Cal Raleigh's MVP Race With Aaron Judge Signals a Catching Renaissance

Plenty of casual voters can glance at Raleigh and Judge's offensive stats side by side, see the disparity in Judge's OPS and bWAR, and not be swayed in favor of the Mariners star.

Baseball May Have a Stats Problem

Ben Verlander, the host of the Flippin' Bats Pod and brother of future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, emphatically argued Thursday that fans using Raleigh and Judge's head-to-head offensive stats as an argument in favor of the Yankees captain are "missing the entire point."

MLB.com's Anthony Castrovince argued in favor of using FanGraph's fWAR, which factors in framing value, to decide where Raleigh stands next to Judge. Even when that is considered, Judge leads Raleigh, 9.6 to 9.1.

The prevailing point does beg the question - in a game so saturated by stats, Raleigh's MVP candidacy goes to show that baseball's infinite performance measurements sometimes fall short, particularly when it comes to intangibles like Raleigh's daily work helping pitchers execute their best stuff in game.

Seeing the catcher position under such scrutiny as the season comes to a close is also a rarity, in and of itself. The last time a catcher won the MVP award, it was 2012, and Buster Posey took home the hardware with 94% of the vote. Before that, it was Joe Mauer in 2009, and Mauer took home 99% of the vote.

It's hard to imagine that either of these two incredible ballplayers will touch 80% of the vote, and what results in the MVP race will say a lot about how the world of baseball evaluates talent.