The first Cy Young poll of 2026 MLB season dropped this week, and the result was exactly what you expected: Tarik Skubal at the top of the American League and Paul Skenes leading the National League. Two defending champions, two familiar names, zero surprises. Voters looked at the resumes, nodded along, and handed out the same ballots they've been filling out for two years.
There's one problem: It is May 1. We're 35 games into a 162-game season, and when you stop looking at names and start looking at statistics, the race in both leagues is more complicated than that poll suggests.
Several pitchers are building cases right now that the early voting completely ignores. Some of them are established aces pitching the best baseball of their careers. One of them nobody is writing about yet. All of them have the numbers to prove the conventional wisdom is already behind.
The data driving the real Cy Young race
Pitcher | Team | Barrel % | K% | BB% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Max Fried | Yankees | 2.4% | 20.9% | 6.8% |
Tarik Skubal | Tigers | 5.2% | 26.8% | 4.2% |
Jose Soriano | Angels | 9.2% | 30.1% | 9.8% |
Nolan McLean | Mets | 6.3% | 33.3% | 7.4% |
Cam Schlittler | Yankees | 6.9% | 31.4% | 3.8% |
Cristopher Sanchez | Phillies | 11.0% | 28.1% | 6.5% |
This is not a hot take column. Every claim is anchored to 2026 contact quality data: expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) allowed, barrel rate, hard-hit percentage and swing-and-miss rate. These metrics strip out luck and tell you what a pitcher is actually doing to hitters, not just what the box score says happened — because the box score is wrong more often than people think.
Before the player breakdown, I want to highlight one metric in particular: Barrel rate. A barrel is a batted ball hit with the combination of exit velocity and launch angle that produces a batting average above .500 and a slugging percentage above 1.500.
Max Fried is making those contacts almost impossible, allowing barrels on just 2.4 percent of batted balls this season. That is the second-lowest barrel rate in the entire qualified starter pool, behind only Dylan Cease (1.4 percent, but with a 12.3 percent walk rate that makes him a separate conversation). Fried is not just pitching well, he is physically preventing damage at an elite level that most of the Cy Young conversation has not caught up to yet.
Without further ado, the pitchers building the strongest Cy Young cases:
Max Fried, New York Yankees
The AL frontrunner voters missed
Nobody expected Fried to be in a Cy Young conversation when he signed his eight-year, $218 million deal with New York last winter. The contract got scrutinized. The pressure of pitching in the Bronx with a rotation full of question marks got dissected. What did not get enough attention was that Max Fried has quietly been the best pitcher in the American League since the season started.
Through seven starts, Fried is posting a 2.09 ERA with a .239 xwOBA allowed, a 2.4 percent barrel rate, and a 30.2 percent hard-hit rate. That hard-hit figure is the lowest of any qualified starter in baseball. Hitters are not squaring him up. They are rolling over sinkers, fouling off cutters and missing changeups, and when they do make contact, it is weak. His .202 BABIP tells you part of the story — he is getting some luck on balls in play — but the barrel rate tells you the rest. The luck is real because the contact is genuinely soft.
Fried is also leading the American League in quality starts, which matters for voters who still care about wins and traditional counting stats. He has logged six quality starts in seven outings. The Yankees are scoring 30 runs in his seven starts, giving him one of the better run-support numbers in the AL. The record and ERA are going to look the part by June. The underlying numbers already do.
The poll put Skubal first. The Statcast leaderboard puts Fried there. Those two things are going to collide by the All-Star break.
Tarik Skubal, Detroit Tigers
The favorite, but not the leader
To be clear: Skubal is having a very good season for the Tigers. His xwOBA allowed is .278, his 4.2 percent walk rate ranks among the lowest in baseball for any starter, and his command of four pitches remains as elite as it has been for two years. The defending AL Cy Young winner is not struggling. He is simply not, at this moment, pitching better than Max Fried.
His 39.2 percent hard-hit rate is the area of the profile that raises a flag. That number sits in the middle of the qualified starter pool, not near the top. Skubal's ERA looks clean right now because he is limiting walks and keeping the ball in the park, but hitters are making better contact against him in 2026 than his reputation suggests. His .302 BABIP is running slightly warm, which means some of those hard hits are finding gloves they might not find later.
None of this is a reason to count Skubal out. He has won this award twice for a reason, and if the contact numbers normalize and the strikeout rate holds, he will be right in it all season. The poll is not wrong that he belongs in the conversation. It is wrong to put him there unopposed. Keep an eye on him in May. If the hard-hit rate drops toward the low 30s, he is the favorite again.
José Soriano, Los Angeles Angels
The breakout contender with one flaw
If you saw José Soriano's 2026 breakout coming, you were not watching the same pitcher who posted a 4.26 ERA last year. Something changed this winter, and whatever it was, it shows up in every meaningful number on the board.
Through seven starts, Soriano has a 30.1 percent strikeout rate, a 57.8 percent out-of-zone swing-and-miss rate, and an xwOBA allowed of .281. His 97.8 mph average fastball and a slider that hitters are chasing out of the zone at a staggering rate have turned him into one of the most difficult pitchers in baseball to barrel. His BABIP is .223, which means he is getting some good fortune on balls in play, but an xwOBA of .281 backed by 57.8 percent out-of-zone whiff rate is not a BABIP story. The swing-and-miss is real.
The one issue is the 9.8 percent walk rate. That is too high for a Cy Young winner. Most award-winning seasons come in at 7 percent or below, and several of the best in history were under 5%. Soriano is pitching around trouble more than he should. If those walks turn into rallies in June and July, the ERA will climb and the conversation will move on. But if he tightens the command and keeps the strikeout rate where it is, he is going to be on the October ballot.
It is also worth noting that the Angels are almost certainly a trade deadline seller, and Soriano's name is already appearing in trade destination speculation. A mid-season trade to a contender could either boost his case with better run support or reset the conversation entirely. Watch this one closely.
Nolan McLean, New York Mets
The NL ace hiding in plain sight
The NL poll gave Skenes the top spot, which is defensible. What is not defensible is how little the early Cy Young conversation has engaged with Nolan McLean, who through six starts is posting the third-best xwOBA allowed in the entire qualified starter pool at .242.
McLean's profile is unusual. His 33.3 percent strikeout rate leads the NL among pitchers with six or more starts, and his 53.9 percent out-of-zone swing-and-miss rate tells you how he is getting those strikeouts: Hitters are swinging at bad pitches they cannot hit. His 31.6 percent hard-hit rate is also among the best in the NL, meaning when contact does happen, it is not dangerous. At 24 years old, pitching in his first full MLB season, he is checking every box a Cy Young campaign requires.
The concern is the same one projection systems flagged in the spring: his workload. McLean has never thrown 180 innings in a professional season, and voters will need him to log 160-plus to take him seriously in November. If the Mets manage his count and get him to late September healthy, the stuff is absolutely Cy Young caliber. Bryce Harper said last season that he was the best arm he saw all year. The numbers through May say Harper was right.
Cristopher Sanchez, Philadelphia Phillies
The unluckiest ace in the race
Sanchez finished second in NL Cy Young voting last year with an 8.0 bWAR season, and this year, his underlying stuff is arguably better. His strikeout rate has jumped to 28.1 percent, his walk rate is a clean 6.5 percent, and his xwOBA allowed of .290 is solidly in contention range.
But there are two flags in his 2026 data that deserve real attention. His BABIP is .423, the highest in the entire qualified starter pool by a wide margin. That is a luck story, and it means his ERA is going to look worse than his stuff deserves for as long as that number stays elevated. It will normalize. The second flag is his barrel rate of 11 percent, which jumped from his 2025 production. When hitters are barreling him at an 11 percent clip, those are not going to stay in the park forever.
The bigger problem may be the team behind him. The Phillies entered May at 8-16, tied for last in the National League. Cy Young voters have historically punished pitchers on bad teams, even when the pitching is excellent. If Philadelphia plays .500 ball from here forward and climbs out of the division basement, Sanchez's case builds itself. The strikeouts are there. The ERA will clean up as the BABIP normalizes. But the Phillies need to start winning for any of that to matter in November.
Cam Schlittler, New York Yankees
The wild card who could break the race
Here is the awkward truth about Cam Schlittler's Cy Young chances: He pitches in the same rotation as Max Fried. That is both the best and worst thing about his candidacy.
The best part: His numbers are legitimately elite. A .247 xwOBA allowed, a 31.4 percent strikeout rate, a 3.8 percent walk rate that is the best of any pitcher on this list, and a 30.5 percent whiff rate. Schlittler is leading the AL in pitcher fWAR through seven starts. He is not riding luck; his BABIP is a normal .242 and his contact suppression is real. In any other rotation in baseball, he would be the story.
The worst part: Voters are going to default to Fried when they look at the Yankees staff, and split-vote dynamics have historically hurt the second-best pitcher on dominant teams. Schlittler needs either Fried to stumble or his own numbers to become so overwhelming that voters cannot ignore both arms. It has happened before. Both Cy Young winners in 1985 pitched in the same division. It is not impossible. It is just hard.
Watch him in May and June. If he keeps this up, the conversation has to include him, and then this race has four legitimate names, which is exactly what the first poll did not account for.
The bottom line
The Cy Young poll is a snapshot of reputation. The Statcast leaderboard is a snapshot of reality. Through May 1, those two things are not aligned in either league, and the gap is big enough to matter.
Fried is the best pitcher in the AL by contact quality metrics. Skubal is excellent but not dominant. Soriano is a legitimate threat if he tightens the walk rate. In the NL, McLean belongs at the top of the conversation and Sanchez belongs on the ballot regardless of what the Phillies do around him. Schlittler is the name that could make this October ballot genuinely unpredictable. A hundred and twenty-seven games remain. The polls will update. The numbers already have.
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