The Baseball Writers Association of America has announced the full list of finalists for the 2025 awards.
This year’s race is highlighted by the American League MVP race between Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh, with José Ramírez vying for third place after being included among the finalists.
Here is the full list of candidates after Monday’s announcement.
American League Manager of the Year
American League Rookie of the Year
National League Rookie of the Year
National League Manager of the Year
A lot of these categories have a clear favorite. For example, as good as Garrett Crochet was in his first season with the Boston Red Sox, Tarik Skubal only cemented his status as the best pitcher in the AL by being even better this season than he was in 2024.
If Skubal does win his second consecutive AL Cy Young award, he will be the first pitcher to repeat in the Junior Circuit since Pedro Martínez in 1999 and 2000.
Over in the NL, Paul Skenes is the overwhelming favorite to be the first Pittsburgh Pirates player to win the Cy Young since Doug Drabek in 1990. The 23-year-old led MLB with a 1.97 ERA, struck out 216 and allowed just 136 hits in 187.2 innings over 32 starts.
Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy should win NL Manager of the Year after leading his team to an MLB-best 97 wins during the regular season.
One year after winning NL MVP playing as a DH-only player, Shohei Ohtani’s return to being a two-way player in 2025 should catapult him to a fourth MVP award in the last five seasons.
The main drama in this year’s awards race is around the AL MVP. Judge was the strong frontrunner for most of the season, then the Mariners made a push to win the AL West for the first time since 2001 on the strength of Raleigh having the best offensive season by a catcher in MLB history.
Virtually every metric still favors Judge as the better player. He led MLB in all three triple slash categories (.331/.457/.688), FanGraphs‘ WAR (10.1), Baseball Reference WAR (9.7), OPS+ (215) and weighted on-base average (.463).
The combination of Raleigh hitting 60 homers playing most of his games as a catcher and the Mariners ending their 24-year division title drought have made this an incredibly competitive showdown between the two stars.
This could end up being one of the closest MVP races in history. Among recent examples, the 2017 NL MVP race was decided by two points with Giancarlo Stanton beating out Joey Votto by a margin of 302-300. The difference was Stanton received one more second- and third-place vote than Votto.
It would be stunning if Judge or Raleigh finished lower than second on any ballot, with the difference potentially being determined by who gets more first-place votes.
The 2025 BBWAA awards will be revealed daily during the week of Nov. 10-13.
