{"id":1614,"date":"2025-11-26T09:50:49","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T16:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=1614"},"modified":"2025-11-26T09:50:49","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T16:50:49","slug":"judge-earns-second-mvp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=1614","title":{"rendered":"Judge Earns Second MVP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a id=\"ghXQsYnMToh4H0l2OAcWPg\" class=\"gie-single\" style=\"color: #a7a7a7; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal !important; border: none; display: inline-block;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/2218027929\" target=\"_blank\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>\/\/ <![CDATA[\nwindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'ghXQsYnMToh4H0l2OAcWPg',sig:'xdZGgvYrdKLrrkR7SekZmOOAEoJ8xCNXHPmaAewNht4=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2218027929',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});\n\/\/ ]]><\/script><script src=\"\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The Aaron Judge vs. Shohei Ohtani debate is one we no longer get to have when it comes to MLB MVP awards since Ohtani switched to the National League and both superstars are the default favorites for their league&#8217;s MVP award every season.\u00a0 But in the DTBL, that competition is alive and well.\u00a0 Both players had their typical otherworldly seasons in 2025, propelling them to winning the MVP award in each league once again.\u00a0 Ohtani&#8217;s extra greatness of not only being one of the best two hitters in all of baseball is that he also happens to be one of the best pitchers too.\u00a0 That doesn&#8217;t play into his DTBL value though where he is only allowed to impact the Moonshiners roster on one side each year.\u00a0 So when comparing their hitting accomplishments only, MVP voters preferred Judge by a comfortable margin as he propelled the Mavericks to their second consecutive league title.\u00a0 Aaron Judge is the 2025 DTBL Most Valuable Player.<\/p>\n<p>What has been really incredible about the career arc of Judge is that he has maintained his status as the best power hitter in the game while becoming an even better all around hitter.\u00a0 This season, he led the league with a .331 batting average.\u00a0 Only five players in the entire league cleared the .300 benchmark, while Judge did so by 31 points.\u00a0 His DTBL career batting average is now on the verge of going over .300 as well, currently sitting at .299.\u00a0 Judge\u00a0also set a career high in runs scored with 137, the second highest total in the league.\u00a0 Amusingly, his league standing in those two categories was higher than in his bread and butter categories of home runs and runs batted in, where he was still among the top five.\u00a0 He hit 53 homers and drove in 114.\u00a0 This is the third time in the past four years that he has surpassed 50 home runs in a season.\u00a0 For good measure, he also stole a dozen bases.\u00a0 His 11.4 Batting PAR bested Ohtani and all others by more than a point.\u00a0 He now holds three of the top eight single season Batting PAR totals since 2005.<\/p>\n<p>The Mavericks blitzed the rest of the league in batting points, thanks in large part to Judge.\u00a0 Even with Mike Trout on the downside of his career, they still have an incredibly loaded outfield, led by Judge and fellow MVP candidate Juan Soto.\u00a0 Judge is probably the best free agent signing in DTBL history.\u00a0 He went undrafted in 2017 when the Mavericks signed him a few weeks into the season.\u00a0 They have been reaping the rewards ever since.\u00a0 He won the Rookie of the Year award in 2017 and also finished third in the MVP vote that season.\u00a0 This is the second time he has been named the DTBL Most Valuable Player.\u00a0 The first time was in 2022, which was probably his best season to date.\u00a0 That year, he broke the AL single season home run record with 62 while hitting .311 with 16 stolen bases.\u00a0 The other season in the discussion for his best was last year when he hit .322 with 58 homers.\u00a0 That would have been a MVP campaign almost any other year.\u00a0 However, Ohtani had the first ever 50\/50 season a year ago, relegating Judge to a second place finish in the MVP vote.<\/p>\n<p>This year&#8217;s MVP vote was nearly the inverse of last year in the top two spots.\u00a0 A year ago, Ohtani got 9 of 10 first place tallies with Judge receiving a single one.\u00a0 This year, Judge garnered nine of the ten, with one second, to finish with 97 points.\u00a0 Ohtani got the other first with eight seconds.\u00a0 He was dropped to fourth on one ballot though, tallying 69 total points.\u00a0 The Moonshiners superstar hit 55 home runs, but the stolen bases dropped considerably from a year ago, with &#8220;only&#8221; 20 swipes on the season.\u00a0 This is the fourth time in the past five years that Ohtani has finished in the top five of the MVP vote.\u00a0 Finishing third is Judge&#8217;s Mavericks teammate and former Yankees teammate Juan Soto.\u00a0 Somewhat surprising considering his consistent dominance, this is Soto&#8217;s highest MVP finish to date.\u00a0 His batting average took a bit of a step back from his career norms, but he more than made up for that by setting a career high with 43 home runs and obliterating his career high in stolen bases with 38.\u00a0 Prior to this year, he had never stolen more than a dozen bases in a season.\u00a0 Soto received the one second place vote that didn&#8217;t go to Ohtani or Judge and was no lower than fourth on any of the ten ballots.\u00a0 That computes to 42 points.\u00a0 Probably the biggest debate during MLB award season was Judge vs. Cal Raleigh for AL MVP.\u00a0 Raleigh led the league with 60 home runs, becoming the fifth different player in DTBL history to ever reach the 60 mark.\u00a0 What made that even more incredible is that he did so while catching 121 games at an elite defensive level.\u00a0 Obviously the defensive value isn&#8217;t relevant to fantasy baseball, but providing offensive numbers like that while occupying a traditionally weak positional slot is extremely valuable.\u00a0 For years now, I have been playing around with a modified version of PAR that does include a positional adjustment.\u00a0 Perhaps this winter would be a good time to implement such a change so we can get a better understanding of just how valuable Raleigh is compared to his catching counterparts.\u00a0 He will have to settle for a fourth place finish in this year&#8217;s MVP vote though.\u00a0 The Jackalope backstop received six third place votes and 35 total points.\u00a0 Finishing in the fifth spot is another guy who is on the periphery of the MVP discussion basically every year.\u00a0 Komodos third baseman Jose Ramirez had his second straight 30\/40 season.\u00a0 He hit exactly 30 homers this year while stealing a career high 44 bases.\u00a0 This is the fifth time in his career that he has finished in the top five for the MVP award, yet he has never been higher than fourth place.\u00a0 He appeared on eight of the ten ballots, all in the fourth and fifth place slots, for 14 voting points.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/MVP25.txt\">Click here<\/a> to view the full voting results.<\/p>\n<p>So the Moonshiners weren&#8217;t quite able to sweep the 2025 DTBL awards.\u00a0 It is the second straight year they have taken two of the three though.\u00a0 All three of the awards went to players on teams who finished in the top two spots in the standings.\u00a0 Thanks to everyone for taking the time to vote a few weeks ago and apologies on being so tardy in actually announcing the winners.\u00a0 Now we turn our eyes to the 2025 season.\u00a0 Have a great Thanksgiving!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Embed from Getty Images The Aaron Judge vs. Shohei Ohtani debate is one we no longer get to have when it comes to MLB MVP awards since Ohtani switched to the National League and both superstars are the default favorites for their league&#8217;s MVP award every season.\u00a0 But in the DTBL, that competition is alive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards","category-mavericks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1614"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1626,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions\/1626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}