Mariners' Cal Raleigh falls prey to voters' lack of imagination in AL MVP letdown

That Cal Raleigh is not the American League MVP for 2025 isn't going to go down in history as an outrage. He did, after all, lose the award to an all-time great hitter who thoroughly added to his all-time greatness this year. If ever there was a "tip your cap" kind of loss, this is it.

Nonetheless, Seattle Mariners fans in the Pacific Northwest and across the world will agree: This is a bummer, and one that the Baseball Writers' Association of America members who voted on the AL MVP should feel just a little guilty about.

Unlike in 2024, Aaron Judge didn't win his third AL MVP in unanimous fashion. Raleigh got his share of support, receiving 13 first-place votes to Judge's 17. Yet the result is the same in that he fell short and stretched the Mariners' MVP drought to 24 years.

AL MVP voters show a lack of imagination in choosing Aaron Judge over Cal Raleigh

Athletics slugger Brent Rooker is right, you know. Judge winning the AL MVP does not diminish or disparage what Raleigh did for the Mariners this year, just as Raleigh winning would not have diminished or disparaged anything Judge did for the New York Yankees.

And when you look at who led who in what, it's ultimately hard to deny that Judge had the better season:

And yet, this feels a little like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest winning the Oscar for Best Picture over Jaws back in 1976. The former is probably the better film, but the latter was a danged game-changer that still has a massive cultural footprint.

Even if Raleigh finished well short of Judge in a host of traditional and newfangled metrics, he still hit 60 home runs to shatter the single-season records for catchers, switch-hitters and Mariners. It might be the single most unlikely season to have ever happened, and that's even before you sit back and realize that he did it at the absolute worst park for hitters.

Between his historic offense, his steady presence behind the plate and his leadership in the clubhouse, "Big Dumper" did more than anyone to muscle the Mariners to the AL West title. It was their first in 24 years, thus ending the longest division title drought in the American League.

What we're doing here is pointing to a wall that has "NARRATIVE" written on it in big, bold letters. That has become something of a no-no in MVP discourse over the last decade or so, but dare we say the pendulum has swung too far.

The narrative of Judge's season isn't more complicated than "all-time great does all-time greatness." He didn't make history like he did when he slammed an AL-record 62 homers in 2022, and some of his numbers took a dive from his 58-homer, 1.159 OPS and 10.8 rWAR season in 2024. And while the Yankees did win more games than the Mariners, they didn't win the AL East and generally didn't live up to what are always sky-high expectations in New York.

The only logical explanation for Judge's win is that he had better numbers, which is true! But this interpretation is taking the word "valuable" literally, which isn't supposed to be the idea. The BBWAA guidelines say that there is "no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable means" and that it's "up to the individual voter." This is not meant to be an objective exercise, but a subjective one.

Nobody can go so far as to say that the voters made the wrong choice in tabbing Judge for his third AL MVP. But it was the safe choice, and it effectively bestows historical significance on a season that isn't as historically significant in a natural, just-plain-obvious way as the one Raleigh had.

One supposes there's always next year for Raleigh. And just like Dan Wilson and the Manager of the Year, the best thing Raleigh can do is treat his MVP snub as unfinished business for 2026.