The 2025 MLB season is at its unofficial halfway point. While the game’s top talent embarks on their return journey from the all- star week festivities in Atlanta and the fans at home gear up for their team’s exciting stretch run, impending sell-off, and everything in between, let’s take stock of the year that has been so far. A quick breather from the 162-game schedule is as good a time as any to look ahead and check in on the big-picture stuff, like playoff races, the trade deadline, the results of the most recent draft…and awards favorites. We have a wonderful in-house metric here at Pitcher List called PLV, or pitch-level value, spearheaded by our very own Kyle Bland in 2022. As the name suggests, PLV aims to quantify and assign credit based on the characteristics of the pitch thrown. Who does it see as deserving of the game’s most prestigious honors as we sit idle during the all-star break? Take a look below (playing time requirements: 1000 pitches seen for hitters, 800 pitches seen for rookie hitters, 500 pitches thrown for relievers, 1200 pitches thrown for starters; pitch types PLV shown left-to-right in order from most-to-least used in pitcher’s arsenal)!
AL Reliever of the Year
Griffin Jax, RHP
You’d be hard-pressed to find any reliever unluckier than Jax this season, as PLV sees his 3.92 ERA as a huge red herring. He leads all pitchers in PLV this season, headlined by a gaudy 1.16 PLA on his sweeper, which has been his trustiest weapon (45% usage). In fact, Jax’s sweeper grades out as the second-best pitch in baseball behind only Carson Palmquist’s slider (1.12). A glance at any secondary results-based metric (xERA, FIP, xFIP, BABIP, K-BB%) suggests that Jax’s ERA is a product of poor luck more than anything else, and PLV wholeheartedly agrees. It wouldn’t be blasphemous to argue that awards should primarily be a results-based honor, but that’s just not the way PLV works. This school of thought would cut straight through the noise and bestow this award to the Twins’ setup man, who has long been an analytical darling and is reportedly getting trade calls with the Twins fading from the playoff picture. At this point, it’s not hard to imagine that at least a handful of teams would give Jax a shot at the closer role if they had him.
Runners-up (PLV): Aroldis Chapman (5.40), Reid Detmers (5.39)
NL Reliever of the Year
Tanner Scott, LHP
Another weird one here. It’s hard to say that Scott has made good on the Dodgers’ heavy investment in him this winter. His strikeout and groundball rates are at career-lows, his home run rates are at a career high, and he isn’t doing the best job at suppressing quality contact. He especially limped into the all-star break, blowing two saves in the first half’s final week to bring his season total to 7, which has already tied a career-high. On the other hand, PLV is not bothered by any of this and is adamant that he deserves better for the season he has had so far. Something rather strange has happened in Scott’s first year with L.A. that’s flying under the radar because he’s getting knocked around more: His control has drastically improved. He has had trouble with walks his entire career (11.8 BB%) until now, as his 4.6 BB% is easily the best he has had in a season so far. Of course, being in the zone more hasn’t paid dividends yet, but this is an instance where taking the premise of this piece at face value would be prematurely jumping to conclusions. No, Scott hasn’t been the best reliever in the NL this year. The takeaway should be that long-term, a marginal sacrifice of stuff for a drastic improvement in strike-throwing ability is a tradeoff that PLV sees as absolutely worth it for him. I’m very curious to see how the second half (and the rest of the fat contract) play out for him.
Runners-up (PLV): Trevor Megill (5.45), Alex Vesia (5.32)
AL Rookie of the Year
Jacob Wilson, SS
Wilson has almost single-handedly delayed the death of the true contact hitter since coming into the league. The former 6th overall pick has become exactly what the A’s envisioned, hitting .332 and striking out less than 8% of the time in the first half. Of course, he isn’t immune to the quirks that come with other extremely high-contact types: He doesn’t offer much in the way of power, and his discipline leaves something to be desired (5.5 BB%). Luckily, that doesn’t matter when you swing and miss at less than 5% of the pitches you see, and run a chase contact rate (84.3%) that is higher than many hitters’ zone contact rates (Wilson’s is 94.1%). With their first genuinely productive offseason in many years and a young core on the rise, I thought the Athletics had an outside shot at ruffling some feathers in the AL West in 2025. That has not happened, but the optimism surrounding their nucleus of position players is palpable, with Wilson, Nick Kurtz, Tyler Soderstrom, Lawrence Butler, and Brent Rooker making some noise down in not-Oakland.
Runners-up: Ryan Gusto (5.14 PLV), Cam Smith (110 Perf+)
NL Rookie of the Year
Ben Casparius, RHP
Casparius has been more valuable to the Dodgers than they probably hoped he would have to be thanks to their laundry list of pitching injuries, but he has stepped up as a bulk reliever who can make a spot start when needed. His 4.45 ERA is uninspiring, but like Jax earlier, FIP and the expected metrics think higher of him, and so does PLV. I do have some surface-level concerns about the fact that, despite an impeccable ability to limit free passes, he has middling strikeout rates and gives up too many balls in the air. However, PLV is sold, especially on the sweeper side of his fastball-sweeper combo that accounts for nearly 2/3 of every pitch he has thrown this season. At the same time, he throws all four of his pitches between 15% and 33% of the time, so there is an unpredictability aspect to him as well. I’ll concede that this race is likely to be shaken up once the likes of Jacob Misiorowski and possibly Chase Burns throw more innings, but until then, Casparius is PLV’s frontrunner in an abnormally shallow rookie class across both leagues. Sometimes your best pitchers are simply the healthiest ones, and Casparius has been living proof of that in 2025.
Runners-up: Drake Baldwin (113 Perf+), Isaac Collins (108 Perf+)
AL Cy Young
Jacob deGrom, RHP
The king hath returned. This was the closest call of all the major award races so far, with the difference in PLV between deGrom and his teammate Tyler Mahle coming down to the thousandth decimal place. However, deGrom has the leg up in both sample size and PLA. The 37-year-old has triumphantly come back from another Tommy John surgery, trimming a bit of velocity and dropping his arm angle to become a command extraordinaire. He’s living in the strike zone at the highest rate of his career since his most recent operation, leading a Rangers rotation that is keeping the team afloat amidst its offensive struggles. Mahle has relied on his defense to an extreme degree this year, to the point that every results-based metric other than ERA thinks a big regression is coming. PLV is sold on his ability to locate, but it’s a tad more impressed with deGrom, whose comeback season will be a resounding success at this rate regardless of whether another Cy Young award ends up on his mantle come the fall. By the way, for those of you about to read the runners-up list and wonder where a certain left-handed pitcher for the Tigers went: He’s 4th in PLV among AL starters this year.
Runners-up (PLV): Tyler Mahle (5.30), Ryan Pepiot (5.24)
NL Cy Young
Zack Wheeler, RHP
A rare case where the results and the process-based models are in complete agreement! It’s looking more and more like Wheeler is in pole position to take home the first Cy Young award of his illustrious career. Things are peaking at the right time for Wheeler, whose K-BB% is the highest it has ever been, and the Phillies too, as his dominance has coincided with Aaron Nola’s severe underperformance. The four-seam fastball Wheeler throws the lion’s share of the time is the NL’s best according to PLV, and the three pitches he throws most often are all above-average. The man who has been a certified workhorse ever since he became a Phillie is now a strikeout and command artist as well, and he’s giving his very best to a team that once again finds itself leading the NL East at the break. The stars appear to be aligning for the veteran who just crossed 1700 career innings in his last outing of the first half. This honor – and a World Series – are the only major boxes he has yet to check in his career so far.
Runners-up (PLV): Nick Pivetta (5.21), Paul Skenes (5.21)
AL MVP
Aaron Judge, RF
Come on now. Who were you expecting? Yes, Cal Raleigh is having possibly the greatest season we’ve ever seen from a catcher. Yes, Judge won MVP last year. This is just another reminder, though, that Judge’s numbers are simply too video-game-like to possibly snub him from another, and PLV agrees. The metric has Judge as the best power hitter in the game, with a process at the plate second only to Juan Soto. His eye for the strike zone is better than you might think for a guy who has chase and swing-and-miss to his game, as he’s nearly one standard deviation above the mean in that regard. I know that it’s easy to have this conversation about Raleigh and the Mariners, but try imagining the Yankees lineup without Judge. They might be half-decent top to bottom, but he gets such bang for his buck every time he steps to the plate that it’s fair to wonder whether they’d be a playoff team without him, struggles in high leverage aside. His OPS is nearly 100 points higher than it was in 2022, when he broke the single-season AL home run record. It’s not by a total landslide, but this is the AL MVP in 2025.
Runners-up: Cal Raleigh (127 Perf+), Jacob deGrom (5.30 PLV)
NL MVP
Will Smith, C
This is the part where I should remind everyone that PLV is an offense-and-pitching-only statistic, meaning defense and baserunning are out of the equation. Sorry, Cubs fans. As well, while Shohei Ohtani has become a two-way player once again (5.02 PLV there, for what it’s worth), his return there hasn’t been enough to offset the fact that PLV has the Dodgers’ backstop, not their dual threat, as the better hitter this year. Smith starting hot and fading down the stretch is a pattern we’ve seen before, but this is the hottest start that he has had, with a consummate approach at the plate that features above-average contact, power, and swing decisions. It should be noted that Smith’s Pitch Runs+ on the year is 90, meaning the quality of pitches he has seen this year is 10% worse than league-average. Performance+ accounts for this, though, and he still remains at the top of a star-studded NL heap. Staying close to this level of production is the name of the game moving forward for Smith, who probably won’t have the distinction of being the best catcher in the sport thanks to the efforts of Mr. Raleigh, but deserves a ton of credit nonetheless.
Runners-up: Ketel Marte (132 Perf+), Shohei Ohtani (130 Perf+, 5.02 PLV)
