Player of the Week: Not a Joke Award After All

In a team sport, everyone involved — players, media, fans — has their own outlook on individual awards. Personally, I think they mean a lot. Yes, the player’s ultimate goal is to serve the team, but when individual effort is only tenuously related to team success, I think it’s worthwhile to recognize outstanding individual performances when they come.

But even I struggle to get too worked up about MLB’s Player of the Week awards. I get the press release in my inbox every week, but I usually check the headline, mark it read, and forget about it forever. As far as I know, there’s no cash prize or physical trophy involved; winning Player of the Week is more like getting all A’s on your report card than winning an Olympic medal.

On Monday, I read a few lines about this week’s AL winner, Cal Raleigh. Raleigh went 7-for-18 in six games, which is a .389 batting average — a little low for a Player of the Week winner. Surely someone had hit over .400 last week, I thought.

Last year, a lot of people wanted Raleigh to win the AL MVP award; as it happened, he lost a close decision to Aaron Judge. In my view, Judge had clearly outperformed Raleigh by the empirical standards available to us, but Raleigh undoubtedly had the most memorable great season of 2025. He hit 60 home runs, leading an oft-forgotten also-ran to within a game of the first pennant in franchise history. In 20 years, I expect that if asked to name the 2025 AL MVP, many if most people will think Raleigh actually won it.

This year, however, no bueno. It got off to a rocky start for the Mariners backstop before the regular season even began. Raleigh went 0-for-9 with five strikeouts at the WBC, as Team USA drew an unflattering contrast between its own comportment and that of its rivals. Italy ran an espresso machine and exchanged smooches in the dugout; the Americans installed a culture I’d charitably describe as chud-curious, and almost got eliminated in pool play because their manager maybe kinda didn’t know the rules.

Raleigh stepped in it a couple times during that run, between the Randy Arozarena Handshake Incident and the Claymore mine t-shirt. Whatever Raleigh’s intentions, he ended up as the face of a flavor of insular arrogance that’s been uniquely American since, oh, at least Teddy Roosevelt. For most of the past 120 years, few would’ve cared, but people are on edge about that sort of thing these days for some reason. I don’t know why. Maybe I should check the news.

Anyway, even now, Raleigh is hitting .171 in 104 games, and he’s on pace for the lowest full-season home run total of his career. It’d take a massive hot streak in September for Raleigh to even get halfway to last year’s home run total.

I thought that the folks at MLB were throwing Raleigh a bone. He did hit five home runs last week, including a three-homer game, so he definitely deserves some recognition. But I was curious to see if Raleigh was getting a gentle push in the right narrative direction when he won Player of the Week.

No, it turns out. Raleigh’s five dingers put him over the top. He led all AL hitters in SLG, wOBA, and wRC+, by pretty comfortable margins. Take a week’s worth of WAR for what it’s worth, but he also led all AL players — including pitchers — in that, too. No narrative assist needed; Raleigh was clearly the best player in the AL last week. At the risk of oversaturating this post with TR references: Bully for him.

And Raleigh is the norm. I actually think I owe an apology to whoever gives out the Player of the Week awards; I expected them to be narrative-based and awarded on flimsy grounds. I expected quotas for stars, or for certain teams. But no. Here are the 23 American League Players of the Week to this point in the season.

In 11 of those 23 weeks, the Player of the Week in the AL was just that week’s leader in wRC+; in seven other weeks, the Player of the Week had the second-best wRC+. In 21 of 23 cases, the AL Player of the Week had either sole or joint possession of first or second place in WAR for the period in question.

I like to think of myself as pretty unsentimental and numbers-focused when it comes to awards; even for me, this level of adherence to the leaderboard is surprising. And it continues in the National League.

The Senior Circuit has longer surnames — Misiorowski, Crow-Armstrong, Alcantara, and so on — so I had to remove the position column in this table to get everything to fit. I trust you remember on your own where everyone plays.

The effect is so great you can tell the rare occasions where MLB got cute.

The first week of the season, Chase DeLauter won AL Player of the Week. He did have a great week, homering four times in his first weekend of regular-season action. But Mike Trout was better by both wRC+ and WAR. No worry; this was one of just two weeks in which AL Player of the Week went to a position player who was outside the top three in wRC+. In the other, Byron Buxton won over, you guessed it, DeLauter. It all evens out.

Well, it usually evens out. Ben Rice has won twice this year; the first award came the week of May 30, when he hit .462 and drove in 11 runs. But Jonathan Aranda hit .524 and out-homered Rice three-to-one.

There have been a few occasions where MLB’s choice wasn’t empirically defensible, but it was close enough to fudge: Ildemaro Vargas over Max Muncy the week of April 25 in the NL, or Logan Gilbert winning for two good-but-not-great starts the week of June 20.

The week of June 13, MLB awarded co-players of the week for the first (and so far only) time this season: Brewers teammates Jackson Chourio and Jacob Misiorowksi. Miz, who had been a deserving Player of the Week just two weeks before, threw his 15-strikeout shutout that week, and Chourio hit .448 with five home runs. Rather than just stacking more laurels on Miz’s forehead (which would probably require a scissor-lift, he’s so tall), MLB split the baby and rewarded multiple Brewers.

That week, the best player in the NL by both wRC+ and WAR was Matt Chapman, and he didn’t take the disappointment well. The following week, Chapman was dead last in the NL in wRC+.

The one real head-scratcher came in the NL, the week of April 18. The median wRC+ for a position player honoree is 307; Nico Hoerner won that week with a wRC+ of 153, which was 25th in the NL. But almost all of the outliers came early in the year. Since mid-May or so, the Player of the Week argument has gone by the numbers.

Even so, plenty of players will feel hard done by. Shea Langeliers, Cam Schlittler, and Jesús Luzardo are among those without Player of the Week hardware this season, despite out-WARing that week’s winner on multiple occasions. Reid Detmers either tied or beat the Player of the Week in WAR on three separate occasions, but he, too, has come up empty.

But if there’s a systemic issue here, it’s an anti-Tigers bias. Detroit has zero AL Player of the Week awards this year, even though four different Tigers — Riley Greene, Dillon Dingler, Kevin McGonigle, and Eduardo Valencia — have matched or beaten the weekly WAR or wRC+ leader at some point this season. Greene and Dingler have done it more than once.

In fact, Greene, has out wRC+’d not one but two players of the week: Bobby Witt Jr. on May 9 and Yordan Alvarez on July 4. And he’s got nothing to show for it.

At least, not so far. Greene is off the IL now, and has just a few more chances to get his name at the top of a press release. I hope it happens for him; he definitely deserves it.