The Passans: 2026 MLB season awards, with a twist - ESPN

While Major League Baseball's awards season doesn't officially arrive until November, that's no reason to wait to pay homage to the best of 2026. These aren't your typical honors, but seeing as how the Baseball Writers' Association of America now hands out 10 awards a year — MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year and the new Reliever of the Year in each league — here are 10 others to accompany those.

The Chicago Cubs' star center fielder is not just the National League MVP. He should win the award unanimously. He has been by far the best player in baseball this season, which is saying something in a year in which Shohei Ohtani hit and pitched. What's most impressive, in fact, is the chasm in production between Crow-Amstrong and every other big leaguer.

Only three times in MLB history has the gap between the player with the most FanGraphs wins above replacement and the second-highest WAR total been as large as it is between Crow-Armstrong and Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. this season. Crow-Armstrong is sporting an advantage of 3.6 WAR — 10.2 to 6.6. The other seasons: Babe Ruth over Harry Heilman by 5.7 WAR in 1923, Ruth over Lou Gehrig by 4.8 in 1926, and Mickey Mantle over Duke Snider by 4.0 in 1956.

So, PCA is having the most dominant season, compared with his peers, in seven decades? Well, by one measure, sure. The other major publicly available WAR, Baseball-Reference, has a 1.9-win gap between Crow-Armstrong and Philadelphia ace Cristopher Sánchez — a top-20 difference in the live ball era but by no means the same sort of edge FanGraphs sees.

And that's fine. Systems can differ in their calculations of value. It doesn't take anything away from the full PCA experience this season. He leads MLB