To the surprise of no one, New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge was named as one of the nominees for the American League MVP. Joining him in the voting will be Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, as expected, and poor José Ramírez of the Cleveland Guardians, who also turned in a stellar season, but has no shot.
With that, get ready for the debate between Judge and Raleigh to reignite with more ferocity than ever as fans eagerly await the results. For Yankees fans, this exercise has grown tiresome, as anyone looking at the competition objectively knows that the choice is easy.
Yankees fans better buckle up, as the Aaron Judge-Cal Raleigh AL MVP debate is about to hit overdrive
By this point, we all know the numbers. Raleigh leads in homers with 60 and RBI with 125, while Judge takes the crown in every other statistical category that matters. The national media will continue to run their propaganda campaigns, but not even the most slanted version of the truth can erase the ocean-sized 196-point gap in OPS between the two contenders.
The stories will be spun that Cal Raleigh breaking Mickey Mantle’s record for most single-season home runs by a switch-hitter means something more than the stats, like wRC+, that measure the actual value of collective offensive output. In case you were curious, the deficit Raleigh faces in that regard is 43 points – or ,better said, Aaron Judge produced 43% more with the bat than Cal Raleigh did, with a mark of 204 versus 161 for the Big Dumper.
Next, you’ll start to hear about Raleigh’s value being enhanced by virtue of his being a catcher. One must concede that it’s tough to find a catcher who hits like Raleigh, and while the overall package behind the plate was good, they’ll conveniently gloss over his -9 blocks above average. More to the point, catching doesn’t erase the cavernous difference between offensive output.
At the end of the day, Raleigh had an excellent season. One for the ages, in fact, and in most years he’d be a more-than-deserving MVP, even if he’d be the first non-pitcher to win the award while batting sub-.250.
But you see, while it took an all-time great season from Raleigh to even get into the conversation, his production was still objectively inferior to Aaron Judge, who has done this so often now that otherworldly greatness has become just another day at the office, as far as he’s concerned.
And with that, the biggest threat to Judge’s candidacy isn’t Raleigh’s stellar performance, but rather the fact that the baseball world has become numb to Judge doing things at a level that has rarely been seen, and doing them so consistently that it has become mundane.
