Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge Are Spearheading a New Golden Era of Baseball

Never mind Yalta or Reykjavik. As summit meetings of superpowers go, nongeopolitical division, precedent for the one at a New York hotel ballroom in January could be found in French Lick, Ind.

There in the summer of 1985, Boston Celtics great Larry Bird, the two-time reigning NBA MVP, hosted Los Angeles Lakers great Magic Johnson at his mother’s house to shoot a Converse sneakers ad known as “Choose Your Weapon.” Though Bird and Magic had competed against one another since the 1979 NCAA championship, the rivals kept such distance between them that they had not yet even casually shaken hands, no less sat down at Georgia Bird’s kitchen table, as they did for a home-cooked meal that afternoon.

Bound as rivals and friends, Bird and Magic changed the trajectory of the NBA as an entry. They sold shoes, sure. They also sold the sport. The average NBA salary in the 1980s rose from $180,000 to $900,000. Bird or Magic—and three times both—played in every NBA Finals of the decade. They won six MVP awards in a seven-year stretch, interrupted only by the newly ascendant Michael Jordan.

Forty-one years later, the two greatest superpowers in baseball, Aaron Judge of the Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers, greeted one another for their first formal photo shoot together. No commercial was involved, but Judge and Ohtani, like Bird and Magic, chose the same brand of weapon—in this case, their bats, not their shoes.

After the 2022 season, prompted by watching Judge hit his American League–record 62 home runs, Ohtani, through his agent, Nez Balelo, contacted Chandler Bats, the maker of Judge’s bats. Chuck Schuup, a Chandler rep, immediately began crafting a bat for Ohtani. Since then, Ohtani has hit the most home runs in baseball, 153, with Judge right behind him at 148.

Like Bird and Magic—one on the East Coast, one on the West, gobbling up MVPs, playing a sui generis style thanks to their size and strength—Judge and Ohtani are the standard bearers helping to carry their sport to heights not seen in a generation. Baseball attendance has increased three straight years for the first time since 2005–07. The World Series, in which Ohtani won his second straight championship since joining the Dodgers, averaged 34 million viewers in the United States, Canada and Japan, the biggest World Series audience since 1992. Game 7 attracted 51 million viewers in the U.S., Canada and Japan, the most watched game since Game 7 of the ’91 World Series. Thanks to the pitch clock, the average time of game has been no more than two hours, 40 minutes for three straight years for the first time since 1983–85.

The 2026 season rides the wings of this renaissance but under the threat of a gathering storm: a labor war. Owners are likely to impose a lockout of the players when the collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1, as happened in ’21. That lockout ended after 99 days, just in time to preserve what is now a record 31-season streak without a game being lost to labor strife (since the MLBPA was officially recognized in 1966). An end to that streak would curb the game’s momentum, not to mention stealing from the primes of Judge, who turns 34 in April, and Ohtani, who turns 32 in July.

From Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby, to Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, to Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, baseball eras have been speckled with tandems of hitting contemporaries that dominate the game and generate national interest. But never like this.

Judge and Ohtani have together won seven MVP awards in the last five years, five of them unanimously. Over the past two seasons they have secured 107 of the 120 first-place MVP votes, or 89%. This year both have the opportunity for a never-been-done third straight 50-homer season. Over the past five seasons they rank 1–2 in the majors in home runs, slugging and OPS (Judge leads), and WAR and total bases (Ohtani leads).

Even dressed in formal wear, as they were for this cover shoot, Judge and Ohtani present an outsized physical bearing that adds, Marvel-style, to their superpower status. The 6’ 9″ Bird was a tall sharpshooter without precedent, just as the 6’ 9″ Johnson revolutionized the point.

At 6’ 7″ and 282 pounds, Judge is not only the biggest of the four players to hit 50 homers four times (Ruth, McGwire and Sosa are the others) but also the biggest player to win a batting title and to hit as high as .331, which he did last year.

“How is that possible?” says Yankees manager Aaron Boone. “I asked him that question [in the offseason]. He was in the training room. I said this a lot last year: I never felt that he was ever totally locked in and on fire like he was during times in ’22, ’23 and ’24. And yet he’s hitting .331 with 50-something homers and an OPS a hundred points higher than everybody else.

“What he said was the one thing he always does is, he goes home in the winter and works on different little things. Guys always say, ‘I want to keep getting better.’ He takes it to heart. When he sets his mind to something, look out. And I think last year he figured out how to get his hits when he was not at his best. Pitches he might swing over and miss; he found a way to still have a competitive swing and still have power.”

So efficient was Judge last season that in 679 plate appearances he grounded out to an infielder on the right side only twice, the same number of times he popped out to the pull side. He devours fastballs. Last year he hit .410 against them and slugged an absurd .874. He even improved his sprint speed to his best since 2022.

That Judge is still peaking at this age is all thanks to two tweaks he made in 2022: refining his swing to generate more balls in the air and adjusting his work and recovery to avoid soft tissue injuries. His four highest fly-ball rates have all come since then, a huge advantage for someone who last year saw more than one out of every three of his fly balls leave the yard (51 of 149). He has played 150 games three times in his 30s (winning the MVP each time) after doing so once in his 20s.

“He is conscientious about how he ages,” Boone says. “He’s really self-aware. That’s the biggest thing in the last several years he mastered. He was very ticked off when he had injuries that cost him time. He’s become very good at understanding what he needs to do to go to the post every day. He’s learned how to back off once he gets into his season. Playing through minor stuff, he’s really good at it. The little nagging injuries that come up, soft tissue–wise, he knows how to govern them.”

Ohtani, too, is a physical outlier. There has never been a player this tall (6’ 3″) and this heavy (210 pounds, a conservative listing) who has stolen 50 bases, as Ohtani did in 2024 in his unprecedented 50-50 season.

No one should ever stop marveling at how he is elite at two distinct disciplines, pitching and hitting, like juggling chainsaws on a unicycle. In the pennant-clinching game last fall, he struck out three Brewers in the top of the first, switched to his hitting gear, Superman-style, without having enough time to go into the dugout, then hit the first leadoff postseason homer as a pitcher. He hit two more homers (including one that flew out of Dodger Stadium) and struck out 10 in what has to be the most amazing playoff game ever.

Also under such consideration would be World Series Game 3, in which he became the first player to reach base nine times in a postseason game, including a record four intentional walks. He capped his season, which began with rehabbing a twice-repaired elbow ligament, of 175 games and 809 plate appearances (fifth most ever) by starting Game 7 on short rest—then proceeded to join Jeff Tesreau of the 1912 New York Giants as the only World Series Game 7 starting pitchers to reach base three times.

Even though he didn’t pitch at all in 2024 and made only 14 mound appearances last regular season, Ohtani is an unprecedented two-way player. Ruth made only 34 starts on the mound as a full-fledged two-way player, after which he said, “I don’t think a man can pitch in his regular turn, and play every other game at some other position, and keep that pace year after year.”

Ohtani has made 100 mound starts as a two-way player. The Dodgers expect him to make between 23 and 28 this year, as he did for three seasons (2021–23) with the Angels.

“We are of the mind that this is a long-term play, obviously with this contract and doing the two way,” says Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “So, if that’s the case, then what does that look like? I think that the No. 1 thing is you’re talking about pitching. I don’t think the plate appearances are going to change. Pitching, he came into camp as a regular healthy player, preparing for a season, not in rehab mode. I think that the six, seven, eight days in between starts is totally feasible. 

“And then it goes to each game managing him within the game. Are there going to be times that I push him? Sure. But I would say for the most part, I’m still taking a long view—look at the pitching this season and beyond.

“This is sustainable, because of who he is, how well he knows himself and how well he trusts us in the sense of how we’re going to manage him.”

Bird was an inveterate trash-talker. Magic was the stage-ready magician who ran the Showtime Lakers. Judge and Ohtani do it differently. They hold up the game as Atlas did the heavens: pure strength under enduring, quiet responsibility.

“He understands his standing in the game,” Boone says of Judge, “but it all starts with him being a great Yankee. It means so much to him being a captain. The way he makes his teammates feel. … When we gather for the first full squad workout, he will make the lowest man out of the 65 or 70 feel a part of it. He’s amazing at that.”

Says Roberts of Ohtani, “Our guys understand how good he is and what he means for the Dodgers. They realize he’s a great person and a great teammate whose world is different from everybody else’s. He wants to be the best player in the world and above all he wants to win.”

Over the past two seasons pitcher Ryan Yarbrough has been a teammate of both Ohtani and Judge. He has pitched against them with little success, allowing a .308 average to Ohtani and .381 to Judge while marveling at how they’ve done it. “I’m thinking, Cool, if I just keep it down and away, they may get their hits but not with damage. That’s not the case with either one. They both have the ability to elevate the ball with power no matter the location.”

More impressive, Yarbrough says, is how they carry themselves as teammates. He sees in each one a Zen-like quality to remain calm amid the tension of a game or the noise around their celebrity status as standard bearers. “They seem larger than life,” Yarbrough says, “and yet it’s really easy for them to be just one of the guys.”

Judge and Ohtani. Ohtani and Judge. Their greatness separates them from all their contemporaries except from one another, like a rare conjunction of celestial bodies deep in Atlas’s heavens. Only seven players have posted back-to-back 50-homer seasons. Judge and Ohtani are the first pair to do so together with at least 7 WAR in both years. It is baseball kismet that their peaks should align like this, and raise the game by the power of two.

More MLB from Sports Illustrated