Pete Crow-Armstrong has gone from breakout story to runaway MVP favorite, and ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle says the National League race is effectively done.
The Cubs still have some finishing to do in the standings. They didn’t win the NL Central, but they are headed for a Wild Card spot and are likely to lock up the top Wild Card seed and home-field advantage, too. A big reason Chicago has been able to stay on track despite shaky pitching is Crow-Armstrong, whose season has turned into something much bigger than a simple breakout.
Doolittle put it bluntly: “The 2026 NL MVP race is over, and now PCA is racing against history.” In his view, Shohei Ohtani, Jacob Misiorowski, Elly De La Cruz, Cristopher Sanchez, and the rest of the league’s stars are nowhere near Crow-Armstrong.
Using Doolittle’s AXE metric to sort the award races, Crow-Armstrong sits at 165.3 AXE, with Ohtani second in the NL at 145.9.
The point, from Doolittle’s perspective, is not that Crow-Armstrong has merely pulled ahead. It’s that the race is so lopsided that even a nightmare finish would not change the outcome. He wrote that even if PCA struck out in every at-bat the rest of the way, there’s no chance he won’t be the NL MVP.
Crow-Armstrong’s numbers back up that confidence. Through 153 games, he has 9.6 bWAR, 115 runs scored, 167 hits, 29 doubles, eight triples, 44 home runs, 105 RBIs, 37 stolen bases, 78 walks, a .282 batting average, .581 slugging percentage, .956 OPS, and 159 OPS+.
That production alone would put him in strong MVP territory. Add in his league-best defense in center field, and the case gets even stronger.
Back in early August, the race still felt like a question. Now, with Ohtani not pitching or hitting because of injury, Doolittle sees no path for anyone to catch Crow-Armstrong. In his words, the MVP race is “over” already.
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