At 12:01 a.m. on July 1, Cal Raleigh had 33 home runs, 71 RBIs, a 1.036 OPS, the coolest nickname in baseball (The Big Dumper, in case you needed reminding), and played for a team four games over .500 and farthest from the sport's media center. At that same moment, Aaron Judge had 30 homers, 67 RBIs, a 1.175 OPS, no particular nickname of any sort (sorry John Sterling), played for a team 12 games over .500 and was the sport's media center. Judge was the putative MVP based on the unwritten rule among voters that Seattle doesn't matter and New York does.
Two months later, the geography stopped mattering. Raleigh stopped doing much of anything worthy of notice, let alone trophy debate. He hit .183 in July and August, his OPS sat in the mid-.700s, and while he added 17 more homers, he hit .103 in his other 174 at-bats, so when he wasn't trotting around the bases he was trudging back to the dugout. He was still one of the better defensive catchers in the game and he was having a power year to remember, but so were about 15 other people. He still had the nickname and the reason for it, and he had played all but two games, which is absurd for the position, and he was still a lock to win the Gold Glove for whatever that's worth. As for Judge, he got hurt but his numbers remained strong throughout. Nobody was talking about MVP unless you were trying to tart up a case for Tarik Skubal.
But sometimes (well, OK, almost never, but run with us on this) you get what you want even after you're sure you've lost it, and we have again what we forgot we could have back in June: an MVP race. Judge and the Dumper are putting on shows that are mercifully helping distract from the Tigers, Astros and Mets.
Wednesday night was the season we wanted in a nutshell. Judge cranked two homers to the same part of Yankee Stadium, to get to 51. Three time zones away, Raleigh hit two himself. The first, off Tanner Gordon, went into the third deck at Safeco Field, and the second, in the eighth off the gloriously named Angel Chivilli, got him to a nice round 60. He has had a breathtaking September to guide the Mariners to a 16-5 record and the AL West title they probably had no right to fantasize about, in tandem with Judge's own September in which the otherwise confounding Yankees have gone 14-7 and are about to run down Toronto for the AL East.
October is what separates the famous from the merely impressive, of course, and Seattle's October résumé is … well, they've paid their league dues on time every year.
That, though, is not our immediate concern. The MVP votes are filed at the end of the regular season, and Raleigh and Judge have four days left to make whatever additional cases they could possibly make. They each have one game left against the gutted rosters of Chicago and Colorado and then finish their seasons at home this weekend, the Yankees against the long-dead Orioles and the Mariners against a Dodger team that is locked into a first-round series and likely to rest as many veterans as they can manage.
And at this point, an MVP vote cannot be wrong, unless some rogue has George Springer in the first slot. Compelling arguments can be made for both, and while we tend to lean more into le Gros Tombereau based on playing a more difficult position and playing it essentially every day, muscling into the game's record books and having resurrected a dead summer to do it, we cannot hate Judge's candidacy even though he's already won two of these and plays for the still moderately detestable Yankees, because he has played hurt without being noticeably off his game, and because his ancillary numbers are better.
We suppose the ass could be the tiebreaker, but we don't want to imagine the poor bastard who has to walk up to each of them with a pair of calipers and ask them for a moment of their time. The rest of it has been far too fun to ruin, and last night was proof if proof were needed that they have combined to commandeer the Season Of Ohtani by doing what must be done to save the sport from Rob Manfred's not-so-tender mercies. We can worry about that Brewers-Guardians World Series when it's time to worry about that, but for now, we have this, in XXXL pants and with baseballs with cartoonish screaming mouths sailing into the night.
