Can Cal Raleigh beat Aaron Judge for AL MVP?

Neither Aaron Judge nor Cal Raleigh is losing sleep over the American League Most Valuable Player Award. The two superstars have much bigger fish to fry. Individual trophies, for players of this ilk, are nice, but Judge and Raleigh are certainly more fixated on shepherding their clubs into the postseason.

Thankfully, the rest of us can still gawk and gab about how their spectacular seasons match up. After all, it has been quite a ride.

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As Raleigh was clubbing tater after tater during the season’s first half, the joyous incredulity that caused was coupled with an understandable skepticism. “He can’t possibly keep doing this,” neutral ballfans mused to themselves. Judge, despite Raleigh’s long-ball outburst, remained a similarly valuable player. And across the 162-game marathon (or so the thinking went), Judge would gradually pull away from Raleigh, with his superheroic offensive impact winning out over the long haul.

That hasn’t happened.

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Raleigh hasn’t stopped crushing big flies, with 50 entering the month of September. Judge, meanwhile, developed an elbow issue in late July that sent him to the injured list and has precluded him from playing the field since his return.

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As a result, with four weeks remaining in the regular season, the AL MVP race is a coin flip. Entering play Monday, Raleigh has seven more home runs, the defensive advantage and the cooler nickname. Judge has something more boring yet just as alluring: better offensive numbers overall, with a .324 average and 1.117 OPS that both lead the sport. How the two contenders perform in September will determine the outcome in what is shaping up to be the most competitive MVP race, from a voting perspective, in quite a while.

Let’s dive in.

A reminder of how MVP voting works

Writers (like me) decide. Each of the 15 American League chapters of the Baseball Writers Association of America nominates two writers to vote on each AL award. Those voters mail in their ballots, marking off a top 10. Points are added up — 14 for a first-place vote, nine for a second-place vote, eight for third place — and a winner is determined. The past four MVPs (Judge and Shohei Ohtani in 2024, Ohtani and Ronald Acuña Jr. in ‘23) have all been unanimous. In fact, there hasn’t been an MVP vote margin within 50 points since Mike Trout edged Alex Bregman by 20 points in 2019. The Judge-Raleigh showdown could be that close.

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The case for Judge: He’s still the best hitter in the world, by a large margin

The 185-point gap in OPS between Judge (first in MLB with 1.117) and Raleigh (fourth, .932) is nearly the same as the gap between Raleigh and Rockies outfielder Jordan Beck in 83rd (.763). Judge is not just the best hitter on the planet; he is multiple hemispheres above every other living being.

That remains true despite his trailing Raleigh in home runs. The Yankees’ captain currently leads all of MLB in batting average (.324) and slugging percentage (.674). If that sustains, Judge would be just the 11th player in MLB history to lead the league in both categories in the same season. In other words, if the MVP award were decided solely on offensive output, Judge would win in a landslide.

At the same time — and this is supreme levels of nitpicky — 2025 is undeniably Judge’s third-best season. This campaign is squarely behind his home-run-record-breaking 2022 and last year’s preposterous 1.159 OPS. This season, Judge is walking slightly less and striking out slightly more. His hard-hit rate and average exit velocity are down as well.

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To be clear, this is like whining about how the sand at your free Caribbean beach resort feels a bit too grainy between your toes. Judge remains dominant, but he has been, ever so slightly, a worse version of his incredible self in 2025.

Will that matter to voters? Maybe.

The case for Raleigh: He’s having the greatest offensive season ever by a catcher

With a month’s worth of games remaining on the MLB calendar, Raleigh has already broken the single-season record for home runs by a catcher. On Aug. 24, his 49th jack pushed him past Salvador Pérez’s 2021 season and into untrodden ground. That is not an accomplishment that should be taken lightly, particularly in this era of baseball.

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Throughout MLB history, catchers have never been responsible for so much. The job, physical and otherwise, has always been demanding, but the modern game necessitates that catchers be dialed in on game-planning more than ever before. One front-office person recently described catchers to me as a “tertiary position group.” They are neither pitchers nor position players. They are something else entirely.

Because of that dynamic, teams nowadays are willing to forgo offensive production from that position. Clubs prioritize skills such as calling games, framing pitches and controlling the running game. All those responsibilities mean less time before and during games to focus on hitting. Quite simply, Raleigh is juggling more — more than Judge, more than all the non-catchers in MLB and more than catchers in the past have ever had to handle.

That makes his big-fly barrage all the more impressive.

One other factor: Narrative fatigue for Judge

This is why LeBron James, despite being the undisputed best basketball player of the 21st century, has won “only” four MVP awards. Sustained brilliance, to our dopamine-hungry brains, can grow stale. There’s evidence across all pro sports that award voters tire of celebrating the same performances year after year after year.

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And thus far this season, the narrative arc is squarely in Raleigh’s favor. He’s a breakout star, fresh off his first career All-Star Game, and he has never finished higher than 12th in MVP voting. His victory in the Home Run Derby in Atlanta solidified him as one of the game’s more prominent figures. The nickname about his voluptuous caboose helps, too. Raleigh’s Mariners have a similar record as Judge’s Yankees, but the preseason expectations in the Bronx for a team coming off a World Series were supersonic. The Yanks have not lived up to that hype; whether that will hurt Judge in MVP voting remains to be seen. If the Mariners make the playoffs or even win the division, that can only help Raleigh’s case.

Conclusion: As of Sept. 1, it’s a toss-up

Since they hit back-to-back for the American League in the All-Star Game, Judge and Raleigh have hit at a pretty similar clip (.222/.384/.481 for Judge vs. .197/.295/.454 for Raleigh), though Judge has had almost 40 fewer plate appearances because of his injury.

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While Raleigh has continued to crank homers — he has 12 since winning the Derby — the rest of his offensive game has slid a bit (1.011 OPS in the first half, .749 since the break). Some of that is bad batted-ball luck, but the Mariners’ backstop is also rocking the seventh-highest strikeout rate in MLB since the break (31.8%). Meanwhile, Judge, who is playing through the elbow issue that makes him unable to throw without pain, homered just six times across 24 games in August.

The point is this thing is still up for grabs. Raleigh’s power burst opened the door to a real race, then Judge’s injury kept it propped open. And because neither player has been at his best over the past six weeks, a hot September could swing the MVP fight in either direction.