now, time for some probability math. Let’s assume that each time Judge faces a pitch in the strike zone, he has an equal and independent 4.4 percent chance of homering — an overly simplistic assumption, but a fair one for this estimate. Given our estimate that Judge will face 22 more pitches in the strike zone, what are the odds that he’ll homer on at least one of those opportunities — that the event that has a 4.4 percent chance of happening will occur at least once in 22 tries? By the powers of probability, those odds are 63 percent.

This aligns with how the sports books see it. DraftKings, for example, on Tuesday morning was offering -175 odds that Judge would hit at least 62 home runs this season, which implies a probability of 64 percent.

With each unsuccessful plate appearance against the Rangers, Judge’s chances will tick downward, and he and his fans will probably sweat a little bit more. Or maybe Judge will hit a home run off the next pitch he faces, and all of these estimates will no longer be needed.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/sports/baseball/aaron-judge-home-runs-today-chances.html