Here’s a clean peak-vs-peak comparison using the stored WAR seasons, then a cautious normalization layer.

Important caveat: I can compare their peak WAR seasons directly and adjust conceptually for era, park, and position, but I do not have the underlying season-by-season park-adjustment coefficients, league run environment constants, or defensive-run component tables needed to recalculate a brand-new WAR from scratch. So the best rigorous answer here is:

1. start from the stored WAR/OPS+ seasons,
2. identify each player’s peak seasons,
3. apply a light normalization logic:
   • OPS+ already adjusts for league and park on offense,
   • WAR already includes position/defense within its framework,
   • cross-era adjustment between 2017–2025 vs 2017–2025 is small because they overlap heavily,
   • the main remaining issue is defensive-position value: Trout’s peak was mostly CF, Judge’s peak was mostly RF, with some CF in his top years.

So this is a relative normalized ranking, not a full custom re-built WAR model.

Peak WAR seasons

Mike Trout peak seasons

Aaron Judge peak seasons

Raw peak WAR comparison

If we rank purely by stored WAR:

Normalization framework

1) Era difficulty

Because Trout’s and Judge’s peaks are in the same broad run-scoring/strikeout era, there is not much true cross-era distortion here. This is not Trout vs Mantle or Judge vs Ruth. Their peak seasons overlap the same baseball environment.

Net effect:

• very small adjustment
• Judge does not need a meaningful “era discount”
• Trout does not gain much from “earlier era” correction because 2017–2019 and 2022–2025 are still same modern offensive/strikeout era family

2) Ballpark factors

A key point: OPS+ already bakes in park and league context for offense.

That means:

• Judge’s Yankee Stadium environment is already normalized in OPS+
• Trout’s Angels environment is already normalized in OPS+
• offensive comparison via OPS+ is already the right park-adjusted lens

On that lens, Judge’s top offensive peaks are clearly higher:

• Judge 2024: 225.7 OPS+
• Judge 2025: 216.8 OPS+
• Judge 2022: 213.5 OPS+
• Trout 2018: 199.3 OPS+
• Trout 2017: 187.2 OPS+
• Trout 2019: 185.0 OPS+

So after park adjustment, Judge still owns the higher offensive peaks.

3) Defensive position value

This is where Trout gains ground.

• Trout’s peak seasons were full-time CF.
• Judge’s peak seasons were a mix:
  • 2022 included substantial CF and RF
  • 2024 was mostly CF
  • 2025 was RF

Center field carries more positional value than right field, all else equal.

Implications:

• Trout’s CF-heavy peaks are structurally more demanding than Judge’s RF-heavy peaks.
• But Judge’s two biggest seasons already included meaningful CF usage, which limits how much of a positional penalty should be applied to him.
• Judge 2025 should get the largest relative downgrade in a custom normalized scale because it was mostly RF.

4) Replacement/defense model drift over time

The hidden risk in cross-season WAR comparisons is not really era here; it’s defensive measurement noise and positional deployment.

Because I do not have the seasonal defensive-run components to rebuild each season, the safest approach is:

• trust WAR broadly,
• apply only modest manual correction for CF vs RF,
• avoid large “defensive model inflation” claims.

Single normalized scale

I’ll use a simple peak normalization:

• start from stored WAR
• keep era and park nearly neutral
• apply a small boost to full-time CF peaks relative to RF-heavy peaks
• apply almost no adjustment to Judge 2022/2024 because those seasons included real CF value already

Normalized peak score

Think of this as “cross-peak value score,” centered on the same scale as WAR but lightly corrected for comparability.

Final ranking takeaway

If you want a single normalized peak ranking, I’d order them:

Bottom line

• Judge has the higher top-end peak.
• Trout’s peak is more balanced and gets a meaningful positional bump because it came as a full-time center fielder.
• After light normalization for park, era, and position, Judge’s 2022 remains the best single season of the group.
• Trout’s 2018 closes the gap enough to rank ahead of Judge’s 2025, but not ahead of Judge’s 2022 or 2024.

If you want, I can also do this a second way:

1. by best 3-year peak average, or
2. by per-162-game normalized peak instead of single-season peak.