NL Cy Young rankings after Paul Skenes, Jacob Misiorowski and Shohei Ohtani trade gems

With a couple of big-name injuries affecting the AL Cy Young race, the NL Cy Young ladder has snuck in the backdoor under cover of darkness to become probably the coolest contest in this year’s MLB awards set. There’s a pretty clear top five but not exactly a runaway favorite just yet, and that makes it perfect for people like me to argue about. 

Among this five are three imagination-capturing pitchers in a new generation of flamethrowers, as well as two older-school offspeed destroyers — even your jaded cousin Harold who thinks the velocity revolution has destroyed baseball can enjoy this race! 

Some honorable mentions before we get started: Chase Burns has been excellent this season, as have Shota Imanaga, Nolan McLean and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but I think they’re a bit outside the top group. Mason Miller finally gave up a few runs in one single inning against the Chicago Cubs, which rocketed his ERA from 0.00 to a scandalous 0.92, but the conditions for a closer to win the Cy Young are so specific that I think it’s outside the realm of possibility … for now. 

5. Chris Sale, Atlanta Braves

FanDuel Cy Young Odds: +850

Sale continues his revenge tour after a quiet-ish 2025, looking to recapture the glory of his 2024 Cy Young Award while continuing to defy the age cliff for the Atlanta Braves. With his amazing offensive support, Sale is racking up wins like nobody’s business: He is 6-2 on the year with a 2.20 ERA. Not bad.

What I’m looking at with Sale this year is his four-seam fastball, which has turned from a pitch he literally didn’t have to his most used pitch in 2026. And its effect has skyrocketed: Sale was never a pitcher that would work you with his fastball, preferring heavy slider and changeup usage to actually retire batters. That appears to be yesterday’s news, as Sale continues to adapt his game and defy the gravity that tries to pull him down. 

4. Jacob Misiorowski, Milwaukee Brewers

FanDuel Cy Young Odds: +850

Our very own Peter Dwyer recently noted the importance of barrel rate and xwOBA in evaluating pitchers, stats that demonstrate what a pitcher is actually doing to hitters while correcting for defense and luck. The Miz is absolutely baller at both: His barrels per plate appearance is a fairly obscene 1.5 percent, barely trailing only Max Fried, while his xwOBA (expected weighted on-base average) against is sitting at 2.53 — trailing only our two leaders on this list and McLean. He has had a few injury dust-ups already this year, but nothing serious enough to worry about. Misiorowski is also just … kinda awesome? 

There’s something reasonably baller about a starter who goes seven innings and is pumping Aroldis Chapman heat on his final batter. I know voters shouldn’t necessarily consider how cool it is to see “103” on the speed gun for your tenth K when considering Cy Young honors, but I would. There are reasons I am not a voter.

3. Cristopher Sánchez, Philadelphia Phillies

FanDuel Cy Young Odds: +430

Sánchez offered a legitimate challenge to Paul Skenes for last year’s NL Cy Young, and he’s continuing to show that an anti-velocity arsenal can still be the best thing going. He gets tons of ground balls, makes hitters look stupid chasing his sinker and changeup all over the place, both of which bite hard and are arguably the most effective individual pitches in the sport. 

According to my chosen FanDuel odds, Sánchez is ahead of Shohei Ohtani in the race right now, though I don’t quite see why. Ohtani leads him in most standard and Statcast metrics, including both my beloved barrel rate and xwOBA by quite a bit. That number probably prices in the fact that Ohtani will end the season with fewer starts than Sánchez given that the Dodgers may limit his workload due to, ya know, needing to hit and all. But I think it’s pretty clear as things stand.

2. Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers

FanDuel Cy Young Odds: +600

Ohtani may lose out on the award purely because of workload restrictions, but he currently has a 0.82 ERA, having started seven games and given up only four earned runs. That’s only two more than Mason Miller, a god-mode closer I believe I referred to as “unhittable” back in April. Ohtani has been even less hittable, somehow.

The vibes surrounding this completely ridiculous pitching display from Shotime have been muted, probably because he’s having easily his worst season at the plate so far. You could argue that Ohtani is, in fact, a human being who may not be able to pitch at Cy Young levels and hit at MVP levels, but if he continues this onslaught, he is probably going to win both anyway.

1. Paul Skenes, Pittsburgh Pirates

FanDuel Cy Young Odds: +155

This is the guy standing in the way of Ohtani’s Cy Young/MVP dreams, and it is quite the stance. Up there in lowest barrel rate and leading all pitchers in xwOBA by a mile, Skenes has regressed from his rookie season 1.96 ERA to 1.97 last season and now is all the way up to a (gasp) 1.98 ERA this year — a concerning trend (this is a joke, all of those numbers are stupid good). To start a career with this kind of dominance is just ridiculous: None of the best pitchers of this century have a three-year stretch of sub-2.00 ERA — not Clayton Kershaw, not Max Scherzer, not Justin Verlander. 

Skenes is the pitcher’s pitcher. His stuff doesn’t break the hardest, nor does he throw the hardest (he does throw pretty hard, but still) nor does he have some superpowered ghost-wizard-fork-knife-and-spoon ball that nobody has ever seen before. But his game just works better than everyone else’s. He’s 23 years old, annihilates every batter he sees and we should all just relish the pre-Skenes trade conversation period we are (somehow) still in. Because once the frenzy starts, several bulls will be loosed in several china shops.

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