This isn’t an article advocating for Seattle’s Cal Raleigh to win the American League MVP.
That’s why Choose is taken into account the favourite.
However that is an article stating that Raleigh’s case for AL MVP is a professional one, which is why most anticipate the vote to be extraordinarily shut when the winner is revealed on Thursday evening.
Though his offensive numbers paled compared to that of Choose, Raleigh delivered a historic season on the plate in his personal proper.
Raleigh’s MLB-leading 60 house runs had been essentially the most ever in a single season by a major catcher, by a switch-hitter, and by a Seattle Mariner. He topped Salvador Perez (48), Mickey Mantle (54), and Ken Griffey Jr. (56), respectively, to set these data.
Raleigh additionally led the AL with 125 RBI.
“We’ve said this all before, but it just continues,” Mariners supervisor Dan Wilson stated in September. “And it continues at a historic level. To do what he’s doing, and to do it behind the plate, as often as he’s back there, again, it’s just kind of unfathomable.”
However — just like the Yankee captain Choose — Raleigh’s worth can’t be described by numbers alone.
Because the Mariners’ workhorse catcher and the anchor of their lineup, Raleigh impacts either side of the baseball diamond as a lot as any participant not named Shohei Ohtani.
Raleigh began extra video games at catcher (119) and caught extra innings (1072.0) than anybody else within the AL.
That meant extra alternatives for publicity to foul suggestions, home-plate collisions, bumps, bruises and the overall put on and tear of spending 9 innings on one knee evening after evening.
“Catchers usually are pretty tired at this point in the year,” Raleigh informed The Athletic in September. “But you could say the same thing for everybody.”
However not everyone may say that, in between the grueling bodily and psychological calls for of enjoying catcher, they had been counted on to ship on the plate as the point of interest of their group’s offense.
Raleigh was in command of a Mariners pitching employees whose 3.87 ERA ranked sixth within the AL.
It’s a job that requires scouring over scouting studies, pregame conferences with pitchers, bullpen warmups, mound visits, calling pitches and all the pieces else that goes into navigating an opposing lineup.
Raleigh was so busy with prep work that he was usually unavailable to the media earlier than the primary sport of a given collection, but he was so in-demand that he would maintain scrums for reporters earlier than the second sport.
And Raleigh was so central to the Mariners’ lineup that he usually served because the designated hitter on the times he didn’t catch. He totaled 159 appearances, together with 157 begins, as a catcher, DH or pitch-hitter — essentially the most of any major catcher.
“It’s the mystery bruise game,” Stephen Vogt, a former MLB catcher and now the Cleveland Guardians supervisor, informed The Athletic of a catcher’s grind. “You wake up and you can’t remember where it came from. Your legs are jello. Your body just aches. It hurts.”
In 2024, Raleigh gained the platinum glove because the AL’s greatest fielder at any place.
His defensive metrics had been down in 2025, but he nonetheless recorded seven defensive runs saved to rank fifth amongst AL catchers, whereas his pitch framing positioned throughout the baseball’s 93rd percentile, in accordance with Statcast metrics.
“And you’re getting beat up back there. I mean, you’re constantly taking balls off to the thigh, inner thigh, off the shoulder from foul balls, and then trying to go hit.”
Aaron Choose, seen right here on Sept. 11, was the primary batting champ with at the least 53 house runs. (Picture by Ishika Samant/Getty Pictures)
We’ll discover out Thursday whether or not the voting members of the Baseball Writers’ Affiliation of America (BBWAA), who resolve the MVP winners, felt the identical approach.
Choose posted extra wins above alternative (WAR) to Raleigh, in accordance with each FanGraphs (10.1 to 9.1) and Baseball Reference (9.7 to 7.4). The Baseball Reference mannequin doesn’t, nevertheless, account for pitch framing, which is an enormous a part of Raleigh’s résumé.
The hole between Choose’s OPS and Raleigh’s, in the meantime, was greater than that of Raleigh and Toronto’s Addison Barger, whose .755 OPS ranked thirty ninth amongst AL hitters.
However Choose has gained two of the previous three AL MVP Awards, together with final 12 months’s, which may give Raleigh an edge when it comes to narrative.
Whether or not all of that is sufficient to overcome one other superhuman season by Choose is the largest storyline going into Thursday evening.
