Philadelphia Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber connects for a double during the first inning in Game 4 of baseball’s National League Division Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
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With the classic Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series behind us, time marches on, with free agent and trade season now upon us. The last vestiges of the 2025 campaign will be the major award presentations which will soon begin in earnest.
I pay the most attention to the big ones – the MVP and Cy Young awards in both leagues – and utilize my batted ball-based evaluation methods to select the top performers. Now my metrics, or anyone’s subjective or objective systems for that matter, aren’t perfect or beyond criticism, but I do stand behind mine. I happen to think they’re pretty good at blocking out the noise and measuring a player’s true talent level and seasonal contribution.
And on most fronts, my methods are in synch with the actual award voters. On the pitching side, my top three finishers in both the NL (Paul Skenes, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Cristopher Sanchez) and AL (Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, Hunter Brown) match up exactly with the official award finalists. We’ll see about the order. In the NL, that isn’t saying a whole lot – once Zack Wheeler got hurt, it was pretty clear that those would be the final three standing. In the AL, however, it was nice to see the Astros’ Brown sneak onto the list of finalists ahead of other worthy candidates, like Yankees Max Fried and Carlos Rodon. In a very minor way, it validates both my system and the views of the actual voters.
There was some agreement, but not nearly as much, in the case of the league MVP awards. In the AL, the three finalists are the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, Mariners’ Cal Raleigh and Guardians’ Jose Ramirez. Judge and Raleigh obviously are no-brainers. My top three, however, consisted of Judge, the Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. and Raleigh, in that order.
Ramirez finished 8th on my hypothetical ballot, with 22.0 “Tru” Player Runs Above Average. You could actually throw a net over players #5-10 on my list – Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., Maikel Garcia, Julio Rodriguez, Ramirez, Ben Rice and George Springer. Ramirez suffers a bit on my system from mediocre batted ball authority, though he did compensate to some extent with solid baserunning and defensive value. Still, my top tier of four players was way, way ahead of him – Judge (86.0 TPRAA), Witt Jr., (49.2), Raleigh (46.3) and Blue Jays’ catcher Alejandro Kirk (40.9). While I don’t think Ramirez is a particularly worthy finalist, it’s not an outrage that he made the cut. I see him as just a little less great than the actual voters do.
In the NL, I also differ with the actual voters on the identity of one finalist. My final three are the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani (63.7 TPRAA, excluding pitcher value), Mets’ Juan Soto (50.2) and Diamondbacks’ Corbin Carroll (42.3), in that order, with the Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. (40.3) falling just short. The actual finalists are Ohtani, Soto and the Phillies Kyle Schwarber.
Schwarber (19.8 TPRAA) just missed my hypothetical ballot, falling at the back of a very tightly bunched #5-11 group consisting of Pete Crow-Armstrong (22.8), Francisco Lindor (22.5), Geraldo Perdomo (22.4), Bryce Harper (21.0), Trea Turner (20.2) and William Contreras (20.1). On one hand, I can say that Schwarber was just a nose out of 5th place on my list, and 5th isn’t all that much different than 3rd. On the other, there isn’t a planet upon which I could place Schwarber on the same level as Carroll or Tatis Jr. in 2025, let alone above them.
With the era of advanced metrics well underway, one would think that MVP voters would be taking more than pure offensive counting stats into account. But that’s exactly what they appear to be doing in the NL race. According to my method, Ohtani (77.1 batting runs above average), Soto (64.7) and Schwarber (40.4) were the three best hitters in the NL., though Carroll (29.4) and Tatis Jr. (29.3) weren’t all that far back in the pack.
But we should be to the point that we expect voters to measure the total player. Ohtani was a DH, but one with plenty of baserunning value. Soto is a subpar defender, but stole himself 38 bases. Schwarber? Sure, he nosed out Ohtani to lead the NL in homers with 56, but was purely a DH, like Ohtani, and was a slow, subpar baserunner, unlike Soto.
It’s quite interesting to note that my system saw Schwarber as the third best Phillie behind Harper – a player considered to have had a “down” year – and Turner, who was hammered by my method for mediocre batted ball authority. Harper hit fewer than half as many homers as Schwarber, but his 27.8 batting runs above average were in Carroll and Tatis Jr.’s league, and his negative baserunning/defense contribution wasn’t nearly as acute as Schwarber’s.
Let’s circle back to the AL for a second. There is actually at least a puncher’s chance that Raleigh – solely because of his 60 homers – sneaks in and steals the award from Judge. Raleigh hit .247 with a .359 OBP. Schwarber hit .240 with a .365 OBP. Even with all of those homers, both Raleigh and Schwarber finished WAY behind Judge and Ohtani in SLG. Judge and Ohtani should both be unanimous choices, even though Raleigh accomplished his feats as a catcher. Voters should be past being blinded by gaudy homer totals – but they’re not.
And it’s defense that is being overlooked, despite the increasing prevalence of publicly available and understandable advanced fielding metrics. Witt Jr. and Tatis Jr. – two of the three players, along with Carroll, most overlooked by the voters, were just awarded Platinum Gloves as the best fielders in each league at any position. Now the Platinum Glove is decided by a fan vote encompassing all of the Gold Glove winners, so at least a grain or two of salt should be taken here, but it’s pretty clear that Witt Jr. was the best defensive player in either league by just about any measure (Turner would have been my NL pick). Not only did the voters over-value homers, they did so at the expense of defensive performance.
We’re clearly in a better place than we once were with respect to award voting. The 1987 nadir of NL MVP Andre Dawson and Cy Young Steve Bedrosian is far behind us. But we should continue to push for improvement, and properly weighting factors such as homers and individual defense would be a step toward that end.