The voting for baseball’s MVP awards in both the National League and the American League have been revealed. There’s basically no drama in the NL as Shohei Ohtani continues to be a force of nature on the mound
and in the batters’ box. The American League had some drama as there was a close race between Yankees superstar Aaron Judge and the Big Dumper himself, Mariners slugger Cal Raleigh. In the end, Aaron Judge just barely took home the hardware in an extremely close race.
Shohei Ohtani has reached Barry Bonds territory when it comes to going to any of his stat pages and just laughing while you scroll and look at the absurd numbers he’s been able to put up. So here are some special stats: Sarah Langs of MLB shared out that Ohtani has won MVP in each of his first two seasons with a team and he’s now only the second player in baseball history to accomplish such a feat. The first one was Roger Maris when he pulled it off in 1960 and 1961 with the Yankees. Ohtani has also won the MVP Award in unanimous fashion for the fourth time. He’s in a category of his own there, as he’s the only MVP in history to win the award unanimously multiple times. What else is there to say about the dude? He’s out of this world, y’all.
Meanwhile, Aaron Judge ended up earning his third career MVP Award in a very close race. He joins 12 other players in winning the MVP Award on three different occasions and he definitely had to work for this one. The BBWAA voters gave Judge 17 first-place votes and 13 second-place votes, which was good enough to just eke out the Award win over Cal Raleigh, who earned 13 first-place votes and 17 second-place votes.
Despite the fact that Cal Raleigh put up some fantastic numbers and was the straw that stirred the drink as the Mariners returned to the Postseason for only the second time since 2001, Aaron Judge continued to put up some astonishing numbers, himself. It’s very tough to argue with Judge winning this award — a 204 wRC+ is absolutely wild, along with his gaudy slash line of .331/.457/.688 with a wOBA of .463, 53 home runs and 10.1 fWAR. Raleigh was truly excellent this season but it’s clear that the voters aren’t getting tired of seeing what Judge does on a daily basis on the diamond.
