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:

1. Barry Bonds, 2001 Giants: 39 (73)

2. Mark McGwire, 1998 Cardinals: 37 (70)

3. Babe Ruth, 1921 Yankees: 35 (59)

4. Reggie Jackson, 1969 A’s: 34 (47)

5. Babe Ruth, 1928 Yankees: 33 (54)

6. 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:

1. Barry Bonds, 2004 Giants: 1.414

2. Babe Ruth, 1921 Yankees: 1.374

3. Barry Bonds, 2001 Giants: 1.357

4. Barry Bonds, 2002 Giants: 1.342

5. 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):

• Babe Ruth, 1921 Yankees: .372, 35 HRs

• Jimmie Foxx, 1932 A’s: .383, 33 HRs

• Babe Ruth, 1930 Yankees: .374, 32 HRs

• Mickey Mantle, 1956 Yankees: .371, 30 HRs

• Frank Thomas, 1994 White Sox: .373, 30 HRs

• Babe Ruth, 1927 Yankees: .366, 29 HRs

• Lou Gehrig, 1927 Yankees: .397, 28 HRs

• Tony Perez, 1970 Reds: .363, 28 HRs

• 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:

1. Salvador Perez, 2021 Royals: 48

2. Johnny Bench, 1970 Reds: 45

3. Javy Lopez, 2003 Braves: 43

4. Roy Campanella, 1953 Dodgers: 41

5. 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.