Cal Raleigh finished the season with 60 Home Runs. He managed to do this while he caught the third most innings of any catcher in the Major Leagues in 2025.

In spite of all of that, the AL MVP award this year went to Yankees’ oaf, Aaron Judge.

Modern baseball metrics are powerful tools, but they are not neutral. They are built on assumptions about run environments, positional adjustments, ballpark factors, plate-discipline weighting, and contact quality.

In 2025, those assumptions work far more in Aaron Judge’s favor than in Cal Raleigh’s, which is why Judge looks dominant by WAR while Raleigh looks merely excellent, even though the eye test tells a different story.

Modern Metrics like WAR, wRC+, and OPS+ heavily favor players who:

• Play corner outfield
• Hit the ball extremely hard
• Walk a lot
• Don’t need to endure the physical burden of catching

Aaron Judge is the exact archetype these models love. Cal Raleigh is the exact archetype modern metrics struggle to capture.

Catching is the most physically punishing job in sports and drags down offensive performance. But WAR barely accounts for this. It gives catchers a positional bump, but the bump hasn’t been recalibrated for:

• Increased velocity in the modern game
• Increased breaking-ball usage
• Larger gear
• Stricter blocking/framing responsibilities
• The insane day-to-day grind behind the plate

In short, the eye test recognizes that a catcher producing elite power is more impressive than a DH/OF doing the same.

Putting B.S. modern statistics aside, in the end, it came down to this: Raleigh doesn’t play for the Yankees, and Judge doesn’t play for Seattle. .

Yeah, Raleigh was robbed!