Image credit: IMAGE IMAGES via Reuters Connect
It is not uncommon for major prizes to be suspended both in careers and in one league. The 2016 National League MVP will be Pete Crow-Armstrong. The 2026 National League Cy Young Award winner will be Jacob Misiorowski. Not only are they both unquestionable, but if you try to mount any serious argument against either premise at the same time, you sound like a fool. It was a year without a large number of individual performances that will stand the test of time, but these two players did this year, which fans will still be talking about in 60 years. There are moments of moments that will go down in history as signs of 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 (unlikely) peaks in the future.
And when the campaign goes from the dominant to the historical, it is a hyperbole of danger, so that today I would like to drive away from that danger to one front – and right into it. Let’s go Crow-Armstrong. After all, DRC thinks + half a dozen teeth this year, anyway. He has become incredible, but more time is needed to tell whether this series was a hot streak or a real metamorphosis from a star to a legend. We could ask some tough questions about Misiorowski, but they are not the same. he could not break it at any moment; we all know Now, though, he’s perfect, and he’s winning, and the big question I’d like to answer is: Will Miz throw the best fastball ever?
Yes, it is a tall order. No, we will not 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 on the contrary Misiorowski, or if he truly stands above the crowd, as he has felt many times this year, the best hitters on Earth will steamroll him, looking like little Leauer with a falsified birth certificate.