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David Schoenfield
In a season when offense has often been hard to find — when 20 qualified pitchers have an ERA under 3.00 and 27 relievers with at least 20 innings have an ERA under 2.00 — New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge and Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh have produced history-crunching numbers that would stand out in any era, but especially in 2025.
Judge’s season isn’t unexpected. He hit 62 home runs in 2022 and 58 in 2024, when he became the first player to slug .700 since Barry Bonds, but he is putting up numbers that exceed the lofty totals of those seasons. He’s hitting .364/.464/.724 with 28 home runs and is on pace for 11.9 bWAR — a figure only five position players have achieved or surpassed. And he has done all this despite a six-game slump in mid-June when he went 2-for-22.
Raleigh’s season, on the other hand, is one of the most unexpected MVP-level campaigns in recent memory. The 28-year-old is hitting .275/.380/.651 and leads all of MLB with 69 RBIs and 32 home runs, just the 24th time a player has at least 30 homers through 81 team games. And though he has hit 30 home runs before — he’s just the fourth catcher with at least three 30-homer seasons — he’s already two from his career high … and we’re still in June. It, of course, feels impossible that he’ll continue his current 65-home run pace, but he’s in a position to finish with one of the greatest offensive seasons by a catcher. His 4.3 bWAR puts him on pace for 8.9, which would top Mike Piazza’s 8.7 in 1997 as the highest for a catcher.
With the Yankees and Mariners playing their 81st games Friday — the halfway point of the season — let’s dig into some of the greatest power seasons from past first halves to put into perspective what Judge and Raleigh are doing.
Note: All stats will be through 81 team games rather than the more traditional first-half totals listed on Baseball-Reference, which vary in terms of games played based on when the All-Star Game took place.
Greatest power half-seasons ever
Most home runs through 81 games
Here are the top six sluggers on the list — and the number of home runs they finished with:
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Barry Bonds, 2001 Giants: 39 (73)
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Mark McGwire, 1998 Cardinals: 37 (70)
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Babe Ruth, 1921 Yankees: 35 (59)
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Reggie Jackson, 1969 A’s: 34 (47)
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Babe Ruth, 1928 Yankees: 33 (54)
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Jimmie Foxx, 1932 A’s: 33 (58)
Ruth and Foxx played when the schedule was 154 games, so they didn’t have those eight extra games the others did. A 23-year-old Jackson, in just his second full season in the majors, was on pace to break Roger Maris’ then-record of 61, but he tired down the stretch, hitting just five home runs in August and two in September.
Raleigh is part of a group that includes five others with 32 home runs — Ruth (1930), Maris (1961), Ken Griffey Jr. (1994), Sammy Sosa (1998 and 1999) and Luis Gonzalez (2001). Ruth tailed off and finished with 49 home runs, and the strike interrupted Griffey’s season in August, leaving him with 40 home runs with 50 games to go (a 58-homer pace).
The last player with at least 30 home runs through 81 games: Shohei Ohtani … but in 2021, not 2024. That was the season he had that amazing stretch of 16 home runs in 21 games before the All-Star break, but he tailed off in the second half and finished with 46.
Can Raleigh avoid the fate so many others with high early home run totals have met? As you would expect, that group of players who hit at least 30 home runs in the first half tailed off, averaging 32 home runs in their first 81 games but 19 the rest of the way, for a season average of 51. But four of those 23 seasons came in the 154-game era, three others came in the strike-shortened 1994 season (Griffey, Frank Thomas and Matt Williams) and two came from players who suffered injuries that limited their playing time in the second half (Jose Canseco in 1999 and McGwire in 2000).
None of them were catchers, though.
Best power/average totals through 81 games
Let’s start by looking at a list of the highest OPS figures through 81 games:
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Barry Bonds, 2004 Giants: 1.414
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Babe Ruth, 1921 Yankees: 1.374
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Barry Bonds, 2001 Giants: 1.357
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Barry Bonds, 2002 Giants: 1.342
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Babe Ruth, 1930 Yankees: 1.338
OK, you get the idea. In terms of raw OPS, Ruth also owns three of the next five spots. He and Bonds dominate all these leaderboards, whether it’s over half a season or a full season. Judge ranks 25th with his 1.202 OPS.
However, Judge is doing this in a lower-scoring era — that’s why his adjusted stats such as wRC+ or OPS+ rank among the best ever. His wRC+ of 221 would rank seventh all time — behind three Bonds seasons, two Ruth seasons and one from Ted Williams, and just ahead of Judge’s 2024 season. His OPS+ of 226 ranks 10th, behind seasons from those same three players, who are widely considered the greatest hitters.
Still, Judge’s combination of power with a high batting average is unique for any era. He is one of just nine players hitting .360 or higher with at least 28 home runs through 81 team games (assuming he remains above .360 after the Yankees play on Friday night):
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Babe Ruth, 1921 Yankees: .372, 35 HRs
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Jimmie Foxx, 1932 A’s: .383, 33 HRs
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Babe Ruth, 1930 Yankees: .374, 32 HRs
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Mickey Mantle, 1956 Yankees: .371, 30 HRs
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Frank Thomas, 1994 White Sox: .373, 30 HRs
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Babe Ruth, 1927 Yankees: .366, 29 HRs
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Lou Gehrig, 1927 Yankees: .397, 28 HRs
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Tony Perez, 1970 Reds: .363, 28 HRs
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Aaron Judge, 2025 Yankees: .364, 28 HRs
These are some of the greatest hitting seasons of all time. Ruth set the record for total bases in 1921. Foxx hit .364 with 58 home runs and 169 RBIs in 1932. Mantle won the Triple Crown in 1956 when he hit .353 with 52 home runs and 130 RBIs. Yes, that’s Ruth and Gehrig from the same season when Ruth blasted 60 home runs and Gehrig hit 47, with Ruth’s total topping every other American League team … You get the gist.
Judge’s average is remarkable given the overall AL average is just .243. When Ruth and Gehrig tore apart the AL in 1927, for example, the league average was .286. The lowest average from this list was Mantle’s 1956 season, when the non-pitcher average was still .264. Looking at Judge’s season from this perspective makes his power/average combo one of the most impressive 81-game first halves we’ve seen, even aside from the era-adjusted analytics.
What it means for Judge and Raleigh
Is this the greatest season from a catcher we’ve seen?
Raleigh has hit 29 of his 32 home runs as a catcher (he has a 1.116 OPS while catching compared with .659 in 17 games as a DH). There are a couple of ways to look at the single-season home run record for catchers. The list for primary catchers — at least 50% of their games behind the plate — looks like this:
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Salvador Perez, 2021 Royals: 48
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Johnny Bench, 1970 Reds: 45
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Javy Lopez, 2003 Braves: 43
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Roy Campanella, 1953 Dodgers: 41
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Todd Hundley, 1996 Mets: 41
Bench added another 40-homer season in 1972 while Piazza had two 40-homer seasons. Perez hit just 33 as a catcher in 2021, with his other 15 coming as a DH. Lopez is the leader for home runs hit while playing the catcher position with 42.
Raleigh has been a low-average power hitter in his first three-plus seasons in the majors — he hit .220 with 34 home runs last year — but now he’s hitting for more power and a higher average. Sifting through his Statcast metrics, there aren’t obvious changes in his approach or swing patterns. Like Bryce Harper, he has always combined an above-average walk rate with a below-average chase rate, although he hasn’t been as extreme in his chase rate as Harper (although he has had higher strikeout rates than Harper).
There have been a few slight improvements across the board from 2024: His chase rate has improved 3 percentage points; his strikeout rate is down 3 percentage points; his fly ball rate is up about 4 percentage points; but his pulled fly ball rate, however, is up over 11 percentage points.
That last one is the big number. That has helped Raleigh to a few more wall scrapers. He is tied with Michael Busch and Paul Goldschmidt with 12 “doubters” — home runs that would be out of just one to seven parks based on distance.
But there’s another reason for Raleigh’s improvement: As a switch-hitter, he has always been much better from the left side, but this season, he’s mashing from the right side, hitting .319 with 11 home runs against left-handers after hitting .183 with 13 home runs against them last season. His “fast swing” percentage (swings of 75-plus mph) from the right side has gone way up, from 39.3% to 48.5%.
Raleigh is also not missing mistakes. Check his results on middle-middle pitches (ones thrown over the center of the plate, both horizontally and vertically) that he puts in play:
2024: .315 average, .795 slugging, 11 HR in 73 AB
2025: .515 average, 1.576 slugging, 11 HR in 33 AB
Can he keep it going? The big question might be how he’ll hold up in the long run. Raleigh has started 78 of Seattle’s first 80 games and pinch hit one other time (he hit a game-tying, two-run single in the ninth inning). He played 153 games last season and has the luxury of some DH games, but this is still a huge workload for a catcher. Last Saturday, he caught all nine innings of a three-hour game in 94-degree heat at Wrigley Field. He was in the lineup Sunday as the DH and back behind the plate the next two nights.
He’s obviously vital to the Mariners — although Seattle’s often maligned lineup is second in the majors in road OPS (but 25th at home). For now, with the Mariners fighting for a wild-card spot after being overtaken by the Houston Astros atop the AL West, manager Dan Wilson has to ride his hot hand; given the Mariners’ unexpected rotation issues, they need all the runs they can get.
Can Judge stay this dominant?
In one sense, we already know the answer to this: No. When Judge was hitting .432 on May 3, his BABIP was .512. Since then, it’s a still-lofty .383, but that is more in line with the .367 mark he had last season, when he finished with a .322 average. He has also avoided prolonged droughts; even when he homered just once in a 20-game stretch in April, he still hit .425. Indeed, it feels about time for Judge to launch into another of his patented home run tears. Yankees manager Aaron Boone, like Wilson with Raleigh, is riding the momentum of his star player: Judge hasn’t missed a game, although Boone has started him 18 times at DH.
As for the MVP race between these two AL sluggers, we’ll leave that for deeper into the season. Both players have a higher WAR figure on FanGraphs — where it looks like a tighter race: 6.1 for Judge, 5.6 for Raleigh — than Baseball-Reference. (FanGraphs incorporates catcher framing into its evaluation, a plus for Raleigh, who won the AL’s Platinum Glove last season as best overall defender.) It would be quite the debate: an all-time great season for a hitter against maybe the greatest power season from a catcher (and a good defensive one at that).
For now, sit back and enjoy the slugging.
Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum computing chip
Microsoft
It doesn’t quite have the buzz of artificial intelligence, but quantum computing is having a moment of its own.
Some of the most powerful institutions in the world, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and the U.S. government, are spending many millions of dollars in a race to develop and build the first practical quantum computer.
Startups focused on quantum technology attracted about $2 billion last year, according to a McKinsey & Co. report, as investors pile into an industry that could have nearly $100 billion in revenue within a decade.
There isn’t much business today, though. In total, quantum computing companies generated under $750 million in revenue in 2024, according to the same report.
But more and more, we’re hearing about a big breakthrough.
In the past year, Microsoft unveiled its first quantum chip, Google executives said the technology may only be five years away, Amazon showcased its error-correcting quantum processor and IBM outlined its plan to build a meaningful quantum computer by 2029.
Joining them are scores of smaller companies and universities working on the underlying mathematics, software or potential business model. Some of the companies are even publicly traded, and can see their stocks soar or collapse based on a kernel of news.
In January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sent quantum computing stocks reeling when he said 15 years was “on the early side” in considering how long it would be before quantum computing would be useful. He said at the time that 20 years was a time frame that “a whole bunch of us would believe.”
Two months later, he walked back the comments, but also expressed surprise that they moved markets, or that there were even markets to be moved.
“How could a quantum computer company be public?” Huang said in March.
Right now, there isn’t anything useful that quantum computers can do. They’re purely for research.
But the promise is clear. If the technology works, it can crunch certain kinds of numbers and do some tasks that are currently impossible on a traditional computer, or that would require so much time that the universe would end before they were completed.
To imagine a quantum computer, you have to fundamentally change how you consider what it means to compute.
A traditional computer works because there are billions of transistors on every chip. Those transistors can be ones or zeros — on or off. In large numbers, transistors can represent nearly every number, refer to parts of the system’s memory, and do arithmetic. That’s how every computer in the world works today.
In a quantum computer, the system uses qubits instead of transistors. It’s far more complicated than ones and zeros. Whether qubits are on or off is determined by quantum mechanics, and all of the qubits are “entangled,” which means a change in one will affect the probability of the others.
Making qubits work can require significant infrastructure. For example, some quantum computers have to be operated at very cold temperatures, near absolute zero.
So far, a lot of the applications for quantum have to do with simulating chemistry and physics.
“Quantum computers will not be the compute of choice for every application, and that’s OK,” said Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s vice president of advanced quantum development. “Even if we just use quantum computers for material science and chemistry, 96% of the world’s manufactured goods rely on chemistry and material science.”
Encryption
There’s one well-understood use for quantum computing today: encryption. That’s why the U.S. government and others around the world are closely tracking the technology’s development. It matters for national defense.
“The fear is that quantum computers will be able to crack our digital secrets,” said John Young, operating chief at the Americas division of Quantum eMotion, a quantum security company.
Currently, most passwords, WhatsApp texts, financial transactions and other important messages are encrypted, which means they’re scrambled and can’t be read if the data is stolen or observed. But quantum computers will be able to factor numbers quickly, which could allow hackers or other attackers to efficiently find the codes needed to decrypt important secrets.
Security researchers worry about what they call Q-Day, or the day when an effective quantum computer is created. They predict chaos when passwords and encryption start to mysteriously fail.
“Alongside its potential benefits, quantum computing also poses significant risks to the economic and national security of the United States,” the Biden White House said in 2022, in a national security memo. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer “could jeopardize civilian and military communications, undermine supervisory and control systems for critical infrastructure, and defeat security protocols for most Internet-based financial transactions,” the memo said.
There’s no practical application or algorithm that can be run on a quantum computer that can’t today be accomplished on a normal silicon-based, digital computer.
However, several groups say they’ve proven “quantum supremacy,” indicating that they’ve run a problem on a quantum computer that would’ve taken far longer with a traditional computer. The actions were all abstract.
Google was the first to declare quantum supremacy in 2019, describing its quantum computer’s accomplishment as a “benchmark.” The task it performed is called random circuit sampling, which is basically only used to test quantum computers.
Google says that researchers gave a computer random instructions to make a problem as complex under quantum mechanics as possible. Its researchers were then able to show that a quantum computer is faster at deciphering the quantum problem. Last year, Google said that its new, faster quantum computer Sycamore had expanded the performance gap.
In terms of future real-world applications, most of the potential for quantum computers is in the realms of medicine, chemistry and materials research.
Google points to drug discovery, or finding molecules that could be useful medicines. It also says that quantum computers will be able to do the science needed to commercialize fusion energy.
When Microsoft announced its first quantum chip in February, the company highlighted chemistry and materials science problems, like why some materials corrode, or how to compost plastic.
There is also some optimism that quantum computers will be well suited for generating training data for AI applications, especially for situations or problems with a huge number of potential solutions.
A general view of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 21, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
A Google researcher maintains a webpage that catalogs many of the most prominent quantum algorithms.
The most famous is Shor’s algorithm, which showed that a quantum computer would be able to find prime factors of a large number far faster than is currently possible on a digital computer.
When the algorithm was discovered in 1994, it ignited some concern from militaries around the world. Many of them use an encryption method called RSA, which needs the process of factoring large numbers to be difficult in order to keep data secret.
Worry about China
The fear is that a quantum computer would allow an adversary like China to quickly decode U.S. military messages or consumer banking transactions.
“Without effective mitigation, the impact of adversarial use of a quantum computer could be devastating to [national security systems] and our nation,” the Pentagon said in 2021.
Microsoft has acknowledged the national security factor, and has even framed quantum security as a race against China.
“While most believe that the United States still holds the lead position, we cannot afford to rule out the possibility of a strategic surprise or that China may already be at parity with the United States,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post in April.
The government has led an effort to move encryption to so-called post-quantum methods, which can’t be broken by a quantum computer. Companies such as Apple have already started to integrate post-quantum encryption into its services like iMessage.
But past communications can still contain secrets. Intelligence agencies and other hackers often collect encrypted data in the expectation that one day it can be decrypted.
For now, much of the work in quantum is still fairly academic.
Most of the advanced hardware companies today are working on “error correction,” or a variety of methods meant to reduce the number of errors, and make them less harmful when they happen.
In present-day quantum computers, the qubits fail as often as 1 out of 1,000 times they are used, according to Microsoft researchers. Microsoft said last week that it was able to reduce the error rate by 1,000-fold thanks to a new approach.
Several improvements in error correction have been announced over the past year, which is one reason why researchers and engineers are increasingly confident that they’ll be able to build a quantum computer.
The next issue to address is scaling up the computers.
Google’s new Willow chip has 105 qubits. Microsoft’s Majorana chip has eight. IBM’s Starling plans to have 200 qubits. Amazon’s Ocelot chip has 14 qubits. In the coming years, these numbers have to go way up. Google and Microsoft say a truly useful quantum computer will need 1 million qubits.
Politics
Welfare bill a humiliating blow for Starmer, and the fallout will be felt way beyond this week
First there was stonewalling, then the private complaints from MPs before a very public outburst that saw an eye-watering 127 MPs tell their prime minister they were going to defy him on a welfare vote.
Now, the inevitable climbdown has arrived, with Downing Street making a significant offer to rebels last night on their planned cuts to disability benefits.
A government with a massive 165-strong working majority had an awakening on Thursday to the importance of parliament as it embarked on a humiliating climbdown after the private warnings of MPs to Downing Street fell on deaf ears.
It’s worth taking a beat to reflect on the enormity of this moment. Less than a year ago, the prime minister was walking into Number 10 having won a landslide, with a Labour majority not seen since the Blair era.
That he has been forced to retreat by angry foot soldiers so early in this premiership, despite having such a big majority, is simply unprecedented. No government has lost a vote at second reading – this basically the general principles of a bill – since 1986 (Thatcher’s shops bill) and that was the only occasion a government with a working majority lost a bill at the second reading in the entire 20th century.
It is obviously a humiliating blow to the authority of the prime minister from a parliamentary party that has felt ignored by Downing Street. And while Number 10 has finally moved – and quickly – to try to shut down the rebellion, the fallout is going to be felt long beyond this week.
Before we get into the problems for Starmer, I would like to acknowledge the predicament he’s in.
Over the past 10 days, I have followed him to the G7 in Canada, where the Iran-Israel crisis, US-UK trade deal and Ukraine war were on the agenda, to Chequers at the weekend as he tried to deal with the US attack on Iran and all the risk it carried, and to the NATO summit this week in the Netherlands.
He could be forgiven for being furious with his operation for failing to contain the crisis when all his attention was on grave international matters.
He landed back in Westminster from the NATO summit on Wednesday night into a domestic battle that he really didn’t need but moved quickly to contain, signing off a plan that had been worked up this week in Downing Street to try to see off this rebellion.
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What will the changes be?
The government has offered significant concessions to Labour rebels.
People who currently receive the personal independence payment (PIP) will continue to do so, as will recipients of the health element of universal credit.
Planned cuts will only hit future claimants.
The change in PIP payments will protect 370,000 existing recipients who were expected to lose out following reassessment.
One senior parliamentary source told me on Thursday night they thought it was a “good package” with “generous concessions”, but said it was up to individual MPs to decide whether to withdraw their names from the amendment that would have torpedoed the welfare bill.
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Govt makes offer to rebels on welfare reforms
In the coming days, Number 10 will have to make the case to backbenchers and whittle down the rebellion in order to get the welfare bill passed on Tuesday. But it’s clear Number 10 has given MPs a ladder to climb down.
But the bigger question is, where does it leave the government and its party?
There is quiet fury from many MPs I have spoken to, angry at the Number 10 operation and critical of what they see as a “boy’s club”.
There has been criticism levelled at the PM’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, with MPs in seats facing challenge from the left rather than the right frustrated that the whole Number 10 strategy seems to be seeing off Reform, rather than look to the broader Labour base and threats from the Lib Dems or the Greens.
There is also much ire reserved for Rachel Reeves – interestingly Liz Kendall is escaping the criticism despite being the architect of the reforms – with MPs, already angry over winter fuel debacle, now in open revolt over the chancellor’s decision to force through these cuts ahead of the Spring Statement in March in order to help fill her fiscal black hole.
MPs felt talked down to
One Labour figure told me on Thursday the growing drumbeat in the party is that Reeves must go.
Another MP told me colleagues hated the cabinet ring around to try to persuade them to back down over welfare, saying more MPs ended up adding their names to the list because they felt talked down to.
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All of this needs work if the PM has any hope of rebuilding trust between his party and his operation.
There is also the problem of what flows from the concessions.
The chancellor will have to fund these concessions, and that could mean hard choices elsewhere. Will this mean that the government ends up doing less on reforming the two-child cap, or will it have to find welfare cuts elsewhere?
That flows into the third problem. In seeing off this rebellion, Number 10 has contained MPs rather than converting them.
What the parliamentary party has seen is a government that, when pressed, be it on winter fuel or benefit cuts, will fold.
That will only serve to embolden MPs to fight again. In the immediate term, the government will hope it has seen off a potentially catastrophic defeat.
But seeing off the growing malaise around the Starmer administration just got a bit harder after this.
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