The most remarkable statistic of the 2025 MLB season, the NL Cy Young and the AL MVP races, two surprising Red Sox

Wednesday 8/27/25

Paul Skenes is going to win the NL Cy Young award with a record under .500, isn't he? He will win it, whatever his record is, and right now he's 8-9. That's going to bother me. It's just not right. You should still have to win games to win the Cy Young, regardless of who you're pitching for. I don't want to see a 10-12 record next to a Cy Young winner's name in the baseball history books.

All of the Roman Anthony hype is premature. He's been good. Solid. Not much pop. Decent at getting on base. I keep hearing him touted as one of the best players in baseball already. That's false. He's off to an encouraging--in some ways--start. But this isn't dazzling, or anywhere close to it. Yet.

It blows me away, though, how everyone starts saying something as if it were gospel when it's simply not reality. We have numbers to go by. The numbers are the numbers. There they are. You can't change or deny them. What people do do, though, is fail to look at them, consider them, or understand what they mean if they see them.

I've never seen anything on August 27 like the Colorado Rockies with their -344 run differential. If that's not the most amazing statistic of this 2025 season, it's that the Rockies have nine wins against teams with a .500 record or better (9-57). Both stats are staggering and seemingly impossible, but there they are, too, and that's after their 6-1 victory over the division-leading Houston Astros last night.

Additionally: The Giants have the worst record in all of baseball since the Rafael Devers trade. Even worse than the Rockies.

Jacob Misiorowski: Ten starts, 4-2, 4.33 ERA as today. The worst All-Star selection--made a mockery of the honor--in MLB history to date. Worse than Alfredo Griffin, who was included simply because he happened to be on the premises and had a glove.

The Red Sox took another from the Orioles yesterday, shutting them out 5-0 behind Lucas Gialito, who went eight scoreless. They're playing good ball right now. Still a ways to go, but the postseason is looking likelier and likelier, though I put no stock in the probabilities you see listed--I think the Sox' odds of qualifying for the playoffs are listed at like 94%--when a single bad week can find you on the outside looking in. Bad weeks happen in baseball (as in all things).

Brayan Bello: Is he a number two starter? He's sixth in the AL in ERA. That means you have two guys in that top half dozen. Sounds like a one and a two to me. But we must apply caution. The devil is in the statistical details. Bello's WHIP is 1.222. That means he lives dangerously. Live dangerously, it tends to catch up with you. Once again, in baseball, as in all things. But this has been a nice year for him when he's delivered on his potential. He doesn't strike out a ton of guys, which means he pitches.

The Red Sox don't have a number four starter; meaning, if they do make the playoffs, I'm unsure who they'd use in that capacity, if a series got that far. Dustin May, I suppose, on the short leash. Wouldn't expect them to go bullpen game. Walker Buehler is unlikely to be on the postseason roster.

Back to awards: I've thought for quite some time now that Aaron Judge shouldn't be the AL MVP, and for weeks I've believed he won't be. Doesn't matter where his stat line ends up, if he wins the batting title--which seemed inevitable at one point, but no longer is--or hits his fifty homers. His season has been too front-loaded.

Reminds me a bit of Reggie Jackson in 1969. Jackson was like the second coming of Ruth in the first half of that campaign. His second half paled so much by comparison that you couldn't give him the MVP, even if his numbers, overall, were the best that year. The presentation was off. And I love Jackson. He was larger-than-life when I was a kid, and I think he's underrated now, which is ironic, if you're familiar with the then-contemporary Jackson hoopla and the Reggie dog-and-pony show.

Plus, the feeling is that the Yankees--the club Judge is the clear leader of--have underachieved, and will have done so barring a final-month run to overtake the Blue Jays for the division. I don't see that happening. And even if it did, would likely still feel like too little, too late--again, in terms of the presentation.

Cal Raleigh is going to win the AL MVP, and I'm not expecting the voting to be close--or anywhere near as close as most would expect (given that at one point Judge had nearly a 100% "official" probability of winning this award). I don't think it will be unanimous, but it'll be by a lot.

This will also bother me. Raleigh is hitting .245 right now. Shouldn't win an MVP hitting in the .240s. His WAR--for those who are all about this stat, which is many--is underwhelming when you consider his home run total. I'd bet people would expect that WAR to be up around ten already, and he's in the fives. Keeping with our theme: If he has a bad week--like a bad week to finish the season--you could have an MVP with a .239 batting average as part of his final line.

So who should be the MVP? Strange as it is to say in a season where a catcher might hit 60 home runs, and Judge doing what he's doing there's no clear-cut choice. Tarik Skubal might be the actual most valuable player to his team, going by the letter of the law--that is, the actual meaning of those words--or else Garrett Crochet, but neither of them has a chance. It's going to be someone with a batting average in the .240s. But that's the world these days: Every last part of it gets worse, and that includes all aspects of sports, which would have once been separate, but nothing is unaffected by our devolution now.

Couple Red Sox players I want to mention, because I was wrong about them. Trevor Story, for one. His OPS+ says that he's been an average offensive player this year, but I am someone who thinks RBI matters. I know what everyone else says--it's mostly a matter of opportunity. I'm not buying that. Never have, never will. You still need to deliver. He's had some big hits for the Sox, timely hits, jump-starting hits, hits that were the reason the Sox won that day.

In the end, he'll have something like 25 homers and 94 RBI. A surprise. He looked done back in the spring, a liability, a guy you couldn't keep plugging into the line-up every day, but he's been one of their most important hitters, if not their most important, and my sense is that he's the closest thing they have to a leader.

Then there's Aroldis Chapman, whose signing I bemoaned in these pages--or if I didn't exactly bemoan it, I expressed sizable reservations. He's having the best year of his career, a year that helps his Hall of Fame candidacy. This is one of the three best years a Sox reliever has had in the last fifty years, along with Jonathan Papelbon in 2006 and Koji Uehara in 2013.

Chapman doesn't give up runs, plain and simple. Currently, he hasn't allowed a hit in more than nine innings. I'm not sure what the specific total is, but he's basically aggregated a no-hitter through his recent appearances.

His WHIP is .686--an eye-popping figure, and borderline shocking, given Chapman's tendency in recent years to issue free passes. His turnaround, or resurgence, or whatever you want to call it, has been truly notable, and you know what? I'd have him smack in the middle of that AL Cy Young conversation.

The Red Sox close their season with a three-game series against the Blue Jays followed by another with the Tigers. Could be a very interesting finish.

A final note: Nathan Eovaldi's season came to an end last night with a rotator cuff strain. This is likely the end for him, I'd think. Or the beginning of. The type of thing where you look at a player's season-by-season statistical profile, and see this outstanding, surprising season right near the close of the career, and you're not sure how that happened if you weren't around at the time--before you look into it, that is--or are confused that that was the final season for that player, given how well they were doing it (consider Britt Burns, for instance: Goes 18-11 in his age twenty-six season in 1985, and then his big league career was over). But baseball history is made up of such things. A player's time is only so long, and the end can come fast. Then again, he could be back and dealing in 2026. But it is getting late.