We may not end up with a great home run chase between Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani across the rest of the summer, with Judge leading Ohtani, 41 to 33. But there is still a chance that we might.

We know what both of them can do in just a week when balls start flying out of sight all over again, in a season when both of them might end up being Most Valuable Player -- Judge for the second time, Ohtani for the third. Back in 2022, when Judge hit 62 homers, they were 1-2 in the MVP voting.

But even if we don’t end up with the two of them battling in a home run summer -- Judge is chasing 60 again while Ohtani tries to become the first Dodger to ever hit 50 in a season -- we are still being treated to a rare and pretty wonderful show on both sides of the country:

East Coast Babe Ruth vs. West Coast Babe Ruth.

This is all happening, of course, in a season when the West Coast Babe isn’t pitching the way Babe Ruth did before he got to New York and essentially invented the home run in baseball.

We start with Judge, because where else are you going to start? He is the first to 40 home runs this season, the first to 100 RBI, just became only the fourth player in Yankees history to hit 40 homers or more three times. Ruth merely did it 11 times, Lou Gehrig five times, Mickey Mantle four. It’s worth remembering that Judge had four homers and a batting average of .178 on April 27. All he’s basically done in just over two months since then is hit 37 home runs in 84 games.

On Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Blue Jays manager John Schneider intentionally walked him in the second inning, nobody on base, the earliest that had happened in a half-century. This was after Judge had hit a 477-foot home run in the first inning of Friday night’s Yankees-Blue Jays game and then hit another home run in the first inning of Saturday’s game.

“He’s in a different category,” Schneider said.

He then added this about No. 99: “He’s ridiculous.”

Judge’s manager, Aaron Boone, was talking about how opposing managers used to intentionally walk Barry Bonds all the time, Buck Showalter even doing it one time with the bases loaded. But he said doing it in the second inning is next level.

“Now we’ll call it the Judge treatment,” Boone said.

Coming out of the weekend, Judge had 41 homers, 103 RBIs, an OPS of 1.157, a slugging percentage of .701 and a batting average of .322. Even in the same batting order where Juan Soto is tearing it up pretty good ahead of him -- 28 homers for Soto, 78 RBIs, .598 slugging., 1.035 OPS, .310 batting average -- Judge as a hitter is head and shoulders above everybody else the way Ruth seemed to be, even when he had Gehrig hitting right behind him.

And if Judge finally gets some real help from the guys hitting behind him, with Giancarlo Stanton back and Jazz Chisholm Jr. now in Boone’s batting order, Judge might have a chance to break his own American League home run record.

On the other side of the country, we still have Ohtani, who has 33 homers, 79 RBIs, a .306 average, a .621 slugging percentage and a 1.018 OPS. And he is the odds-on favorite to win another MVP after doing that twice with the Angels.

Everybody knows he is not pitching this season because of Tommy John surgery. But Ohtani was talking the other day about how he thinks taking a year off from pitching and exclusively being a DH has made him even better at the plate.

“I’m growing as a hitter,” he said through a translator. “I think that’s leading to good results.”

Well, yeah, kind of. And on top of everything else he is doing, including hitting home runs as far as Judge does from time to time -- not long ago against the Red Sox, he hit one 473 feet that did everything at Dodger Stadium except break a window -- last week he became the third-fastest player in baseball history to get to 30 stolen bases in a season when he’d already hit 30 homers.

To use what Schneider said about Judge, Ohtani is also in a different category. He's also doing ridiculous things this season. Imagine what we would be saying about him if he hadn’t taken a year off from pitching.

This is not meant to diminish what Soto is doing in New York, and what Bobby Witt Jr. is doing for the Royals, and the way Marcell Ozuna is trying to carry the Braves. But the two biggest stars we have are the big guys from two star places, New York and Los Angeles.

East Coast Babe and West Coast Babe. Two months left. Crazy as this sounds, the best from both of them might be yet to come.