Can Yordan Alvarez Win the Triple Crown? Astros Slugger Is Running Away With the AL MVP
Yordan Alvarez is having the best offensive season in baseball, and he is close enough to a Triple Crown that we need to start taking it seriously.
The Houston Astros slugger is hitting north of .310 with 38 home runs and 95 RBIs. He leads the American League in all three categories. He also leads the majors in batting average and home runs and has been trading the RBI lead back and forth with a handful of National League bats all summer.
Nobody has won the outright MLB Triple Crown, leading the entire sport in all three, since Mickey Mantle in 1956. Only four players have ever done it since RBIs became official in 1920: Mantle, Ted Williams in 1942, Lou Gehrig in 1934 and Rogers Hornsby in 1925. That is the company Alvarez is keeping right now. The AL version, leading just his own league, was last done by Miguel Cabrera in 2012.
The rule works in his favor at the margins. If he finishes tied for the lead in a category, he still gets credit for it. He does not need to win all three outright, he needs to not lose any of them.
The batting average race is the one that could get him. Luis Arraez has spent his career making this look easy, with three batting titles from 2022 through 2024 and a career mark north of .310. He was traded from San Francisco to Philadelphia at the deadline and is now hitting in a lineup with Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber, which does not hurt. Arraez is the single biggest threat to the whole chase, and it is not close.
Home runs are crowded but manageable. Junior Caminero has been right on Alvarez’s heels all season, and the 23-year-old Ray has 78 homers across the last two years with a plate discipline profile that keeps improving. Schwarber, who hit 56 last season, is in the mix too. Alvarez needs to keep his foot down for three more weeks.
RBIs are the least in his control. That is always the case. Houston’s lineup is not the one that used to score at will, so Alvarez gets fewer chances than a hitter in a stacked order would. He has been jockeying with CJ Abrams and Sal Stewart, both of whom have benefited from opportunity as much as anything.
The MVP conversation is much simpler. Alvarez is running the highest OPS in baseball, over 1.000, and the Astros are leading the AL West. There is no serious counterargument in the American League this year.
Part of why there is no counterargument is Aaron Judge. Judge missed 84 games with a stress fracture in his right rib and was only activated off the injured list in early September. He had 17 homers and a .908 OPS in 59 games before the injury, which is an MVP pace, but 59 games does not win awards. The one voter block that could have complicated things for Alvarez spent four months in a New York training room.
Here is the thing about Triple Crowns. They are partly luck. Cabrera in 2012 needed Mike Trout to have a slow enough start on the counting stats. Alvarez needs Arraez to cool off in September and needs Caminero to not go on a heater. Neither of those is in his hands.
What is in his hands is the part he has already done. Elite contact, elite power, an on-base percentage that has hovered near .440 for most of the year. The best hitter in baseball in a season where the best hitter in baseball is also carrying a division winner. Even if the Triple Crown slips away in the last week, this is a season people will reference for a long time.
About 17 games left for Houston. Watch the batting average column.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
