Hard to believe I’m saying this about a sport in which virtually all player movement is tracked and measured by high-frame-rate cameras, but … we might need more baseball stats!
If Judge, who leads the Majors in nearly every offensive metric that matters, wins the award for the second straight year and the third time in four years, he will be eminently deserving. And that will be just another fun fact to include on his eventual Hall of Fame plaque.
Let me be as clear as can be: Aaron Judge is a 2025 AL MVP. When you boil everything down, he’s leading the Majors in the Wins Above Replacement calculations from both Baseball-Reference (9.3) and FanGraphs (9.6).
But it’s my contention that we have two AL MVPs this year and that WAR is not doing enough to demonstrate Raleigh’s total value to his team as a switch-hitting catcher with 60 bombs. (Yes, it’s a catcher hitting 60 homers, a feat truly historic in and of itself.)
Before we go any further, I want you to do me a huge favor: Take Judge’s Baseball-Reference WAR (aka bWAR), crumple it into a tiny ball in your hand, toss it into the nearest receptacle, then take that receptacle and set it on fire.
I love Baseball-Reference and utilize it daily. But because bWAR does not include catcher framing, it is completely useless to us in this AL MVP discussion as Raleigh’s 7.3 bWAR is severely underselling his value.
FanGraphs, which does include framing, currently has Raleigh as the 14th most valuable defensive player at any position, while Statcast tells us he is in the 87th percentile defensively. (If you go to the Statcast framing leaderboard, you’ll see Raleigh ranked sixth in the league.)
If you watch baseball, you know these are much better representations of Cal Raleigh’s defensive value. Just because he’s not likely to claim his second consecutive Platinum Glove Award doesn’t mean he’s somehow become a defensive liability overnight.
If you think that fWAR difference is large enough to give Judge the MVP, when combined with Judge’s far superior offensive rate stats — the 177-point OPS difference between Judge and Raleigh is roughly as large as the difference between Raleigh and the Dodgers’ Andy Pages — no reasonable person could fault you.
Still, even fWAR, which does include catcher framing and obviously is holding Raleigh in very high regard, does not compute all that goes into the catching position, particularly in the modern game.
Raleigh has caught 120 games this season. That’s the most in the AL. That’s 120 games in which he has squatted behind the plate and weathered foul tips and bounced balls in the dirt. That’s 120 games in which he’s been responsible for calling the pitches for a Mariners staff that entered Thursday ranked 11th in the Majors in ERA.
As a catcher, Raleigh is the key part of the daily preparation for the pitching staff. He’s in the pre-series meetings with both the hitters and the pitchers. He’s developing a working relationship with a staff that, this year alone, has used 33 different pitchers. (Prior to this century, 33 pitchers would have been a record. Now, it’s just the Major League norm.) He’s calling games for a team that uses, on average, 4.4 pitchers per night.
Raleigh has endured that grind, avoided the IL, is somehow finishing the season even stronger than he started it (1.128 OPS in September, vs. .884 in March/April) and is carrying the load for a club that just won its first division title in 24 years.
We could give Cal 0.1 CALs apiece for leading the AL in games caught, 0.1 for the physical toll, 0.1 for the mental toll and 0.1 for the acclimation to so many pitchers.
Let’s toss in another 0.1 for being a switch-hitter who has to keep two different swings in mechanical check all year … and for agreeing to (and winning!) the midseason Home Run Derby despite all the Boogeyman-fearing souls out there who insist it messes up your swing!
OK, I hope you understand I’m being facetious there. But again, in a sport that has grown so deeply analytical, there are still things that can’t be measured. The true toll of catching is one of them.
However this ends, Raleigh has hit 60 home runs (and might still yet meet or break Judge’s AL record of 62) for a team that hadn’t won its division in a generation.
It’s true that we can’t assign him added value just because his franchise struggled and fell short for so long. But it’s also true that players are more human than the numbers tell us, and bearing the weight of leadership on a team that for so long faced so much scrutiny about not being able to get the job done in September and not being able to overcome the Astros is a real thing.
Judge has his own real things. He’s the captain of the Yankees, for crying out loud. It’s the most pressure-packed environment in baseball. You can’t put a number on that, either.
Still, to me, with all apologies to Judge and his many supporters in this debate, this has been the Year of the Big Dumper (and a majority of the execs our Mark Feinsand recently polled agreed).
But there are two AL MVPs this year. I would give the Hank Aaron Award to Judge but the MVP to Raleigh. Because I think Raleigh really does have a case that goes beyond numbers.