If the MLB season is more akin to a marathon than a sprint, the same can be said for the MVP races in each league. Hot starts, or cold ones, offer no guarantees for how things will shake out for players when the winners are revealed.
Just as there are ups and downs with teams in playoff races, there are likely to be ebbs and flows for MVP candidates, with one name leaping ahead of another as the various seasonal storylines unfold. That’s good to keep in mind with the results of our latest MVP poll, which features a new name leading each league’s race – and, in both cases, it’s a runaway.
Still, the results in both races leave plenty of room for new leaders to emerge. In a survey of 42 MLB.com experts, 16 players received at least one MVP vote in the National League, while 10 received at least one in the American League.
Players received vote points on a 5-4-3-2-1 scale – five points for a first-place vote, four points for a second-place vote and so on. Here are the results.
AMERICAN LEAGUE
1. Aaron Judge, Yankees (38 first-place votes)
After not ranking in our first MVP poll while he scuffled in April, Judge debuted on the list in May and now has surged to the front of the pack. But that can happen when you hit the ball insanely hard and lead your league in nearly every major offensive category.
Judge’s 62.5 percent hard-hit rate is in baseball’s top 1 percent, as is his 96.7 mph average exit velocity. That’s again proven to be an excellent recipe for hits — and extra-base hits in particular.
Since May 1, Judge has hit .372 with 20 homers, 46 RBIs and a 1.388 OPS, which has made everyone forget that sluggish April. It’s been even scarier since May 15: .393 with a 1.476 OPS.
Judge is now tops in baseball in bWAR (5.1), homers (26), RBIs (64), slugging (.686), walks (57) and OPS (1.110), and he’s even on pace to reach the rare 400 total bases mark for the season.
As we saw in 2022, when Judge set a new AL record with 62 homers and won his first MVP Award, provided he stays healthy, he definitely has the stuff to keep this going for a while.
2. Juan Soto, Yankees (four first-place votes)
Soto still leads MLB in on-base percentage and is second behind Judge in OPS (1.025), and he’s still among the AL leaders in homers (18) and RBIs (55). He’s hit .343 so far in June and has a 1.224 OPS for the month. That’s most definitely still MVP-level stuff.
All the preseason fantasies about what a Soto-Judge combo might look like at the top of the New York lineup have proven true at a level that perhaps even the most passionate and hopeful Yankees fans never saw coming.
