Outliers: American League East
A look into a slew of statistical outliers found within the AL East hitter data
I’m bringing back the old outliers series that I started back in the day on RotoBaller and had a few iterations of last year.
With the daily notes and slate previews taking up most of my writing time, I’ve forgotten about this Outliers idea I had years ago. But it’s a cool idea, and I’m happy to resurrect it here in July 2025. Let’s find some outlier data points for AL east hitters.
Yankees
Aaron Judge’s 65% Contact Rate
I try to make everything I write useful for fantasy baseball players. This particular stat is not going to be useful for anybody.
But we can use it to learn a bigger lesson, maybe. If you told me that a hitter who is batting .360 and slugging .737 has a 65% Contact% and then told me nothing else, I would be pretty set on my way already to call that player a massive sell-high.
This is a really low contact rate, and it’s down pretty significantly from last year. Here are some plate discipline marks on Judge from FanGraphs.
It’s a little different than what you’ll see on my dashboard, and that has to do with foul tips. No matter where you look, though, you’ll see that he’s making less contact this year. He’s also swinging a little bit more and chasing a lotta bit more. His chase rate is the highest it’s been since his rookie year.
And that would be worrisome if this were anybody but Aaron Judge. Few players in baseball history have been able to do what Judge can do when he gets the bat to the ball, and it’s not as though he’s ever been a low strikeout rate guy. Him striking out around a quarter of the time is nothing new, it just doesn’t hold him back. The strikeouts are well worth the trade.
Here are your hitters with contact rates most similar to Judge in 250+ PA.
You can see that Judge has the field in batting average by almost 100 points. But you can also see his expected batting average is way ahead of the rest of them as well.
The one thing that’s obvious is that he’s not going to finish the year hitting .360. He has benefited from the highest BABIP of his career.
Aaron Judge BABIP by Year
2017: .357
2018: .368
2019: .360
2021: .332
2022: .340
2023: .300
2024: .367
2025: .433
We expect something like .350 from him (that’s his career average). And he’s way, way above that. That’s not to say we expect him to finish this year at .350, we’re already more than halfway home, but the right expectation for the rest of this season would be a .350ish BABIP, and pairing that with the 25-27% K% will turn into a much more modest batting average.
Is that likely regression reason enough to trade the big man? I don’t think so! Unless you’re bringing back something insane like getting another stud player like Bobby Witt Jr., along with another very useful fantasy player. Those are the kinds of trades I’d be looking to do, but I’m by no means advising anybody to run for the hills on Judge just because he might only hit .275 the rest of the way home. But that is a real possibility.
Jasson Dominguez’s 11% BB%
It’s been a bumpy ride for Dominguez this year. He’s had some big games and has shown some really good signs, but overall, he hasn’t been a needle-mover for fantasy baseball.
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