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Last night, the final chapter was written for the 2025 MLB season.

If the World Series is the end of the story, awards season is the epilogue. A time for us to reflect on the season that was, before moving on to the season that awaits.

It is only fitting that the final awards that are announced are the most prodigious, highlighting truly the best players in the sport across a marathon of 162.

This year’s races for Cy Young and MVP were filled with standout candidates who put together amazing cases to win the awards.

Juan Soto nearly put together the most improbable 40-40 season in MLB history, and he wasn’t even the runner-up for NL MVP.

In his first season in Boston, Garrett Crochet led the league in innings pitched and strikeouts, punching out 255 batters in 205 1/3 innings pitched. Spoiler alert, Crochet did not win AL Cy Young, and NOBODY is even going to bat an eye.

That’s how good baseball was in 2025!

American League

As Tarik Skubal’s name kept popping up in trade rumors over the last few weeks, everyone was already calling him the two-time reigning AL Cy Young. That is how sure they were that Skubal was taking home that award.

The MVP race presented a more scrutinized debate, as Cal Raleigh put together a Herculean effort, but came up short against one of the greatest hitters who has ever lived.

Aaron Judge Wins Third MVP in Four Years

Right now, Shohei Ohtani has become the undisputed face of baseball and rightfully so. Japanese Babe Ruth has exceeded the hype, giving us all a chance to watch a clear “Greatest Player of All-Time” in real-time.

And yet despite all of the attention that Ohtani gets, Aaron Judge is still the league’s best player.

If Ohtani were still in the American League, his combined 9.4 fWAR would have come up short of the 10.1 fWAR that Judge posted in 2025.

Across 152 games played, Judge hit .331/.457/.688, with 53 home runs and a 204 wRC+. He led the league in batting by 20 points, in on-base percentage by 58 points, in slugging by 66 points, and he cleared Ohtani by 130 points in OPS.

This marks Judge’s third MVP win in the last four seasons. The lone exception was 2023, when Judge hit 37 home runs in 106 games with a 173 wRC+. Ohtani was pretty remarkable on both sides of the ball that year, but if Judge played a full season, that MVP race could have been a lot tighter.

Simply put, Aaron Judge has been an unstoppable offensive force over the past four seasons.

His 210 home runs pace Ohtani and Kyle Schwarber by 23, and he has one more RBI than Pete Alonso for the MLB lead, despite playing 65 fewer games. Judge’s 204 wRC+ in 2025 is also the same mark he has posted over the past four seasons.

When you look at position player fWAR since 2022, Judge’s 37.3 mark is more than 10 wins better than Ohtani (26.6 fWAR), who is one decimal point behind Bobby Witt Jr. (26.7 fWAR) for third-best in all of baseball.

You have seven players separated by less than five wins, and then you have Judge atop the mountain, leading the pack by 10 wins. Pretty remarkable.

This is not to disparage Ohtani, Witt, or even Cal Raleigh, who put together a season that will go down forever in Mariners lore.

This is just a time to recognize a future first-ballot Hall of Famer at the height of his powers. Dominating the league in a way we really haven’t seen since Barry Bonds.

Tarik Skubal Wins Back-To-Back Cy Youngs

As if there was ever any doubt.

After receiving 26 out of 30 first-place votes for this year’s AL Cy Young Award, Skubal is now officially a two-time recipient of this honor. The left-hander beat Crochet and Hunter Brown of the Houston Astros, but the race wasn’t really ever much of a race at all. Skubal was just the guy.

A look at the league-wide leaderboards will show you that Skubal was simply baseball’s best pitcher in 2025. He wasn’t just the best arm in the AL, he was the best hurler in the sport.

The 28-year-old topped Paul Skenes, this year’s NL Cy Young Award winner, in the fWAR department by just 0.1 WAR, but he was also at or near the top of the league in most other major pitching categories.

Skubal’s 11.10 K/9 was third-best in baseball behind only Crochet and Dylan Cease. His strikeout rate per nine might’ve been lower than others, but Skubal still punched out 32.3% of batters he faced in 2025, which led the majors. His 1.52 BB/9 was the lowest in the game, and he also sported the AL’s lowest ERA (2.21) and FIP (2.45).

Now that he’s added yet another trophy to his shelf, Skubal is the first pitcher since Jacob deGrom (2018 and ‘19) to win back-to-back Cy Youngs, and he’s only the 23rd player in MLB history to win this award a second time.

While it had been known for a while that Skubal was going to be named the AL’s best pitcher, there’s a whole lot more uncertainty on where exactly he’ll be pitching come next year. More on that in a minute.

Just Baseball Trivia of the Week

Our newsletter will have a trivia question every week to test and expand the baseball knowledge of our subscribers! The answer to the weekly trivia question is at the bottom of the newsletter.

Aaron Judge hit 53 home runs in 2025, tying the MLB record with his fourth 50-homer season. Only three other players have hit at least 50 home runs in a season four times. Which of the following players did NOT accomplish that feat in his career?

A) Mark McGwire

B) Babe Ruth

C) Alex Rodriguez

D) Sammy Sosa

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National League

This year, the American League had far more intriguing award battles than the National League. That’s not to say that the NL’s players were any less successful or noteworthy than the AL’s, but rather that there was an obvious winner for both the MVP and Cy Young Awards.

In the end, both players who were expected to win the awards, Shohei Ohtani and Paul Skenes, won them. Not only did they win them, but they did so in convincing fashion.

This isn’t the most exciting outcome for people that fancy themselves an underdog, but having this level of dominance on both sides of the ball is great for the sport we all know and love.

Shohei Wins Third Straight MVP

Ohtani, arguably the most talented player in our sport’s history, had the award for the NL’s best player locked up since day one. And that was while he was still “just a hitter” and hadn’t even picked up a ball yet this year.

Then he started pitching (and pitching well), and there was no chance for the competition.

For the fourth time in his short but historic career, Ohtani took home an MVP Award. He has now done so twice in each league. Now that he’s won the award for a fourth time, he joins Barry Bonds as the second player in MLB history to win more than three MVPs.

No matter which offensive category you look at, Ohtani was at or near the top. His 55 home runs were second in the NL and third in all of baseball. He scored more runs (146) than any player in the game while finishing fourth in OBP (.392), second in SLG (.622), and second in wRC+ (172).

He was also one of seven players in the NL to drive in more than 100 runs.

Ohtani, 31, made his triumphant return to the mound in June and ultimately wound up posting a 2.87 ERA and sparkling 1.90 FIP through 14 starts and 47 innings. In that time, he struck out just a hair under 12 batters per nine innings while sporting the lowest walk rate of his career.

It’s wild to think that if Ohtani had been pitching from the start of the season, he could’ve conceivably put a run together for both the MVP and Cy Young Awards. We’ve truly never seen a player like this before, and it’s best to just sit back and enjoy the ride, because we may never see another.

Paul Skenes Wins First Cy Young

After receiving all 30 first-place votes, Skenes won the first Cy Young Award of his career. The right-hander is still just 23 years of age but has already cemented himself as one of the game’s very best and brightest young stars.

Now that he’s a Cy Young Award winner, Skenes is just the third Pirates pitcher in the team’s storied franchise history to claim the award, and the first since 1990.

The Pirates’ first-round pick in 2023, Skenes led the majors with a 1.97 ERA and a 2.36 FIP in 2025, while also sporting baseball’s lowest HR/9 at just 0.53.

While it’s true that Skenes didn’t lead the league in other rate stats, and he didn’t strike out the most batters or walk the fewest, he was simply the best at run prevention.

Keeping runs off the board the way Skenes did while finishing top-five in most of the major counting stats is always going to be more than enough to bring home some hardware in any given season.

Skenes beat out Cristopher Sánchez and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the voting, but there was never really much of a chance for the latter two to overtake the former.

Offseason Trade Rumors

• On Thursday, Jordan Leandre wrote about the 15 best players who could realistically be traded this offseason, from Luis Robert Jr. to Tarik Skubal.

• Then, on the latest episode of the Just Baseball Show, Peter, Aram, and Jack went into more detail on the most significant trade pieces of the 2025 offseason, focusing on three massive names who could shake up the winter: Joe Ryan, Ketel Marte, and MacKenzie Gore.

• Speaking of trade candidates, Cristian Crespo took a look at five former top prospects who could desperately use a change of scenery this winter. Time will tell if any of them will end up on the trade block.

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Read all the details about our Discord community here.

Trivia Answer: C) Alex Rodriguez

Babe Ruth, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire each had four seasons with at least 50 home runs. Alex Rodriguez only had three (2001, ‘02, and ‘07).

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