A brand-new MVP ballot hits the AL
· Yahoo Sports
I am loathe to say that something within the world of baseball is impossible for Aaron Judge. However, he’ll probably play right around 100 games this season if his IL-reduced projections are correct, and even he is not good enough to merit a fourth MVP award while missing that many games. Them’s the breaks.
Those breaks mean that for the first time since 2020, someone other than Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge will be the American League MVP. Perhaps nothing signals the wave of youth in baseball this year like all the debuting prospects hitting the ground running, except for the new crop of contenders for the game’s highest individual award.
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The favorite right now has to be Bobby Witt Jr., who of course was the hard-luck loser who put up a 10.5 (!) win season in 2024, just to see Judge top him by almost an entire win. Witt’s the only man in the Junior Circuit currently above the four-win mark, and while the MVP award isn’t the WAR award, take a look at who tends to walk away with the hardware over the last decade and where they sit on the leaderboard.
The one hitch for Witt at this stage of the season, indeed the hitch for the top six most productive position players in the AL, is they all play for teams that are pretty stinky. The Royals sit 10.5 games back in the AL Central, the Tigers sit nine back despite two of the top-five players in the league, and Yordan Alvarez’s Astros are merely 4.5 games behind the division-leading Mariners.
The dark horse in the MVP race to me is Nick Kurtz, who I am increasingly convinced is a top five hitter in the sport. Last year’s Rookie of the Year is hitting rather Judgian himself, with a .442 on-base percentage leading all of baseball. He is hitting a little over his skis based on his expected stats, and if you look at who directly surrounds Kurtz on the WAR leaderboard, all else equal we would expect them to hit a little better going forward and him to hit a little worse:
And then of course there’s the Yankee Question. Two members of the club, Ben Rice and Cam Schlittler, have been amongst the very best position players and one of the five or so best pitchers in the sport. I’m fully on board with pitchers being eligible for MVP voting, but you really have to stand out and you probably need a relatively weak field of position players as well. As great as Cam has been, I don’t think he has been better than some of the players we’ve already discussed, and doesn’t have the luck of a weaker field anyway. Right now Schlittler would walk home with the Cy Young Award, but probably isn’t getting significant MVP talk.
Rice is a challenging case. He does have the playoff bit and if he weren’t a Yankee, there would be a compelling narrative about a team losing it’s All-World star only to make a new one on the fly, but I think he’s just a tier below the kind of players that Witt, Alvarez and Kurtz are — the type of player to finish seventh in MVP voting. Now, if the Yankees have a fresh Aaron Judge, the Cy Young winner, and a seventh-place MVP finish being brought to bear in the playoffs, I’ll take that over just about any team in the AL right now.
Of course all this presupposes that Judge doesn’t come back and hit 40 home runs in the season’s final 50 games, and I’m not going to rule that out just yet. In all likelihood though, should he be able to maintain this pace, Bobby Witt Jr. will have his standout season, two years inflation-adjusted.