If there’s one thing you can count on under Aaron Boone, it’s that his New York Yankees will rally to the ball when they’re faced with an AL Central opponent in the postseason. Is it any wonder that, when it came time to determine the American League MVP, those very same dominated AL Central teams bowed down before Aaron Judge?

Judge’s absurd 2025 season – AL-leading .331 batting average, 53 homers, a 215 OPS+ while playing through elbow issues to end the campaign – narrowly edged Cal Raleigh of the Seattle Mariners for MVP honors on Thursday night. It’s possible that, when random independent fans scattered across the country, think about 2025 wistfully someday, they’ll remember Raleigh’s arrival before “just another jaw-dropping Judge season”. That, ultimately, did not matter to the voters.

Especially those who watched AL Central teams all year, then headed to the ballot box.

Want to blame “East Coast Bias” for Judge’s win? You can’t; he split the East Coast first-place votes five apiece. The West Coast gave us the exact same breakdown. It was, in fact, America’s heartland that broke in Judge’s direction by a 7-3 margin.

Bummed that Cal Raleigh didn’t win AL MVP, but this wasn’t an East Coast bias thing. Of the 10 AL East voters, it was a 5-5 split between Raleigh and Judge. In AL West, also a 5-5 split. Difference came from AL Central voters (7-3 for Judge).

— Greg Johns (@GregJohnsMLB) November 14, 2025Aaron Judge’s MVP-winning votes came from AL Central MLB writers

That gave Judge the 355-to-335 margin he needed to capture the MVP race that captivated a nation all summer. Judge has now seen himself go from absurd, unrecognized story (2017) to megastar overcoming voter fatigue (2022 vs. Shohei Ohtani) to the one engendering voter fatigue himself this time around. We’ve now reached a point where Judge’s greatness cannot be effectively challenged. As long as he plays a full year and puts up representative numbers that match his freakish abilities, even 60 home runs from a full-time catcher won’t cut it.

Maybe if the writers who watched Raleigh regularly out there in the AL West felt differently, things would’ve flipped. An 8-2 split from his own division, and the Mariners backstop would’ve earned the hardware. Instead, it’s just another, “What if?” and another triumph in the AL Central during the Boone Era. Who knows? Maybe those writers will be “rewarded” for their “get out the vote” effort with a few more Yankees playoff series in Cleveland and Kansas City next October.