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…