2026 MLB Awards Watch: MVP, Cy Young and more for July - ESPN

What if the MVP award were just for position players?

The Cy Young Award has always been strictly for pitchers, so that would mean two distinct groups of big league players competing for two distinct awards, with no overlap.

Pitchers have won MVP awards several times, even though those winners didn't have Shohei Ohtani's built-in advantage of being a premier hitter and premier pitcher. Pitchers have always been eligible to win MVP, and there is no reason they shouldn't be. In reality, though, pitchers face an uphill battle in MVP voting, due, at least in part, to the opinion of some that «pitchers have their own award.»

The reason I bring this up now is Pete Crow-Armstrong, who is fresh off an epic June that propelled him to the best position player AXE in the majors.

So, let's say that pitchers were ineligible for MVP honors (a hypothetical, not a pitch for a policy change). Crow-Armstrong and other National League standouts are at a disadvantage in the MVP race because it takes overwhelming production for anyone to outproduce Ohtani's combined output as an elite hitter and an elite, full-time starting pitcher.

In this hypothetical, where Ohtani's pitching production does not count for MVP, Ohtani would rank sixth in the NL MVP race for his work as a designated hitter, while maintaining the fifth spot he owns in the Cy Young race. That's unfathomably impressive… but he would not be the front-runner in either race.

Instead, Crow-Armstrong would be the player to beat in the NL MVP chase and it wouldn't, at the moment, be that close. Such is the reality for any NL player sharing a circuit with Ohtani when he's doing what he's doing now — hitting and pitching in full-time roles, and doing so with All-Star-level performance.