With another two months until votes for the Most Valuable Players, Cy Young Award winners and Rookies of the Year are revealed, now seems the perfect time for a far wider-ranging set of honors for Major League Baseball’s 2025 season.

The third annual Passan Awards aim to celebrate the most enjoyable elements of a season and recognize that even those who aren’t the best of the best deserve acknowledgment. Certainly, the winners are talented, but the players favored to win the MVP awards for the second straight season, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, will not get this hardware. Instead, the first award honors a player for his anatomy.

Badonkadonk of the Year: Cal Raleigh

As if it could be anyone else.

Ball knowers understood who Raleigh was entering the 2025 season: the best catcher in MLB, a switch-hitting, Platinum Glove-winning, home-run-punishing hero with the most appropriate (and inappropriate) nickname in baseball — the Big Dumper, for his lower half putting the maximus in gluteus.

This, though? A superstar turn in which the Seattle Mariners‘ best player passes Hall of Famers such as Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr. in the record books? A seasonlong run in which he keeps pace with Aaron Judge, the best hitter in the world still at the peak of his powers, in the American League MVP race? A legitimate shot at becoming only the seventh player in MLB history to hit 60 or more home runs in a season?

Look hard enough and it makes sense. A season like Raleigh’s 2025 necessitates playing every day, which, at a position where 120 games is the norm, is almost impossible. Well, Raleigh has sat out three games this year. Amid all his responsibilities as a catcher, he has taken a right-handed swing that was the weaker of the two and honed it into a stroke as powerful as his left-handed wallop.

The confluence of it all in Raleigh’s age-28 season has thrust the Mariners to the precipice of their first AL West title since 2001 and put Raleigh on a pedestal alongside Judge. Raleigh’s case for MVP is strong. He has got the numbers to back up the narrative, which could be very compelling for voters: the game’s 2025 home run king, playing its most important position, carries the franchise with which he signed a long-term extension to the postseason while the star in the Bronx, already a two-time AL MVP winner, doesn’t do anything different from what he typically does.

Of course, just maintaining his status quo is actually a pretty good case for Judge, considering his OPS exceeds Raleigh’s by nearly 175 points. But that’s for MVP voters to decide. The case of the best badonkadonk is open and shut. From the city that gave the world Sir Mix-A-Lot comes version 2.0: bigger, better, dumpier.

None of this is new for Schwarber, the 32-year-old who has spent the past four seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies as the National League’s three-true-outcomes demigod. Schwarber is third in the NL in walks (behind Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani), second in strikeouts (behind James Wood), and tied with Ohtani for the lead with 53 home runs. Beyond the seasonlong compilation of gaudy numbers, though, are the moments that have appended “of the year” onto the slugger label he long ago earned.

When NL manager Dave Roberts needed hitters for the All-Star Game swing-off — a truncated Home Run Derby that would break the game’s 6-6 tie — of course he chose Schwarber, who whacked three home runs on three swings and secured the win. If anyone in the sport was poised to go on a single-game heater and pummel four home runs, he was near, if not at, the top of the list for that, too — and did so Aug. 28.

Schwarber is the archetypal slugger. He will have some rough at-bats, and his slumps will be uglier than most because of his propensity to strike out. But when he gets hot, there’s nothing like it: the compact stroke, the innate power, and the symbiosis between him and the electric crowds at Citizens Bank Park converge to create a monster of which pitchers want no part.

Even though the team doesn’t have ace Zack Wheeler and All-Star shortstop Trea Turner because of injuries, Schwarber stabilized the Phillies and kept them from sliding down the standings alongside the New York Mets. Schwarber’s impending free agency will grow into a heated bidding war because he is as beloved as he is good, and he’s very, very good.

In the meantime, because he is a designated hitter with a mediocre batting average, Schwarber will not receive the MVP love he deserves. So, consider this a way of honoring Schwarber: king of the sluggers, ready to light up another October.

Base Thief of the Year: Juan Soto

Of all the unbelievable things to happen in the 2025 season — the no-way-that-can-be-true, how-did-that-happen, you-got-to-be-kidding-me facts — this is unquestionably the wildest: Juan Soto leads MLB in stolen bases in the second half.

Seriously, Juan Soto. The $765 million man. In 58 games since the All-Star break, Soto has 24 stolen bases — four more than runner-up Jazz Chisholm Jr. This season, Soto has swiped 35, nearly triple his previous career high of a dozen set in 2019 and 2023. And it’s not as if Soto is leaving all kinds of outs on the basepaths; he has been caught just four times this season (though three of those are in September).

Soto hits home runs with regularity (42 this season, 19 in the second half). He has the best eye in the game. Stolen bases, though? The guy who ranks 503rd out of 571 qualified players in sprint speed? The one who takes more than 4½ seconds to go from home to first base?

It’s just further proof that ripping bags, in this era of larger bases and limited pickoff moves for pitchers, is no longer the sole domain of the speedy. With a little bit of know-how and gumption, anyone can become a base stealer. Josh Naylor, the Mariners’ burly first baseman, is fourth in MLB in the second half with 17 — one ahead of Tampa Bay rookie Chandler Simpson, one of the fastest runners in the big leagues. Miami rookie catcher Agustin Ramirez, who is also objectively slow, has stolen more bases since the All-Star break than Bobby Witt Jr., Jose Ramirez, Fernando Tatis Jr., Julio Rodriguez and Elly De La Cruz.

The new rules have led to remarkable seasons: Ronald Acuna Jr.’s 40/70 year in 2023 and Ohtani’s 50/50 campaign last year. As unprecedented as each was, they’d have been likelier bets than Soto threatening to become just the seventh player to go 40/40. That he’s at 30/30 already — alongside Chisholm, Jose Ramirez and Corbin Carroll — is remarkable enough.

Credit is due in plenty of places. To Mets baserunning coach Antoan Richardson, whose work with Soto encouraged him to study the craft of stealing a base and trust his instincts. To the Mets’ late-season ruin that made every base seem that much more important. Most of all, to Soto, who, after signing the richest contract in professional sports history, refused to pigeonhole himself as someone defined by patience and pop and actively sought his most well-rounded incarnation yet.

Best Player You Still Know Nothing About: Geraldo Perdomo

Who were the five best every-day players in baseball this year? There are three locks: Raleigh, Judge and Ohtani. After that, it’s a matter of preference. Want a masher? Schwarber or Soto would qualify. Prefer an all-around player? Witt is a good choice at No. 4; Jose Ramirez always warrants consideration; and, had he not gotten hurt, Turner would have been firmly in the mix.

Consider, however, the case of Perdomo, the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ 25-year-old shortstop. As easily as Perdomo’s bonanza 2025 can be summed up with wins above replacement — his 6.9 via FanGraphs ranks behind only the three locks and Witt, and Perdomo’s 6.8 via Baseball-Reference comes in third behind only Judge and Raleigh — his statistics get even more interesting upon a granular look. Here are Perdomo’s numbers, followed by their MLB rank out of 144 qualified hitters:

Batting average: .289 (13th)
On-base percentage: .391 (5th)
Slugging percentage: .462 (47th)
Runs: 96 (13th)
RBIs: 97 (14th)
Strikeout rate: 10.9% (8th)
Walk rate: 13.4% (14th)
Stolen bases: 26 (19th)
Games played: 155 (8th)

And that’s to say nothing of Perdomo playing the second-most-important position in baseball at a high level. He is not Witt defensively, but Perdomo is always on the field — his 1,363 innings is the most at shortstop in the majors this season — and, outside of the occasional throwing mishap, eminently reliable.

Take it all into account and it adds up to a legitimate case for Perdomo to join the game’s luminaries. He is neither the most well-known star on the Diamondbacks (Carroll) nor even in his own middle infield (Ketel Marte). And that’s fine. The numbers tell his story. And it’s one worth knowing.

Individual Performance of the Year: Nick Kurtz

Since the turn of the 20th century, a period that comprises around 4 million individual games played by position players, there have been:

• Nine games with a player scoring six runs

• 21 games with a player hitting four homers

• 81 games in which batters went 6-for-6

• 170 games with a player having at least eight RBIs

And only one game with all four.

That belongs to A’s rookie first baseman Kurtz, who, three months after his major league debut, turned in arguably the greatest game by a hitter. Facing the Houston Astros on July 25, Kurtz, 22, started with a single in the first inning, followed with a home run in the second, doubled off the top of the wall in left field two innings after that, and finished homer, homer, homer in his final three at-bats.

The home runs came off four pitchers: starter Ryan Gusto, relievers Nick Hernandez and Kaleb Ort, and utility man Cooper Hummel, whose 77.6 mph meatball went over the short porch in left field at Daikin Park. Five of Kurtz’s six hits that night went to the opposite field, a testament to his lethal bat that should win him unanimous American League Rookie of the Year honors and will land him on plenty of AL MVP ballots.

Kurtz finished the game with 19 total bases, tying a record that has long belonged to Shawn Green, whose line was almost identical to Kurtz’s: a single, a double and four home runs with six runs — but only seven RBIs. Yes, all four of Green’s homers came off big league pitchers, and he did it at Miller Park, a tougher place in 2002 to hit homers than Daikin in 2025.

When trying to adjudicate a winner, every factor counts. But for argument’s sake, let’s say Kurtz’s game was better than Green’s because of that additional RBI. Was it superior to Ohtani’s last September in which he went 6-for-6 with a single, 2 doubles, 3 home runs, 10 RBIs and a pair of stolen bases — and in that same game he became the first player with at least 50 homers and 50 steals in a season? It’s difficult to argue with the historical nature of Ohtani’s game. Context should matter, and to do something never conceived of before 2024 adds a delicious narrative flourish to Ohtani’s performance.

If Kurtz’s game isn’t the best, it’s certainly among the top five. And in the year of the four-homer game — there have been an MLB-high three this season, with Schwarber and Eugenio Suarez joining the party — none compared to Kurtz’s.

The average major league fastball ticked up another 0.2 mph this year, all the way to 94.4 mph, more than 3 mph harder than when the league began tracking pitch data in 2007. Pitch velocity is a marker not only for where the game is now but where it’s going. And where it has gone is featuring a starting pitcher with a slider nearly as fast as a league-average heater.

Misiorowski, the Milwaukee Brewers‘ rookie right-handed starter, is a walking outlier. At 6-foot-7, he is taller than all but 18 of the 868 players who have thrown a pitch this season, and at under 200 pounds, his slender body and its elasticity stretch the bounds of what a pitcher should look like. What they create is magic.

Though the 23-year-old’s triple-digit fastball generates the most oohs and ahhs, his slider induces the most gawking. Misiorowski’s slider averages 94.1 mph. He has thrown 85 of them at least 95 mph this season — a full 10-plus mph over the rest of the league’s average. He got Mookie Betts swinging on a 97.4 mph slider in August. It was the full-count version of the pitch he delivered at 95.5 mph against Willi Castro on June 20, though, that earned this award.

It wasn’t just the velocity or pitch shape that was most impressive. It was the swing Misiorowski induced. Castro just wanted to get on base. Hell, he just wanted to make contact. Instead, he got this:

HE BROKE HIS ANKLES@Jmisiorowski9 pic.twitter.com/bWG3UkzCae

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) June 21, 2025

That right there — the velocity, the late movement, the pitch shape — is an evolutionary slider. For all the pitchers who have made 90-plus mph sliders a regular thing, Misiorowski essentially said: “Thank you for walking so I could run.” Castro did not simply swing and miss. He got pretzeled. Misiorowski punctuated it with a celebratory twirl off the mound. The visual only amped up Miz Mania, which peaked when, barely 25 innings into his career, MLB named him an All-Star replacement.

Since then, the league has caught up to Misiorowski. The plan is for him to pitch out of the bullpen in the postseason, though injuries to the Brewers’ pitching staff — the best team in MLB this year — could change that. Whether he’s a starter or a reliever, Misiorowski can unleash the sort of pitch previously seen only in dreams — or, as Castro will attest, nightmares.

Put together two teams like the Pirates and Rockies and the possibilities are endless. Most of those possibilities, of course, are offensive — and not in the run-scoring sort of way. The baseball gods’ sense of humor reveals itself at the oddest times, though, and when the teams met at Coors Field the day after the trade deadline, they partook in the most madcap, rollicking affair of the 2025 season.

That day had already offered a Game of the Year candidate: Miami’s 13-12 victory over the New York Yankees, who blew a five-run lead in the seventh inning, recaptured it in the top of the ninth and got walked off in the bottom. The notion that the Pirates and Rockies would one-up that was unlikely, but then the beauty of baseball is as much in the unexpected as it is the known.

It started as any game at Coors can: with a nine-run top of the first inning, matching the run support the Pirates had given Paul Skenes in his previous nine starts combined. Pittsburgh, facing Antonio Senzatela, started single, single, single, single, grand slam, single, walk before Jared Triolo grounded into a double play. The Pirates followed single, walk, home run, single, single, then finally closed the frame when their 14th batter, Oneil Cruz, struck out.

The Rockies chipped away — a run in the first, three more in the third. The middle innings were chaos. Three for the Pirates in the top of the fourth, two for the Rockies in the bottom. Three more for the Pirates in the top of the fifth, four for the Rockies in the bottom. After a run in the sixth, Pittsburgh held a 16-10 lead and carried it into the eighth inning, when the Rockies scored a pair.

The bottom of the ninth beckoned. Pittsburgh had traded its closer, David Bednar, to the Yankees the previous day and called on Dennis Santana, who came into the game having allowed seven runs in 46⅓ innings. He struck out Ezequiel Tovar for the first out. Then, the madness of the day peaked. A Hunter Goodman home run. A Jordan Beck walk. A Warming Bernabel triple. A Thairo Estrada single. And, finally, a Brenton Doyle walk-off homer to left-center field.

Final: Rockies 17, Pirates 16.

In the modern era, only 20 games featured more runs than the Pirates and Rockies — the two lowest-scoring teams in 2025 — put up that day. Just two of those were decided by one run. Neither ended on a walk-off, let alone a walk-off homer.

Baseball is funny like that. Even two last-place teams that have combined for more than 200 losses this season can face off and emerge with something unforgettable.

The Chicken-and-Beer Award for Most Staggering Collapse: New York Mets

Note: This could wind up including the Detroit Tigers, whose lead over the Cleveland Guardians — 15½ games on July 8, 12½ on Aug. 25 — has almost evaporated. If Cleveland surpasses Detroit in the AL Central, consider the Tigers compatriots in ignominy with New York.

For now, the dishonor belongs alone to the Mets, who on June 12 won their sixth consecutive game to extend their major-league-best record to 45-24. Queens felt like the center of the baseball universe. Soto wasn’t even hitting up to his standard, yet the Mets were still bludgeoning opponents enough that they held the best expected winning percentage along with the top record.

Since then, the Mets have the same record as the White Sox: 35-52. Not only have they frittered away what was then a 5½-game advantage over Philadelphia atop the NL East, they’ve fallen out of the first, second and third wild cards, too. As of today, they are on the outside of the postseason looking in.

The Mets haven’t flamed out in one spectacular blaze. It has been a slow burn, a consistent degradation of quality, gradual and raw. It’s everywhere. An inconsistent lineup. A bad bullpen. A starting rotation that buoyed them over the first 69 games disappeared, through injury and ineffectiveness, to the point that New York is now relying on three rookie starters, all of whom the team preferred to keep in the minor leagues until next year.

Now, Nolan McLean, Jonah Tong and Brandon Sproat are fundamental parts of any salvage job the Mets hope to hatch. And that is the most damning indictment of all: a $340 million team, left to rely on a group of young players to rescue the franchise from its self-inflicted depths. Attempts in the middle of the season to turn things around, as they did in making an NLCS run last year, didn’t work. Adding reliever Ryan Helsley and outfielder Cedric Mullins at the trade deadline didn’t, either.

This collapse isn’t the 1964 Phillies or even the 2011 Red Sox, whose pitching staff habitually ate fried chicken and drank beer in the clubhouse during games, even as the team’s nine-game advantage in September evaporated. At least that was the equivalent of a Band-Aid being ripped off. This has been interminable, a stark reminder that for all the Mets have going for them — the richest owner in the game, plenty of talent, excellent resources — they’re still the Mets, professional purveyors of pain.

There were plenty of choices. Soto’s contract is an all-timer. Max Fried has been everything the Yankees needed. And there was no shortage of trade options, from the blockbusters (Kyle Tucker to the Cubs, Rafael Devers to the Giants) to the deadline stunners (Mason Miller to the Padres, Carlos Correa back to the Astros).

In terms of sheer impact, though, the Red Sox’s December acquisition of Crochet is unbeatable. And it’s among the most infrequent of trades, too: one in which both parties emerge elated. Without Crochet, 26, headlining the rotation, Boston isn’t sniffing a playoff spot. Not only did the Red Sox think enough of him to give up four players who had yet to make their major league debut, but during spring training, they kept Crochet from reaching free agency next winter with a six-year, $170 million contract extension even though the left-hander had never thrown 150 innings in a season.

Boston’s faith was well-founded. Crochet leads MLB in strikeouts and the AL in innings pitched. He has faced 788 batters this year, and they are hitting .220/.268/.360 against him. And with a 17-5 record and 2.69 ERA, he has positioned himself as the likely runner-up behind Tarik Skubal in AL Cy Young voting.

All was not lost for Chicago. The four players the White Sox got back in the deal are all doing well, too. Kyle Teel has been exceptional and looks like a future All-Star at catcher. Chase Meidroth gives the White Sox a high-on-base, low-strikeout threat at either middle-infield position. Wikelman Gonzalez is becoming a reliable big league bullpen option. And Braden Montgomery, a switch-hitting center fielder, is already up to Double-A.

Trades don’t work out more often than they do. (Just ask the Mets.) But on the day this deal was consummated, the industry response liked it for each side. The White Sox weren’t willing to commit to a Crochet extension and wanted to avoid injury or ineffectiveness cratering his value, and in Boston, they found a team desperate enough to offload an immense amount of talent. Year 1 of a deal that included a combined 30 years of club control is too early to name definitive winners and losers. So for now, it’s an easy call: the rare win-win.

The Tickle Me Elmo Award: Torpedo Bats

Remember the torpedo bat? It was going to revolutionize baseball. The first weekend of the season, with a lineup full of hitters using the bat that looked like nothing MLB had ever seen, the Yankees hit 15 home runs — against the Brewers, who since have been among the best teams in baseball at home run prevention.

The concept was simple: MLB allows the redistribution of wood weight as long as the bat stays within specified parameters, so why not take the mass that typically is toward the end of the barrel and create a new shape that better suits individual hitters? After the Yankees’ home run barrage, the torpedo bat became baseball’s version of Tickle Me Elmo, Furby and Cabbage Patch Kids: the must-have toy of the moment.

Well, the moment passed. Torpedoes certainly remain in circulation — Raleigh uses a different model from each side of the plate — and are not going anywhere. But the notion that half the league would switch bat models ignored the realities that (A) baseball players are creatures of habit and (B) the torpedo doesn’t suit the significant number of players who hit the ball more toward the end of the bat.

And that’s fine. Not every piece of technology is meant for every consumer. The takeaway from torpedo bats isn’t that they are a failure because they haven’t taken over the market, nor is it that they are a success because the best home run hitter of 2025 uses them. It’s that the game is full of curious people who aren’t afraid to build a new mousetrap. That’s how a game that has been around for 150 years evolves. And that’s a perfectly good thing.

Thing we’ll still be talking about in 50 years: The Colorado Rockies’ run differential

Maybe Raleigh hits 60. Or Judge continues his spate of all-time-elite seasons, giving this one greater context. Perhaps there’s a surprise World Series winner. It is baseball, which means trying to predict the next 50 minutes, let alone the next 50 years, is a fool’s errand.

But in the modern era, which comprises every season since 1900, never before has there been a team as good at giving up runs while being as bad at scoring them as the Rockies. There have been thousands of baseball teams in the game’s history. None has a worse run differential than Colorado’s minus-404 (and counting).

That is not just hard to do. It has been, to this point, impossible. Getting outscored by more than 2½ runs per game is the domain of teams in the 1800s. (The 1899 Cleveland Spiders yielded an astounding 723 runs more than they scored in 154 games.) And yet, here are the Rockies, whose ignominy won’t launch them past the White Sox for the most losses in a modern season but will place them atop record books with a minuscule likelihood of being supplanted.

The numbers are quite simple. Colorado has scored just 584 runs, fewer than any team except Pittsburgh, which has an offense that includes a single player (Spencer Horwitz) with an adjusted OPS above league average. Colorado has allowed 988, the most in the big leagues by more than 125 runs. And the heretofore mythical minus-404 differential, seen as an impossible wall to breach, has crumbled, felled by an organizational ineptitude that has grown uglier annually since 2019. Even the all-time-bad teams — the 1932 Red Sox (43-111, minus-345), the 2023 A’s (50-112, minus-339) and the 2003 Tigers (43-119, minus-337) — look at these Rockies and say: You are awful.

So, yeah. It’s not the kind of record worthy of celebrating or shouting from the mountaintops. It’s just one strong enough to stand the test of time, even if it takes another 100 years to break it.

CLEVELAND — It happened fast. And without a ball even leaving the infield. The Detroit Tigers took a 2-0 lead into the bottom of the sixth inning in a crucial game against the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday only to see their ace fall apart on the mound in several different and dramatic ways.

“We did a lot of uncharacteristic things, and it’s hurting us,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said after the Tigers’ 5-2 loss.

First, Tarik Skubal tried to flip a bunted ball through his legs with his back to first base, only to see it sail over teammate Spencer Torkelson‘s head, putting runners on second and third. It was the second of two consecutive bunts by the Guardians, who came into the night trailing the Tigers by just one game after being down as many as 10½ on Sept. 1.

After a third bunt in the inning went awry — Skubal’s 99 mph fastball struck designated hitter David Fry in the face, and Fry had to be carted off — Skubal threw a wild pitch and then balked. Both of those led to runs.

Game. Set. Match. The Tigers have been caught in the American League Central.

“There’s some frustration,” Skubal said. “Losing isn’t fun, and we’ve been losing a lot.”

Hinch added: “He chose to do the emergency flip [through his legs], which is not easy to do and didn’t produce a good play. That is an example of an uncharacteristic mistake piling up on us at the worst time.”

That’s an understatement. The AL’s best team in the first half has fallen hard, losing seven in a row. Not only did the Guardians catch Detroit in the standings, but they also secured the tiebreaker, in case the teams match records when the regular season ends later this weekend. Nothing is going right for the Tigers.

“We didn’t play our game tonight,” catcher Dillon Dingler said. “I know that’s redundant to say over the last two weeks.

“We’ve been this way for a couple series now. We definitely feel some of the pressure. We have to eliminate it. We have to find ways to stay loose and home in on what we have to do and go out there and do it.”

The Tigers played that part of being loose before the series opener: Skubal was working on his crossword puzzle, others were playing pingpong, while Hinch was advocating a positive perspective. Who wouldn’t want to be playing meaningful games and control their own destiny, he opined in the dugout several hours before first pitch. But then the game started, and a win once again slipped through their hands.

And if those sixth-inning miscues weren’t enough, the Tigers also struck out 19 times. That tied a franchise record for Cleveland pitchers.

“They won the strike zone on both sides tonight,” Hinch said. “They dominated tonight. We didn’t.”

The days are running dangerously low for Detroit to turn things around. Cleveland has all the momentum. Playing at home didn’t help the Tigers last week, nor did a change of scenery Tuesday with their ace on the mound. But they still control their destiny even though their future is as muddied as ever. A wild-card berth or perhaps a stunning ouster altogether from the postseason are growing possibilities.

“Have to show up tomorrow and win a baseball game,” outfielder Riley Greene said. “We believe in each other. We have to play better baseball and we have to win. That’s what it comes down to.”

CHICAGO — Right-hander Cade Horton was removed after three innings of his start in the Chicago Cubs‘ game against the New York Mets on Tuesday because of back tightness. The club said Horton was removed “as a precaution” after throwing just 29 pitches.

Horton, a leading NL Rookie of the Year candidate, allowed a leadoff homer to New York’s Francisco Lindor but settled down and looked sharp for the remainder of his short outing. Horton allowed two hits, struck out two and departed with the Cubs leading 5-1.

After the Cubs extended the advantage to 6-1, New York rallied against the Chicago bullpen, scoring five unearned runs against Michael Soroka to tie the game and later grabbing the lead in a matchup with playoff implications for both clubs.

Horton, 24, is 11-4 on the season with a 2.67 ERA over 118 innings. The win total leads all rookie pitchers and the ERA leads rookies who have logged at least 100 innings.