Many statistical categories have a hallmark. A figure that is the symbol of more than excellence, but of legend. Numbers that we saw set in the past (sometimes distant past) that we look for any possible instance of passing.
While that exact figure is disputable for stats like home runs, wins, and ERA, it’s indisputable for batting average. The round number of .400 has a mythical connotation. In a world where leaguewide batting average is approaching an all-time low, the excitement when someone is hovering around that number is palpable. Nobody has done it since Ted Williams in 1941. Nobody has maintained a season-long chase since Tony Gwynn in the strike-shortened 1994 season.
Following yet another multi-hit day, Aaron Judge is hitting .396 through 65 games. With well over half of the major-league schedule still in front of him, the odds are high that he won’t maintain this absurd level. But why think about the future right now? He’s hitting .396 in June! He’s in ultra-rarified air. Only three other men have even hit .390 through June 10th since the turn of the century: Chipper Jones, Todd Helton, and Luis Arraez.
Those three other men obviously didn’t hit .400. They didn’t even maintain a realistic chase in the final days like Gwynn did before the strike. What happened? Did they just revert to normal, or did the weight of the milestone make their games suffer as a whole? Let’s look into their stories and see if Judge’s start is similar to any of those.
2023 Luis Arraez (.402 on June 10)
Photo by Megan Briggs/Getty Images
The most recent chase for .400 happened just two years ago with this era’s most iconic active slap hitter.
In his first (and only) full season with the Miami Marlins, Arraez got off to an unbelievable start. Through April 18th, he was hitting .458. By May 5th, it was still at .437. While a cold streak dipped him into the .370s by the end of the month, he went on another blistering hot streak, going 24-for-46 from May 28th to June 10th to climb all the way up to .402.
Arraez woke up on the morning of June 25th still hitting over .400. While it’s cute when you’re flirting with .400 in April or May, the media coverage truly begins that month. Arraez started having baseball analysts everywhere talking about it, from ESPN to FanGraphs, even the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Everyone was talking about it. He was maintaining an average over .390, relative striking distance, into the beginning of July. MLB.com was even updating a tracker on his quest to match Teddy Ballgame as late as August 2nd, before his average dipped below .380 permanently.
Ultimately, he never got close again. Arraez batted just .315 from July 1st to the end of the season, which was a regression to his career norms. It shows that you can’t really lose a beat to keep up with history. He still gladly took the .354 average for the season and the second of three consecutive batting titles (with three separate teams). Outside of Arraez, no one has hit better than .350 in a full season since 2010.
2008 Chipper Jones (.420 on June 10)
Set Number: X80334 TK2 R3 F36
Before Arraez’s half-season bid, there was Chipper. The legendary Atlanta Braves third baseman was coming off one of the best non-All-Star seasons in modern history in 2007 and somehow got even better in 2008 at age 36. In his first All-Star nod since 2001, Jones got off to a worse start than Arraez, but went absolutely ballistic in late April.
From April 12th to May 7th, Jones hit .461 over a span of 20 games to get up to .429 on the season. Unlike with Arraez, who slowly dropped off after a ludicrous start, he was maintaining his mark. The future Hall of Famer climbed above .400 on April 13th and didn’t fall below it again for another 67 days, fittingly hitting his 400th career homer in the process. Nobody has taken a .420 average deeper in a season in the last 30 seasons than Chipper.
Like with Arraez, the noise started growing in June. The New York Times did a feature on the chase, with Jones remarking, “Anybody who has hit .400 for this long will tell you that you don’t hit this well without a little bit of luck. That being said, I’m no Ted Williams.”
He’s not wrong about that.
After getting up to .421 on June 6th, Jones hit just .309 over the remaining 71 games he played. A 6-for-30 skid from June 11-19 brought him down below .400.
Like Arraez, Chipper still hit pretty well, but finished at just .364 (though securing the first and only batting crown of his career). You just can’t afford being pretty good. You have to be excellent. Jones also missed some time with injury, playing just 128 games due to managing a small quadriceps tear for most of the season and an eye injury suffered in June, around where things dropped off. That explains it.
2000 Todd Helton (.405 on June 10)
During the mid-to-late 1990s, we saw a bunch of .400 bids into June. Guys like Roberto Alomar and Larry Walker did it in 1996 and 1997. Gwynn’s best shot in 1994 was maintained for longer, but Paul O’Neill was also batting .430 into mid-June with pop to boot. Recently-inducted Hall of Famer Todd Helton had the last bid of that period around the Steroid Era.
It was part of Helton’s breakout season, partially aided by the pre-humidor Coors Field but still a staggering achievement. After being a solid three-win player for his first two full seasons in Colorado, he exploded at age-26, eventually leading the league in doubles (59), RBI (147), OPS (1.162), and rWAR (8.9) in a fifth-place NL MVP. Helton’s path to his final numbers was different than the last two, as he entered May batting just .337, but he would go 25-for-43 over the first 11 games of the month and it boosted him into the conversation. He maintained .400 through June 10th, but never finished a game there again
It looked like Helton’s chase was over when he fell to .370 in early August, but a 16-game stretch where he hit .586 suddenly put him right back on the precipice. When Helton woke up on August 19th, he was hitting .399. Two days later, he briefly got over .400 midgame, but dipped back below by the end:
That would be the closest he got. After entering September at .395, he hit just .274 the rest of the way and fell to a still-impressive and league-leading .372 — though once again, nowhere close.
What does Judge have to do?
Who does Judge’s start compare to the most? His first month resembles Chipper, where he started in the 300s, climbing to over .400.
That said, unlike Chipper or the other two, Judge hasn’t topped .400 since May 21st. However, he’s hung around to stay in the upper-390s, never going lower than .387. In that aspect, he’s been like Helton. While the other two never quite rebounded after falling beneath the threshold, Judge is hanging around.
So, where might he end up?
Since Judge evolved into the clear-cut best hitter in baseball in 2022, he’s hit lower than .250 in just two full months, August 2023 and April 2024. Both months were affected by lingering injuries that had messed up his timing, with the former being his infamous toe injury and the latter being his mysterious abdominal injury in spring training.
Other than that, Judge batted .250 in April 2023. The lowest he’s hit in the last 3.5 seasons outside of April, excluding his post-toe injury slump, was .257 in June 2022. If Judge were to hit that total for the remaining 98 games, he’d still finish at .311.
If Judge batted to his 2022-24 average of .304 for the rest of 2025, he’d still hit .341 for the season. Now, if he batted to his .322 average last season, he’d finish at a ridiculous .351, the highest batting average by a Yankee in a non-shortened season since Don Mattingly hit .352 in 1986. That’s bonkers from a guy who also happens to be the best power hitter in a generation.
How long can he maintain this? It’s hard to say. He’s been the best hitter in baseball for several years, but his current .468 BABIP would be an MLB-record by a lot, thanks to his higher strikeout and homer rate than the regular high-average hitter. We don’t have stats like wOBA and xwOBA for Helton and Chipper, two more well-rounded hitters compared to Arraez’s one-trick pony, but nobody has started a season like Judge has in nearly a century when you add in the other parts of his game.
The Dream of .400 is unlikely, but so has everything else that Judge has accomplished so far. Can you ever really count this dude out?
