A Most Valuable Player award race for the ages is dominating the final week of Major League Baseball’s 2025 regular season, but there isn’t any immediate money in it for either of the two main competitors.

Yankees superstar Aaron Judge and Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh each provided dramatic touches Wednesday night to their American League MVP candidacies as the high-profile race escalates. Judge hit two home runs and became just the fourth player in MLB history with four 50-homer seasons. Raleigh, one of MLB’s foremost breakout players this season, hit two more of his own to reach 60 on the season, becoming the seventh player in league history to do so. He now trails the AL single-season record set by Judge three years ago by just two.

Both those individual performances on Tuesday also helped solidify their team’s playoff positions. The Mariners clinched their first AL West division title since 2001, while the Yankees tied the Blue Jays for the AL East lead after spending 83 days trailing Toronto. 

Betting odds in many sportsbooks slightly favor Raleigh for AL MVP, as he has already set records for the most home runs in a season by a catcher and by a switch-hitter, is chasing additional history, and he plays a more premium defensive position. Judge, however, easily bests Raleigh in many other measures, including batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and wins above replacement (WAR) as he looks to add a third win to join MVP awards in 2022 and last year. Judge also has more intentional walks than any other team as a whole, showing the degree to which opponents fear him. 

Prestige, Not Payouts

As a result, this year’s race could be the closest since the 2017 National League MVP race in which Giancarlo Stanton, then with the Marlins, beat the Reds’ Joey Votto by two voting points. 

Regardless of who wins, there will not be a financial windfall coming with the award. Judge’s nine-year, $360 million deal signed in late 2022 does not include a separate bonus for winning MVP. 

The contract situation for Raleigh, who also claimed a $1 million bonus in July for winning the Home Run Derby, is much more nuanced. He signed a six-year, $105 million extension with Seattle earlier this year, and that deal calls for a seventh-season player option for 2031 at $20 million with a $2 million buyout. That option escalates by $3 million and the buyout by $1.5 million if he finishes twice in the same season as a Gold Glove finalist and in the top 10 in MVP voting—something certainly achievable given Raleigh’s defensive prowess beyond his hitting. If he does that a third time, the option escalates by another $2 million and the buyout by another $1.5 million.

Indirectly, though, an MVP win could fuel further endorsement activity for either player. 

October Glory in Sight

MLB’s final week of the regular season, meanwhile, continues to have high levels of drama as the full playoff field draws closer to being set. 

The NL has one last available playoff spot, with the Mets, Reds, and Diamondbacks competing for the final wild-card position, and each lost on Wednesday. 

The AL, meanwhile, has the Guardians, Tigers, Red Sox, and Astros vying for three still-unclaimed spots. Cleveland has pulled ahead of Detroit in the AL Central after previously trailing by 15 and a half games, and if it holds, it would represent MLB’s largest comeback since the beginning of divisional play in 1969.

A new College Football Playoff format appears no closer to arriving, as Football Bowl Subdivision conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director met Wednesday outside Chicago and emerged without any further consensus on the tournament’s future. 

As the Power 4 in particular remains at odds on how to allocate automatic bids in an enlarged format, CFP executive director Rich Clark said the event’s management committee is “comfortable” with staying at 12 teams for not only this year but 2026 as well.

“My sense in the room is the room is comfortable with that, if that’s where we go, and why they’re probably not too pressed with rushing into a decision,” Clark said. “If they can find time to have a discussion, and make a decision, they want to have that opportunity.”

CFP executives have a contractual requirement to let ESPN know by Dec. 1 if they want to expand the 2026 tournament beyond 12 teams. Getting widespread agreement on anything in the next two months, however, is likely not going to happen, as conference leaders continue to talk about a wide variety of potential formats, some as large as 28 teams. 

In the meantime, Clark said discussion on the next CFP structure will likely continue in “smaller group sessions,” and a working group focused on the issue will be formed involving athletic directors from each of the Power 4 conferences. 

“After that, they will bring [their work] back to the bigger group,” Clark said. 

The current, 12-team CFP format, which began last year, involves automatic qualifiers for the five highest-ranked conference champions and seven at-large bids. Ongoing conference realignment and an additional concentration of power within the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, and SEC have significantly altered viewpoints on what the CFP’s future should be. 

Major League Soccer’s NYCFC is drawing much closer to ending the itinerant nature that has dominated its entire existence, but the development of its new stadium is also coming with a bit of shade toward a regional rival. 

The club held a hard-hat tour on Wednesday of its forthcoming Etihad Park in Queens, N.Y., providing media a first look at the construction for the forthcoming $780 million venue, to be located next to Citi Field, home of MLB’s Mets. The privately financed 25,000-seat venue, solidified in April 2024 and set to open in 2027, will at last give the club a true home of its own after playing its first 14 seasons at Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and Sports Illustrated Stadium—and not being the primary tenant in any of them.

“We were resolute in our mission, right from when we first came here in 2013. We were going to be in New York City, for the city, the five boroughs,” NYCFC CEO Brad Sims tells Front Office Sports, shortly before the playoff-bound club was dominated Wednesday night by Inter Miami CF at Citi Field in a 4–0 rout that included two goals and an assist by superstar Lionel Messi. 

“That definitely made it harder, but here we are now, standing in the skeleton of a stadium that will be a cathedral of soccer. … Everybody knows there’s light at the end of the tunnel now,” Sims says.

Drawing in part from other recently opened MLS venues such as Energizer Park in St. Louis and Geodis Park in Nashville, as well as several venues in Europe, Etihad Park will lean heavily in to established soccer culture. That includes a dedicated supporters’ section and a focus on fan proximity to the field, but there will also be some technology nods to next-generation venues such as the Sphere in Las Vegas, which has hosted several sports-related events, in part through immersive LED screens.

There is also a significant local element to Etihad Park, as the venue will be part of a larger mixed-use development in the Willets Point area.

“One of the key design pieces is that we want to be authentically New York and integrate into this new neighborhood that’s being built. We didn’t want a spaceship that just looks like it just landed right in the middle of the neighborhood,” Sims says. 

Was that a dig at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, N.J., the more futuristic-looking home of the New York Red Bulls, a key NYCFC rival?

“You can draw your own conclusions,” he says. 

Betting on the Future

NYCFC, meanwhile, does not have a direct role in the ongoing proposal by Mets owner Steve Cohen and his partners, including Hard Rock International, to develop Metropolitan Park, an $8 billion casino and entertainment complex next to Citi Field. The soccer club, however, will directly benefit from the year-round destination that is contemplated in that project. Cohen is seeking a coveted gaming license to make that a reality, and a decision is expected in December.

“We’re in favor of anything that the residents of Queens, and especially this immediate area, are in favor of, and anything that’s going to make this area better,” Sims says. “There’s a great discourse going on with the community and the community leaders, and the Mets have done a great job listening to the feedback and working that into their proposal.”