Jacob Misiorowski has turned a fast start into a betting number. Two months into the MLB season, the rookie right-hander was backed at +340 for the NL Cy Young Award on the strength of his strikeout dominance, a 1.83 ERA and the kind of run prevention that keeps getting sharper the deeper he goes into his first full major-league season.
He is also the reason the race feels so compressed. Oddsmakers still have Cristopher Sanchez as the chalk at +145, but they also describe the field as a six-horse race, with Paul Skenes, Shohei Ohtani, Chris Sale and Chase Burns in the mix. Misiorowski is not just hanging around that group; he is pushing it with the sort of stuff that forces a recheck of the board.
The numbers behind him are hard to ignore. Misiorowski leads all of baseball with 100 strikeouts and owns a 14.06 K/9 rate across 64 innings. He has posted a 2.14 xERA and, in May alone, struck out 49 batters in 31⅓ innings while allowing no extra-base hits. He also lit up the radar gun in a way few starters can: 202 pitches at 100 mph or harder, and only 11 of those resulted in contact that reached first base. That is the kind of raw overpowering power that makes a short price on a Cy Young contender look attractive even when the season is still young.
Sean Treppedi, whose recommendation framed the wager, said to buy Misiorowski’s strikeout dominance “sooner than later” because of “the pure stuff that Misiorowski is dealing.” He added that “the three things that Cy Young voters value the most are strikeout dominance, workload, and run prevention,” which is exactly why the debate around Misiorowski has been so lively. He has already delivered the first and third pieces. The second is where the comparison gets uncomfortable.
Cristopher Sanchez still brings the larger body of work. He leads the NL with a 1.47 ERA, has logged 79⅓ innings and owns 3.3 WAR, helped by a May stretch in which he threw 39 straight scoreless innings through five starts. Misiorowski, by contrast, has pitched 15 ⅓ fewer innings than Sanchez. That gap matters because Cy Young voters have long preferred a full-season load, not just a dazzling peak, and Misiorowski is asking them to weigh dominance against volume.
That is what makes this race worth watching now. In the opening third of his first full season, Misiorowski has done enough to belong in the conversation with proven aces and bigger workloads, but the next step is the one that will define him: keeping the strikeouts coming while holding his run prevention together over far more innings. If he does that, +340 may look generous in hindsight. If he cannot, Sanchez’s heavier workload and steadier résumé will keep carrying the day.
