NEW YORK — Three of the last four American League MVPs sit on Aaron Judge‘s mantel. According to ESPN’s latest Awards Watch, he is not even the second-best MVP candidate on his own team.
That is the punch line of a ranking that has stirred a sharp reaction from Yankees fans. ESPN baseball analyst Bradford Doolittle, using the network’s AXE rating system, slotted Judge sixth on his updated AL MVP board. Cody Bellinger, his Yankees teammate, came in fourth. Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. tops the list. For a player who hit his 385th career homer on Tuesday, the slot landed like a curveball nobody saw coming.
Doolittle’s reasoning leans on a system rather than a feel, and Yankees fans have not bought it. AXE blends Baseball Reference WAR, FanGraphs WAR, win probability added and championship probability added into one consensus number, where 100 is league average. Witt sits at 140.5 atop the ranking, well clear of the Yankees pair below him. Behind him come Nick Kurtz (135.0) and Shea Langeliers (131.2) of the Athletics, then Bellinger (129.3), Detroit’s Kevin McGonigle (128.1) and Judge (127.4). Miguel Vargas, Mike Trout, Yordan Alvarez and Willson Contreras fill out the rest of the top 10.
Doolittle was direct about why Witt leads the Yankees captain despite a quiet offensive start. He framed Witt’s case as one built well beyond the batter’s box.
“Witt has had a pedestrian start at the plate, posting a batting average and on-base percentage in line with past seasons but with an isolated power number that’s down, or at least it will be until he goes on a power tear,” Doolittle wrote. “So, why is Witt a strong early frontrunner in this category? He’s just really, really good at everything.”
The defense of the math is plain. Witt holds a 3.4 fWAR, a full half-win clear of every other AL player. He leads the majors in FanGraphs’ DEF metric and sits seventh in baserunning value. Of his 31.9 runs above replacement, only 8.2 come from the bat. The rest comes from playing a premium position at a premium level, the kind of all-around case the Yankees star cannot quite match this year. Doolittle also pointed to Judge’s recent funk, including a stretch of 11 games without a homer or an RBI that the slugger snapped with a walk-off blast against the Rays on Sunday.
The slugging case that ESPN’s ranking glosses over
Here is where the ESPN logic runs into a wall of Yankees evidence pointing the other way. The Yankees captain has been the best hitter in the American League by almost every measure voters historically reward, and it is not particularly close. He owns a .252/.380/.554 slash line and a .933 OPS. He has 17 home runs to Witt’s eight. He has 32 RBI to Witt’s 24. He leads the entire league in runs scored with 41. He has crushed four walk-off home runs already this season, a Yankees feat no captain has produced more memorably.
The home run lead in particular is hard to dismiss. Witt is currently slugging .484. Judge is at .554. That 70-point slugging gap is roughly the difference between an All-Star and an MVP. AL voters have never handed the award to a player with nine home runs in late May while a Yankees star of his level sat 17 deep.
385 home runs in 1,200 games and a fifth 50-HR season in reach
Then there is the captain’s broader résumé. On Tuesday, the Yankees captain played his 1,200th career game and hit the 385th home run of his career. MLB.com researcher Sarah Langs noted the total is the most ever by any player through 1,200 games. Ralph Kiner ranks second at 327, followed by Juan Gonzalez at 326 and Mark McGwire at 322. The gap to Kiner alone is 58 homers. Judge reached 385 in just 1,198 games, while McGwire needed 1,379. Judge is also the fastest player to 300 and 350 home runs, hitting those marks in 955 and 1,088 games.
The Yankees slugger is on pace for a fifth 50-homer season. No player in big league history has ever reached that plateau five times. He has four. The slump that ESPN cited is exactly what manager Aaron Boone treated it as. Boone framed the down stretch as a temporary lull rather than a real concern.
“Just going through it a little bit right now,” Boone said. “Usually that means good things are coming on the other side. He’ll get through it, and somebody will pay the price real soon.”
Royals at 22-32 versus a Yankees contender at 34-22
The team-context argument cuts hard against ESPN as well, and it favors the Yankees star. The Royals are 22-32 and tumbling out of the AL Central race. The Yankees sit at 34-22, third in baseball and squarely in the World Series picture. Voters rarely crown an MVP from a fading club. AXE may not weigh that factor heavily, but voters always do. Even Doolittle conceded the point. He acknowledged Witt’s case would be cleaner if Kansas City climbed back into a playoff push.
The same scrutiny applies to the Yankees teammate ranked ahead of him on the AXE board. Bellinger has been very good for the Yankees. He owns seven home runs, 33 RBI and an .863 OPS. None of those numbers match Judge in any meaningful way except RBI. The Yahoo and Sporting News writeup of the ranking put it bluntly. The Yankees captain should at least be the leading vote-getter on his own roster.
AXE was built as a snapshot, not a verdict. Doolittle himself called this the likely “nadir of a down cycle” for the Yankees captain and warned June pitchers that bad news was on the way.
For now, the Yankees can answer the ranking with metrics of their own. Judge leads the AL in runs, laps the field in homers among the league’s MVP candidates, and owns the better OPS and slugging while doing it on a contender. By the end of June, the Yankees expect the AXE figure to look very different.
What do you think about the EXPN MVP math? Isn’t it a brazen disregard of Aaron Judge’s performance?
