Yankees' Aaron Judge getting a run from Royals' Bobby Witt Jr. in AL MVP discussion
Kansas City Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. tags out the Yankees’ Aaron Judge at second base on a double play to end the fifth inning of an MLB game at Yankee Stadium on Monday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
How do you define Most Valuable Player?
It’s the debate raging in Flushing of late, as Francisco Lindor faces the Sisyphean task of stealing the award away from Shohei Ohtani, who, for most of the season, has felt like the de facto king of the National League. But the Yankees’ last three games against the Royals has to spark a similar sort of discussion, which is pretty impressive when you think about what Aaron Judge has pulled off this season.
Like Ohtani, when you look at Judge, your brain short-hands to “MVP.”
He’s won the award once before, the Yankees entered Wednesday in first place in the AL East, and he is, by almost every metric, the best hitter in baseball. He had an MLB-best 51 homers and 126 RBIs before the series finale against the Royals, a 4-3 win in 11 innings, with the most weighted runs created and highest OPS+ in the league (largely considered the best metrics for evaluating offensive production).
He is fearsome in the batter’s box — the type of player who can sometimes beat a pitcher with aura and stature alone. In the Bronx, you’d think the lyrics to his walk-up music included a chorus of “M-V-P, M-V-P” at the end.
“I think I get to watch an MVP every day,” Aaron Boone said Monday when asked about the debate.
If he’s being honest, though, for the last three days, he’s gotten to watch two of them.
Although Bobby Witt Jr. doesn’t have Judge’s imposing persona, and his offensive numbers, excluding batting average, are (just a little bit) worse than Judge’s, you can’t help but notice the Royals’ speedy shortstop.
Witt glides around the basepaths like he’s cutting through air, with 28 stolen bases to show for it, along with 41 doubles and 11 triples. Blink, and he’s on third.
He has a whopping 18 outs above average at a premium position, and even FanGraphs and Baseball Reference can’t agree on which of the two has contributed the most to their respective teams: Witt’s fWAR is higher than Judge’s (9.6 to 9.5 — the top two in baseball), and Judge’s bWAR is higher than Witt’s (9.5 to 9.1). The discrepancy is understandable, in part because FanGraphs values defense more, Witt plays a harder position, and Judge has had a down defensive year (-6 outs above average).
All of which is to say that, numbers-wise, it’s pretty close.
But there are those questions again: Do you define MVP on numbers alone? How much more does offense mean than defense? Where does baserunning slot in?
But maybe there’s a supplemental question we should be asking: How do you define that word “valuable”?
Because the answer might very well cost Judge the award.
Take, for instance, the case of Mike Trout — long believed to be the best player of his generation. He’s a three-time MVP, but he’s done it in a vacuum, because the Angels have pretty much been terrible for the 13 years he’s been there. When Ohtani won AL MVP in 2021 and 2023, that same Angels team went a combined 150-174 — a .463 winning percentage. It’s clear that, to the voters, MVP meant, “whoever is best at baseball” and not “who dragged his team kicking and screaming into the playoffs.”
But there’s an argument to be made that being that much better than everyone around you — of strong-arming a team into postseason relevance — is worth more than OPS+. Judge is more dominant, sure, but Witt is the more complete player right now. And, shocking to say, but he may also mean more to the Royals than Judge means to the Yankees (and let’s be 100% clear — Judge means a lot to the Yankees).
When Judge slumps — and he’s been slumping pretty hard lately — he has Juan Soto (7.5 fWAR) and Austin Wells (3.4 fWAR) to pick him up. The discrepancy is far larger among the Royals’ position players: Kansas City has been buoyed by its excellent starting pitching, but behind Witt, the most valuable position player is the ageless Salvador Perez, with a 3.2 fWAR.
Add to all of this: The Yankees were projected by many to do well this year. Who, exactly, thought that the Royals — the team that won only 56 games last year — would even be in sniffing distance of the playoffs this season? Yet, going into Wednesday, they were 14 games over .500. They currently have a hold on the second wild card spot, and are close enough to the AL Central-leading Guardians that they could feasibly take the division in the next two-plus weeks.
So much of that success can be traced back to Witt, who only is in his third full season. He’s also been more consistent than Judge, who started the year in a slump that saw his batting average dip to .197 on May 2, and entered the day hitting .196 in the last 14 games. (Don’t worry; Judge will snap out of it — he always does.)
“His athleticism jumps off the page at you,” Boone said of Witt. “I think he might be the fastest guy in the league. He plays with a really, really good motor. You saw the talent when he got into the league, it kind of felt like he was going to be a really good player, and this year, he’s obviously taken a giant leap at the plate — becoming a premium hitter, too. I think his explosiveness, his athleticism and the energy he plays the game with is pretty impressive.”
Impressive, yes. And very, very valuable. It’s going to be pretty hard to determine if the word “most” should go before that.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.