The 2025 AL MVP vote already felt like a knife twist for Mariners fans. Now, with Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh both navigating rough 2026 seasons, that decision looks even harder to swallow.
Judge took home the award after collecting 13 of the 30 first-place votes, and the result left plenty of people in Seattle shaking their heads. Raleigh’s season was the kind that rarely comes around, catcher or otherwise: history-making power, a place among the game’s elite, and a run that made him just the seventh player ever to reach 60 home runs.
He also did things no catcher had ever done before in Major League history. Even with all of that, he came up short.
That debate over what “most valuable” really means has only grown louder this year. Judge remains an all-time hitter, no question. But the gap between what he and Raleigh have meant to their teams in 2026 makes the argument feel even shakier.
The Yankees enter Sunday at 93-68 and can match last season’s regular-season win total, even though Judge has been limited to 66 games by a right rib stress fracture and, more recently, a right calf strain. When he has been in the lineup, he’s also on pace for his least productive season since his rookie year in 2016. Even then, Seattle would take his .871 OPS and 140 OPS+ in a heartbeat.
The Mariners, meanwhile, have fallen from 90-72 last season to 74-86 with two games left. Raleigh has dealt with his own injury trouble, including a right oblique strain that badly affected his first half, especially while he tried to play through it. He’s still appeared in 124 games, but it’s been a brutal year all the same.
And for all the disappointment around the roster, Raleigh has been the center of it. Julio Rodríguez, Josh Naylor and Andrés Muñoz have all slipped, the rotation has regressed, and the bullpen hasn’t had enough depth. Still, Raleigh stands out because everything seems to move with him.
That was true last season too. The Mariners went 38-11 when he homered and 52-61 when he didn’t.
That split says a lot about his importance, but it also shows how much the team leaned on him. Rodríguez may have the superstar profile.
Naylor may have brought a spark after arriving in July. Raleigh, though, is the one holding the room together.
The contrast gets starker when you put last year’s Raleigh back into this season’s picture. His 9.1 fWAR in 2025, compared with the 1.9 fWAR he’s produced in 2026, would have been worth roughly seven more wins. That would have put Seattle at 81-79 and two games ahead in the AL West with two games remaining.
Judge’s 2025 version would have changed the Yankees’ season too, adding about eight wins and giving them home-field advantage in the AL. But New York is still headed to the playoffs as the top wild-card seed. Seattle is not.
That’s why the frustration around the MVP result hasn’t faded. If anything, this season has made it sharper. Raleigh looked like the player who should have been crowned in 2025, and the way these two teams have unraveled and survived in 2026 only strengthens that case.
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