We're entering the final week of the 2025 regular season, and while there's still a ton to be decided from a team perspective, there's really only one remaining source of suspense when it comes to MLB's awards races. New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge and Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh have been waging an all-out war for AL MVP honors, one that's left not just fans of each team but even neutral observers bitterly divided about who actually deserves to take home the hardware.
At this point, you're likely aware of where things stand. Judge is having another Judge-like season, topping the league in just about every offensive category ... save for home runs, where Raleigh is lapping the field with 56. Oh, and he's done all that while serving as the primary catcher for a team that currently sits atop the AL West standings.
Which side are you on? How are we supposed to weigh Judge's offensive brilliance against the value Raleigh brings behind the plate? This race is so close that it feels like less a matter of who's got the better numbers and more a matter of who will have the weight of narrative on their side — a referendum on how people watch the sport and what they value most.
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1. A desire to reward history
It's awfully hard to resist the temptation to reward something that's never been done before. Baseball's been around a long time; if a player is putting up the sort of numbers that no one else has in over a century and a half, how can that player not have a trophy to show for it?
To be clear, Judge's production has also been plenty historic. Overall, you could argue it's the more historic season: While Raleigh's production behind the plate is unprecedented has been a little bit overstated at times — his power numbers are historic, but it's not particularly close to being the best offensive season by a catcher; he's still looking up at guys like Mike Piazza and Joe Mauer on the all-time OPS+ leaderboard — Judge is on track to become the first player since Barry Bonds to eclipse a 200 OPS+. The fact that he's done so three times in the last four years is just icing on the cake.
But that requires far too much explanation and qualification. Raleigh's brand of history is far simpler: He's hit more homers than any other catcher, or any other switch-hitter, has in a single season. It's tough to deny the pull of something we've never seen, especially when the names you're passing in the record books are ones like Mickey Mantle and Johnny Bench.
2. Voter fatigue
I don't mean this pejoratively, or to take anything away from Raleigh's case. He's putting together a truly remarkable season, remarkable enough to make this a genuinely competitive race right until the end. This isn't the media ginning up something out of nothing — far from it.
Still, it would be silly to pretend that this isn't a factor at play here. We see it in the NBA, where Nikola Jokic has been almost universally regarded as the best player in the sport for years now but has nonetheless won just one of the last three MVP Awards. Heck, we've even seen it in baseball: Mike Trout lorded over the sport from an all-around production perspective for over half a decade, but only has three MVPs to show for it.
Judge, meanwhile, has won two of the last three AL MVP Awards. Which isn't to say that voters are consciously ignoring him; it's just to say that it's human nature to be drawn toward the new, and unlike, say, Shohei Ohtani, Judge doesn't have the novelty of being a two-way player to hold people's attention. Again, if Judge were running away with it, this likely wouldn't matter. But the fact that Raleigh has made this a close contest means that everyone can feel comfortable adding some variety to the proceedings. That might not be how this is supposed to work on paper, but it is human nature.
3. How much does defense matter?
Statistically, this is the crux of the argument. Judge has, by every available metric, been the more valuable offensive player this season. But he's also played far more DH than he has in years past, and manning right field isn't worthy nearly as much (and isn't nearly as difficult) as serving as your team's primary catcher. The question then becomes: Can Raleigh's edge in defensive value — framing pitch after pitch, handling a whole staff, all while getting beat to hell on a daily basis — make up for the gap in offensive value?
We have ways to try and answer that question, statistically speaking. This is the whole reason why catch-all metrics like WAR exist, and why there's been so much attention paid to advancing our ability to quantify defense in recent years. (For what it's worth, Judge enters play Saturday with a narrow edge in FanGraph's WAR calculation, 9.1 to 8.5 — not insignificant, but also still within the potential margin for error.)
But even baseball's most practiced sabermetricians will admit that our defensive metrics (at least the public-facing ones) are still nearly as much art as science. We know a lot more than we used to, but we still don't know enough, at least not with any degree of certainty. We can safely say, for example, that Raleigh is a very good framer, or that Judge is among the better right fielders in the sport. But those statements need to come with a whole lot of context, and we don't really know how to compare across positions the way we need to.
Into that vacuum steps a whole lot of old narratives about the way baseball works. About what it takes to truly manage a pitching staff, about the wear and tear that comes with playing catcher at the Major League level, about the dreaded "intangibles" that have become something of a bugagoo in online baseball conversation in recent years. All of those things are real, and should be considered — Raleigh has taken on a larger defensive load than Judge has this season, one that likely can't be quantified by the numbers that show up on the stat sheet.
Just how much they should be considered, however, likely depends on your preconceived notions about how the game works. There's a bit of an old-school vs. new-school thing at play here, where traditionalists value Raleigh for all the underdiscussed benefits he brings to the Mariners and the more online fans among us look at the numbers pointing (ever so slightly) to Judge and think that should settle the matter.
4. Judge's postseason failings (yes, even for a regular-season award)
Obviously, nothing that either of these players have done in prior seasons — let alone in prior postseasons — should have any bearing on what is an award for the 2025 regular season. But come on: Voters are humans, not robots, and how they feel about the quality of Judge and Raleigh absolutely affects how they (and we!) view what they've done this year.
There's absolutely a sort of normalization that goes on with just how good Judge has been at the plate this season, and how abnormal it is in the recent history of the sport. Fatigue has something to do with that; the fact that Judge's greatness in 2025 is very similar to his greatness in 2024, 2023 and 2022 means that it's easier to contextualize and digest. But if we're honest, there's something else at play here, something that might make voters less willing and able to give Judge his due: While he's already among the greatest regular-season sluggers the sport has ever seen, he's yet to come anywhere close to that in October.
Should that matter when deciding the 2025 AL MVP Award? No. Will it? Well, we can't rule it out entirely: Until Judge hits like a star on the biggest stage, he's not going to be treated like one among baseball fans (and at least some voters). You can almost feel the extent to which some people, heck even some Yankees fans, aren't willing to sweat anything Judge does in the regular season too much, as if they want to simply hit "sim to end" and get to the games that really count.
Even Judge's most ardent defenders have to admit how disappointing he's been as a postseason performer, and those narratives stick around for a while — at this point, it feels like they overshadow anything else Judge does on the field. It's very hard to be considered as great as Judge's regular-season numbers suggest he is without a ring, or at least a great individual playoff run, and you can't blame fans for being a little tired of singing his praises until he flips the script.