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If Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are named on Nov. 21 as the MVPs of their respective leagues, as widely expected, the argument will continue: who is the better hitter?

The home run kings of the two leagues recently squared off in the World Series, won by Ohtani's Los Angeles Dodgers over Judge's New York Yankees, and their batting statistics are close.

Of the three candidates for MVP in the two leagues, Ohtani and Judge are in a class by themselves. Both not only led in home runs, but also RBIs.

Moreover, Ohtani had the second highest batting average in the National League with a .310, while Judge’s .322 average was third in the American League.

Ohtani and Judge are also the only batters in MLB with an OPS exceeding 1.000. The OPS is the sum of a batter’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage.

JUDGE HAS THE FASTER BAT SPEED

Turning to other baseball metrics to assess which of the two is better leads to a comparison of bat speed.

MLB’s website began offering a new “Bat Tracking” index from this season.

The index includes various statistics calculated through an analysis of data gathered on a batter’s swing compiled from five high-performance cameras set up at every ballpark in MLB.

One such stat is bat speed. The average bat speed of an MLB batter is 71.5 mph, but Ohtani’s was 76.3 while Judge swung at a speed of 77.1. Judge had the fourth fastest bat speed, while Ohtani was in eighth place.

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The batter with the top bat speed was Judge’s teammate Giancarlo Stanton at 81.2 mph.

An analyst with the MLB website said that raising the bat speed by 1 mph will increase the distance of a ball hit in the air by about 6 feet.

The analyst said that distance represented the difference between a fly ball caught on the warning track and one that reaches the stands.

One stat in which Ohtani bettered Judge was in squared-up rate.

The rate calculates how much of a possible exit velocity a batter was able to generate on a hit ball. The possible exit velocity is a theoretical calculation based on bat speed and pitch speed.

A rate exceeding 80 percent means the batter squared-up on the pitch. In other words, he hit the pitch on the sweet spot of the bat.

Ohtani was found to have squared-up on 27.5 percent of his swings, the 59th best in MLB. Judge only squared-up on 24.2 percent of his swings, below the MLB average of 25 percent.

Luis Arraez of the San Diego Padres, who led the National League in batting average this season at .314, squared-up on an incredible 43.3 percent of his swings, the best ratio in MLB.

MLB has also defined a “blast” as the “most valuable swing” because it is both squared-up and executed with a fast bat speed.

Baseball analysts calculate that on average only 7 percent of all swings can be considered blasts.

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Major League Baseball explanation of a "blast" (Captured from MLB website)

Juan Soto, another Yankees teammate who is also a candidate for AL MVP, had blasts on 20.5 percent of his swings, the highest ratio in MLB.

Judge had blasts on 18.4 percent of his swings, fifth best, while Ohtani recorded blasts on 18.3 percent of his swings, sixth best.

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