Why Cal Raleigh didn’t win the MVP
Photo by Mollie Handkins/MLB Photos via Getty Images
As we all know, the 2025 MVP was Aaron Judge. But a lot of people thought it should have gone to the runner up, Cal Raleigh, including players, national media members, and nearly half of MVP voters. It became one of the most debated MVP races in recent memory. The result itself was not surprising because of how incredible Judge’s season was. What was surprising was just how close the vote ended up being. Personally, I always believed Judge was going to win, and I believed he would win comfortably. Not because of east coast bias, the smaller media market Cal played in, or the fact that Judge was already a massive star. I thought Judge would win easily because of how the baseball world currently evaluates players. In a previous article comparing Judge and Raleigh, Adam pointed out that 2025 Judge has a classic MVP profile, with the offensive numbers popping out first and foremost. And that is exactly where things went wrong for our Big Dumper. We are more reliant on stats and metrics than ever before. In that environment, Judge winning made perfect sense. The real shock was that it was even a debate at all. That closeness feels like a signal that something is changing for the better in how voters and fans think about value.
From the Eye Test to the Spreadsheet
In the pre-moneyball era, the entire baseball community focused on the wrong things when determining who was a good player. They believed strongly in the eye test, small ball, batting average, attitude, and anecdotal evidence. Over time, the sport made a dramatic shift. We’ve become obsessed with measuring everything there is to measure and putting a number on everything there is to number. During this transition, award voters were rightly criticized for ignoring metrics like WAR in favor of outdated benchmarks such as pitcher wins, RBI, or team success. Eventually, even they came around, and the statistical revolution was complete. WAR became mainstream. Analytics became the dominant language of baseball discussion. That shift was necessary and mostly positive. But somewhere in the process, we forgot how to account for the things numbers struggle to capture.
Most people will acknowledge that advanced metrics are not perfect, but in practice they are often treated as absolute truth. Anything that cannot be measured cleanly gets dismissed as too subjective. Leadership, game management, defensive coordination, and preparation are pushed aside because you cannot easily put a number on them. The irony is that WAR itself was once dismissed for being too subjective and too difficult to calculate accurately. Now it is often treated as the final answer instead of one tool among many. In our rush to embrace the future, we threw out some of the only real wisdom left from the past.
Most of the discussion and arguments about the 2025 MVP race were centered around how the stats measured up between Cal and Judge. A minority of the discussions talked about the flaws in stats and advanced metrics like WAR, and only the most nuanced debates truly gave proper respect to the unmeasurable value that a catcher brings to the table. That said, those nuanced conversations are happening more often than they used to, and that is encouraging. MVP races like this one further push the baseball masses towards a better understanding of the game and all the ways players can add value to their teams.
Players and front offices have understood for a long time that player value goes beyond slash lines and statcast data. They know WAR is incomplete, because sometimes there is a real gap between what is felt and what is measured when it comes to the impact a player has. Teams employ entire departments dedicated to closing that gap, evaluating skills that are difficult or impossible for the public to measure. And it’s about time we caught on to what they know. So let me tell you why Cal Raleigh didn’t win MVP, and why that answer probably changes if this vote happens 10 years from now.
What MVP Voters Are Actually Asked to Do
To understand why he didn’t win, we’ll first have to understand what factors go into the MVP. What criteria are the voters using? Well, unfortunately, the answer is unsatisfactory. The Baseball Writer’s Association of America is the organization that gives out many awards, including the MVP. Their guidelines for voters are intentionally vague, saying “There is no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable means. It is up to the individual voter to decide who was the Most Valuable Player in each league to his team. The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier.
The rules of the voting remain the same as they were written on the first ballot in 1931:
1. Actual value of a player to his team, that is, strength of offense and defense.
2. Number of games played.
3. General character, disposition, loyalty and effort.
4. Former winners are eligible.
5. Members of the committee may vote for more than one member of a team.”
Looking at historical voting trends, it is clear that voters also factor in several other things:
1. bWAR and fWAR
2. Offensive and defensive value
3. General sentiment among players and staff
4. Leadership and character
5. Leading the league in stats like Batting Average, Home Runs, OPS, etc.
6. Historical significance, for example, Aaron Judge breaking the AL single-season record for home runs
7. Positional difficulty, the most extreme example being Shohei Ohtani; performing at such a high level in both pitching and hitting simultaneously gives him an edge in voting when all other things are equal.
8. Team success—most players get an edge in MVP voting if their team does well that season.
Over the last several seasons, leadership, team success, and historical context have taken a back seat to WAR. The last five AL MVPs have led the league in fWAR, and the same is true for the last three NL MVPs. Pitchers are essentially eliminated from MVP consideration, with Clayton Kershaw in 2014 standing as the last exception. Most fans would agree that a lot of these changes are good, because needing your team to make the playoffs to have a chance at the MVP is ridiculous. And I would agree, the current voting environment is fairer than it used to be. But too much trust is placed in publicly available stats and analytics, because most people don’t really understand how all these advanced metrics really work, particularly their flaws.
One of the biggest issues in the Judge versus Raleigh debate is how WAR treats catchers. When people cite bWAR in this argument, it reveals a misunderstanding of how WAR is calculated. bWAR does not include catcher framing at all. fWAR does include framing, as well as Stolen Base Runs and Runs Saved on Passed Pitches, but even that leaves the final tally incomplete. Defensive metrics are known for being some of the more unreliable ones in the baseball nerd world. It’s hard to get them right, and even the ones that are pretty accurate need a massive sample size to stabilize. Usually, it will take multiple seasons worth of data to really know how good a defender is.
Catcher framing is a good one to use, because they catch thousands of pitches in a season, and so the sample size is sufficiently large to get an accurate picture of how good their framing is. And of course, the weight given to these factors matters a lot as well. I won’t get into the weeds on whether it should count for more or less, but an argument could certainly be made that the defensive weights should be changed a bit for some positions, including catcher.
Catcher defense is one of the most difficult things in the game to quantify, because it is so much more than just framing, blocking pitches, and throwing out runners. They also have to study the opposing batters, call the right pitches at the right time to get the desired results, work with the entire pitching staff to understand their arsenals inside and out, cultivate relationships with them, and learn how to calm them down or fire them up during mound visits so they can perform at their best. The value they bring in these areas doesn’t get factored into the WAR equation at all. Catchers are effectively the quarterbacks of baseball, and everyone inside the game knows it. Fans and media often don’t know or act as though it isn’t the case.
Teams Tell Us This Matters
There is plenty of real world evidence that front offices value catcher defense far more than WAR suggests. Teams routinely tolerate terrible offensive production from catchers if they excel in other areas. The Astros won a World Series with Martin Maldonado as their starting catcher while he posted a .600 OPS. Maldonado lasted 13 MLB seasons without ever having an OPS+ over 100. Patrick Bailey of the Giants is widely regarded as elite despite never posting an OPS above .644.
In 2025, Austin Wells, Carlos Narvaez, and Luis Torrens were all primary starting catchers for big market teams with playoff expectations, despite being below average hitters. Backup catchers start 40 to 60 games per season and are almost universally bad offensively. According to WAR, many of these players barely provide value at all. Maldonado never exceeded 0.9 fWAR during four seasons with Houston. Torrens has never topped 1.6 fWAR. Then there’s backup catchers, who are atrocious at the plate pretty much across the board. Backup catchers start 40-60 games a season, more than most other backup players. So why are teams allowing them to play for them? If WAR were telling the full story, teams would not make these decisions. The fact that they consistently do tells us something important is missing.
The Easy Answer
A lot of hitting metrics, by contrast, take a smaller sample size to stabilize, are easier to measure, and conveniently factor into WAR. This is another advantage that Judge had over Raleigh. It is so easy to put a number on the value he brings to the table. .331 batting average, .457 OBP, 1.144 OPS, 204 wRC+, 10.1 fWAR. That’s a gosh darn MVP if I’ve ever seen one, right? For Raleigh, you have to read between the lines and dive deep into the details to even attempt to explain his full value, which admittedly isn’t possible to quantify precisely yet. That difference in visibility is the biggest reason Judge won, not because Raleigh was less valuable.
Does Cal’s ability as a game-caller and leader of the defense really make up for the 1.0 fWAR difference between him and Judge? Well, the margin of error for WAR is widely accepted to be 1.0 in either direction, so yes, it probably could. But let’s assume the fWAR numbers are spot on. When you consider that most teams probably wouldn’t roster a bad catcher unless they hit like an MVP candidate, and the fact that Raleigh is regarded as one of the best all-around catchers in the game, it is still well within the realm of possibility.
But that’s not all the hidden value Cal Raleigh brings to the table. There’s a saying in sports that the most important ability is availability. And in Big Dumper’s case, this holds especially true. Imagine for a second, that you’re an average team with a great catcher who is the best hitter on the team—but he needs his regular days off so he’s fresh enough to keep up his performance. So, you would have a backup catcher playing in the place of your starter 40-60 games per season. Backup catchers usually can’t hit, because front offices value their other skills more, so you’re basically taking your best bat out of the lineup and replacing it with a bad one. That stinks. Now imagine you’re an average team with Cal Raleigh, who played in 159 out of 162 games in 2025. When you put in the backup catcher, you’re adding a bad bat to the lineup, but you also get to keep your best bat in the lineup. That adds a lot of value that other catchers wouldn’t.
If you look at how many players have had a wRC+ of 150 or higher at the catcher position (min. 500 PA) in the last decade, the entire list is Cal Raleigh. Now, Fangraphs only shows stats by position, so that doesn’t include any stats from DH days. But that’s still super important to know when determining the value a catcher brings, because 99% of catchers don’t DH on their days off. The top end for a catcher is generally in the 130’s for wRC+, and Cal got to 174 as a catcher, and 161 overall. In fact, no player has ever reached 160 wRC+ as a catcher over 500 PA as far back as Fangraphs data goes, with the lone exception of Cal Raleigh. As Adam pointed out in a previous article addressing the MVP debate, Raleigh did that while playing half his games in the worst offensive enviornment in MLB.
Most everyday batters easily clear 500 PA if they stay healthy—but not catchers. The position is so brutally demanding that very few ever make it to 500 PA. And those that do, typically see their production fall off in the second half of the season. Foul tips, blocking balls, constant squatting, and daily preparation take an enormous physical toll. On top of that, catchers spend hours preparing game plans and working with pitchers, time that other players can spend refining their hitting. Raleigh still handled that workload while producing historic results over a sample size of 705 PA. He hit 60 home runs and allowed zero passed balls in 1,072 innings behind the plate, both MLB records for a catcher.
When you take into consideration the value that teams place on good defensive catchers, how rare it is for a catcher to put up these kinds of numbers over the sample size of a full season, and the extra value added by playing every day, I think you can reasonably say that Cal provides a bit more value than Judge, even if you can’t measure it all exactly.
Applying the MVP Criteria
Returning to the original MVP guidelines:
Actual value favors Raleigh when all facets of offense and defense are fully considered.
Number of games played favors Raleigh, who played 121 games at catcher and 38 at DH, compared to Judge’s 95 in right field and 56 at DH.
Character and effort favor Raleigh, who handled the most physically and mentally demanding role in baseball nearly every day.
Historical significance also leans Raleigh given the records he broke on both offense and defense. Positional difficulty overwhelmingly favors him. Team success leans his way, as the Mariners won their division and pushed deeper into the playoffs than the Yankees. Judge only holds the edge in offensive stats, which remain too heavily weighted in MVP voting.
Final Thoughts
Cal Raleigh did not lose the 2025 MVP because he was less valuable than Aaron Judge. He lost because the way we measure value is still incomplete. WAR is a powerful and useful tool, but it is not a final answer. It struggles to capture catcher defense, leadership, workload, and in game responsibility. Teams already understand this reality. That is why they tolerate weak offensive production from catchers and prioritize defense and game management at the position. Fans and voters are slowly beginning to catch on, as evidenced by how close this MVP race became.
As analytics continue to improve and as better ways of measuring catcher impact emerge, seasons like Raleigh’s will be viewed very differently. What looks like a narrow second place finish today will eventually be seen as a case where the most valuable player was doing work the numbers were not yet equipped to measure. If the 2025 MVP vote were held 10 years from now, with a deeper understanding of catcher value and more complete metrics, the story would be different.
-Isaac Harai
