Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- Two National League pitchers are dominating early-season stats and reshaping the Cy Young race.
- Advanced metrics and strikeout rates highlight one contender's historic performance this year.
- The final decision hinges on sustainability questions that could define the award's outcome by November.
Coming into this season, if I told you that Shohei Ohtani would have a 0.82 ERA through his first nine starts, you would have bet your house on him winning the National League Cy Young Award. You would then have taken out a second and third mortgage on that house, and bet those on it too. But get this: Ohtani is not even in the conversation.
Okay, maybe he’s in “the conversation,” per se, but ERA is a simple and limited statistic; if the season ended today, he would have precisely zero chance of winning the NL Cy Young. And that's because of two guys: Jacob Misiorowski and Cristopher Sanchez. It is a disservice to their respective greatness to split hairs like this, but Misiorowski and Sanchez have been so good we have to figure out who has been better, and we’re going to do it in five simple stats — courtesy of my good friends over at FanGraphs. Well, mostly simple … okay, they won’t all be simple. But we will still have plenty of fun!
Opposing batting average
Advantage: Misiorowski (1-0 Misiorowski)
I like opposing batting average as a stat for judging pitchers. Even though it is simple, does not correct well for walks or certain fielding mistakes that aren’t “errors” and does not properly weigh strikeouts versus ground balls versus robbed home runs, I like it because it judges a very simple quality about a pitcher: can they prevent hits?
It’s a noisy statistic. For example, Kris Bubic is only allowing a .200 opposing BA — good stuff. Yet his ERA is over 4, due to more walks and louder contact. Yet for our guys Misiorowski and Sanchez, it works great. Sanchez is 49th in the Majors with a .239 opposing BA, while Misiorowski is 1st among qualified pitchers by a mile, sporting an unreal .149 opposing BA.
Opposing BA tends to favor pitchers with high strikeout numbers, but that’s not necessarily a limitation of the statistic; as we shall see in our next number, strikeouts are a valuable thing in baseball. It is much safer to sit a guy down without ever letting the ball get in play, something that Misiorowski does better than anyone. Not included on this list but worth mentioning: the Miz strikes out 39.6 percent of batters — that would be the second-highest number in the last decade, behind only 2019 Gerrit Cole.
SIERA
Advantage: Misiorowski (2-0 Misiorowski)
“Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average” is one of many stats we in the biz call “ERA estimators” since, as we learned with Ohtani in the intro, ERA alone is kind of a crappy statistic. SIERA attempts to move beyond FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, another estimator) by correcting for the high value of strikeouts and walks being bad-but-not-too-bad — just think of these numbers on an ERA scale (below 3.00 = really good). The tale of the tape: Sanchez has a 2.54 SIERA, the second-best mark since 2016, trailing only ... 2026 Jacob Misiorowski and his 2.09 SIERA.
That number tells you how ridiculous what Misiorowski has been doing is: there have been pitchers that approached a 2.54 SIERA — 2017 Chris Sale, 2021 Corbin Burnes to name a couple — but no one has ever come anywhere near that Misiorowski mark, owing to the completely absurd rate at which The Miz is striking out batters without walking too many. Our ERA estimators were not designed for a guy who could strike out 40 percent of batters and only walk seven percent of them. That’s just not allowed.
Scoreless innings streak
Advantage: Sanchez (2-1 Misiorowski)
This one is totally unfair to The Miz but we’re doing it anyway. Unlike our previous super-nerd stat, this stat is predictive of absolutely nothing other than being cool. Misiorowski in currently on an eight-inning scoreless run — not quite making the leaderboard. Sanchez, though, is nursing a 44.2-inning streak, also known as the 11th-longest streak of all time. If Sanchez pitches, say, six shutout innings in his next start on Wednesday, he will pass Bob Gibson and move into fifth all time. He still has work to do if he wants to get to Don Drysdale/Orel Hershiser territory in the upper 50s, but the fact that I’m even discussing this is ridiculous.
The is what we call a “Swag Stat”, in that it corrects for nothing and can be manipulated by a million things out of the pitchers' control. But it is simply so awesome to have a 40+-inning scoreless streak that Sanchez gets a point. Deal with it.
Ground ball/fly ball ratio
Advantage: Sanchez (2-2 tie)
Another overly simple stat that nonetheless tells us a lot about our respective pitchers. Sanchez leads MLB with a 2.20 ground balls per fly ball, while Misiorowski is 20th with 1.35. It’s still quite impressive that Misiorowski, who throws harder deeper into games than we’ve ever seen, can still produce so many ground balls. But Sanchez is just in a league of his own in this department, using his sinker and changeup to tie up right- and left-handed hitters with different approaches. He is remarkably effective at producing soft ground-ball outs, a valuable quality in today’s game.
Barrel rate
Advantage: Misiorowski (Misiorowski 3-2)
A “barrel” is a ball hit with an exit velocity and launch angle that produces a batting average over .500 and a slugging percentage over 1.500. Barrel rate is an incredibly predictive stat when it comes to pitcher success, since contact quality is generally more reliable than the actual outcome of batted-ball events )since, ya know, wind and defense and stuff). Simply put: there is nobody who avoids the most damaging contact like Jacob Misiorowski.
Sanchez allows a relatively pedestrian 5.6 barrels/plate appearance, while Misiorowski only gives up 1.5 barrels/PA. And if it weren’t for 2026 Max Fried (who’s in the AL, so who cares), that would be the best in the Majors since 2016.
Some of Misiorowski’s numbers are so good that they simply cannot and will not continue forever. Everything we know about pitcher mechanics suggests that it is not super safe for Misiorowski’s arm health to be pumping 103-mph gas deep into the seventh inning. Yet his command of these pitches is unheard of, and despite Sanchez’s absurd streak and superior traditional statistics, once we get down to brass tacks, Misiorowksi wins the NL Cy Young … if I were the only voter and voting happened today. Same difference.
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