As a gripping postseason made clear in recent weeks, this is a lustrous baseball era, one molded by titans and enjoyed across oceans. Thursday night’s crowning of Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees as this year’s National League and American League most valuable players offered a reminder of its rarity.
As a gripping postseason made clear in recent weeks, this is a lustrous baseball era, one molded by titans and enjoyed across oceans. Thursday night’s crowning of Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees as this year’s National League and American League most valuable players offered a reminder of its rarity.
One race yielded as tough a call as anyone can remember, with another huge season from one of the greatest hitters of the century in Judge pitted against what might have been the best ever all-around season by a catcher from Raleigh.
The other race was over almost as soon as Ohtani stepped on a major league pitching mound in June, provided he stayed healthy. He has won four MVP awards in the past five seasons and three straight since 2023. He is alone behind only Barry Bonds, who won seven, for the most MVP awards in MLB history. Last year, Ohtani joined Frank Robinson as the only player to win an MVP award in both leagues. This year, Ohtani became the first player to win the award in both leagues twice. He was a unanimous choice by Baseball Writers’ Association of America voters.
Ohtani’s achievements remain impossible to overstate. He is a legend in his prime, who has won World Series titles in both years he played with a team that matched his effort.
His 172 wRC+ — a measurement of how many runs a player creates per plate appearance adjusted to allow comparison across stadiums and eras — was second only to Judge among all major leaguers. None of the other top hitters also made 14 regular season pitching starts with a 2.87 ERA.
If he threw enough innings to qualify — and as he eased his way back from elbow surgery, he fell well short — Ohtani would have tied for third among starters with 11.87 strikeouts per nine innings, more than AL and NL Cy Young Award winners Tarik Skubal of the Detroit Tigers and Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who received those honors Wednesday. Ohtani’s FIP, fielding independent pitching, was 1.90 — almost half a run better than Skenes and Skubal.
Much like Ohtani, Judge has felt nearly untouchable in this race in recent years when healthy. He entered this season having won two of the past three AL MVPs, disrupted only when Ohtani won for the Los Angeles Angels in 2023. And he finished this season with massive numbers, most notably a .331 batting average that was 20 points higher than anyone else in baseball, and paired that with 53 home runs. His 204 wRC+ is the 10th-best single-season mark since 1975, trailing four Bonds seasons and two of his own, among others.
And yet, despite one of his best all-around offensive seasons, Judge was no lock for this year’s award because Cal Raleigh also compiled a season for the ages. After some offseason adjustments, the switch-hitting catcher started hitting home runs and never stopped, setting the regular season record for home runs by a catcher and threatening Judge’s AL mark with 60 regular season homers.
Raleigh did this while managing one of the game’s best pitching staffs, playing in 159 games and catching 121 of them. In an age when the rigors of catching and preparing to steer a handful of pitchers through endless data and scouting reports each night have made true offensive stars rare at the position, Raleigh somehow withstood the workload to lead the Mariners through a storybook season that yielded their first AL West title since 2001 and ended one win shy of the World Series. He also set a new single-season record for home runs by a switch hitter, another aspect of his skill set that requires extra preparation.
Voters from the BBWAA, therefore, debated the merits of Judge’s astounding offensive season against Raleigh’s ability to hit for record power while also handling the sport’s most demanding everyday position. The result was one of the more dramatic votes in recent memory.
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