There has rarely been so little suspense in the races for the major awards in one league. The 2026 National League MVP will be Pete Crow-Armstrong. The 2026 National League Cy Young Award winner will be Jacob Misiorowski. Not only are both of those things beyond doubt, but if you try to cobble together any serious argument against either premise, you’re going to sound foolish. It was a year without a large quantity of individual performances that will stand the test of time, but these two players did things this year that fans will still be talking about in 60 years. There are just a fistful of seasons that go down in history as a shorthand for transcendent greatness: Mays 1954, Koufax 1965, Gibson 1968, Pedro 2000, Ohtani 2024. There will be two such entries for 2026, unless one of these guys (improbably) tops themselves in the future.

Any time a campaign goes from dominant to historic, there’s a risk of hyperbole, so for today, I’d like to steer away from that danger on one front—and right, straight into it on another. Let’s set aside Crow-Armstrong. After all, DRC+ thinks he was half a fluke this year, anyway. He’s been incredible, but we’ll need more time to tell whether this was an all-timer of a hot streak or a real metamorphosis from star to legend. We might have some tough questions to ask about Misiorowski, but they’re not the same. He could break at any moment; we all know that. Right now, though, he’s unbroken, and he’s overpowering, and the big question I’d like to answer is: Does The Miz throw the best fastball ever?

Yes, that’s a tall order. No, we’re not going to arrive at a concrete, irrefutable answer. (You probably knew that.) What I want to know, though, is whether we can even make a strong case against Misiorowski, or if he really stands as far above the crowd as it often felt this year, watching him steamroll the best hitters on Earth like a Little Leaguer with a forged birth certificate.