Shohei Ohtani has moved to the front of the National League MVP race, and Chris Sale is now the leading name for the NL Cy Young Award in a weekly power-rankings look at every team’s award candidates. The early shape of the season is starting to settle, and the stars at the center of that picture are already separating themselves.
That is why the Cubs game today search keeps pulling baseball readers back to the broader league conversation: two months into the season, the awards race is no longer a guess. Ohtani is being treated as the favorite to win a fifth MVP award and a fourth straight, and the numbers explain why. He has a 0.82 ERA, and hitters have a.447 OPS against him, the kind of two-way dominance that keeps him in the center of every conversation about the best player in the league.
Sale is making a different kind of case. He is the top NL Cy Young candidate with an 8-3 record and a 2.01 ERA, even after allowing eight runs in May. Those figures are strong enough on their own, but they also show how crowded the field has become. Cristopher Sánchez, Jacob Misiorowski and Chase Burns are all described as sensational NL pitchers, and that matters because it changes the shape of Ohtani’s race. If he keeps hitting and pitching like this, he may have a better shot at MVP than Cy Young, simply because the league’s best pitchers have made the mound race so deep.
The American League side has its own early separator in Cam Schlittler, the top AL Cy Young candidate. Schlittler has allowed six earned runs over his last eight starts, a stretch that covered more than 50 innings, and his ERA and FIP are both below 2.00. Only Dylan Cease is striking out hitters at a higher rate in the AL, which gives Schlittler a statistical edge that is hard to ignore this early.
Jacob Misiorowski adds another layer to the picture. Among qualified starting pitchers in either league, he has the most strikeouts, the lowest WHIP and the lowest opponents’ batting average. Among qualified NL starters, he is second in ERA to Sánchez. That kind of production is why the weekly ranking now feels less like a snapshot and more like the beginning of a real race.
The rest of the season will decide whether these early leaders stay on top, but the first clear read is already in place: Ohtani is the most dangerous player in the NL, Sale is the present Cy Young benchmark there, and the strongest challenge to Ohtani may come not from another hitter, but from the cluster of pitchers chasing him for the league’s top awards.
