Over the past few years many of baseball’s biggest awards have tended to go in a landslide. Each of Shohei Ohtani’s four MVPs were unanimous, as was Ronald Acuña Jr.’s NL MVP in 2023. Paul Skenes was a unanimous pick for NL Cy Young this year, and Tarik Skubal won each of his back-to-back honors decisively, including a unanimous selection in 2024. That made this year’s AL MVP race between Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh particularly fascinating. Judge and Raleigh each put together historic seasons, with Judge delivering arguably a top-five season all-time by a right-handed hitter while Raleigh enjoyed without question the greatest season ever by a catcher. Voters had a difficult choice to make,...
