Jeff Passan's 2023 MLB season awards - ESPN

Less than two weeks remain in Major League Baseball's 2023 season, and it has objectively been a great year. Surprising teams. Unexpected collapses. Incredible individual performances. And arguments aplenty over deserving award winners.

As wonderful as the MVP and Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards are, there seemed to be plenty of room for a complementary set. Some, like the Shohei Ohtani Award for Best Player, didn't work, because Shohei Ohtani getting the Shohei Ohtani Award would be weird. But plenty of others stuck, and thus we are proud to present the First Annual Passan Awards. They'll serve as your guide through the 2023 season and cover all the important stories to catch you up before the postseason starts Oct. 3.

And they begin with a twist on the quarrel that has dominated baseball rhetoric for the past month.

Acuña or Mookie. Mookie or Acuña. The National League MVP race has taken a Braves-Dodgers rivalry that's already heated and doused it in lighter fluid. So rather than get burned trying to adjudicate whether Atlanta's Ronald Acuña Jr. or Los Angeles' Mookie Betts deserves the award, let's try something different.

Who's having a better season: Acuña and Matt Olson or Betts and Freddie Freeman?

It's a fantastic question because as difficult as it is to differentiate between Acuña and Betts, doing so between the duos might be even harder. The tale of the tape is quite simple: The four best players in the NL this season play for two teams. In fact, the Batman of each plays right field, and his Robin is a left-handed-hitting first baseman. It's almost impossible to find two better duos to compare to one another.

Just look at weighted on-base average, the metric widely seen as most representative of