The 2023 MLB Awards Race Homestretch Guide

One month remains in the 2023 regular season, which means we’re entering the final sprint of not only playoff races, but a host of individual awards races as well. As is usually the case around this time, we’ll use that one-month benchmark to survey the six big awards and all the players who have the opportunity to use this last stretch to make their case. We’ll order the races from most to least settled; all statistics are through Wednesday’s games.

AL MVP

The favorite: Shohei Ohtani, Angels DH/SP
The contenders: None
The dark horses: None

In the 2021 edition of this piece, Ohtani also claimed the first entry as the obvious AL MVP favorite with no contenders or dark horses behind him. I wrote then, “Here’s the only remaining question about the AL MVP award: Would Ohtani win even if all his pitching accomplishments were ignored? Maybe!”

This year, the answer to that question is almost definitely. Ohtani leads all qualified AL hitters in on-base percentage, slugging percentage, home runs, walks, and triples. In total bases, the gap between Ohtani (323 total bases) and second-place Luis Robert Jr. (271) is larger than the gap between Robert and 20th-place Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

If Corey Seager (1.062 OPS) or Aaron Judge (1.007) had stayed healthy all year, maybe they could have given the hitter-only version of Ohtani (1.071) a real challenge. But of course, in that hypothetical, Ohtani’s unmatched pitching advantage would have easily pushed him over the edge.

Now that he’s not taking the mound anymore, Ohtani won’t reach 12 WAR for the season; before he tore his UCL, he was on pace to become the first player since Dwight Gooden in 1985 (and the first hitter since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967) to do so. Now, he’ll have to settle for his second unanimous MVP award in three years.

NL Rookie of the Year

The favorite: Corbin Carroll, Diamondbacks OF
The contenders: None
The dark horses: None

The majors’ no. 2 prospect entering the season, Carroll is coasting to the Rookie of the Year crown. Had Reds infielder Matt McLain been in the majors the whole season, or Dodgers outfielder James Outman not suffered a brutal midseason slump, or Mets starter Kodai Senga reined in bouts of wildness, perhaps they could have mounted a fiercer challenge. But Carroll’s impressive combination of volume (528 plate appearances, second among rookies) and per-plate-appearance production (136 wRC+) makes him an easy choice for this award.

AL Rookie of the Year

The favorite: Gunnar Henderson, Orioles IF
The contenders: Triston Casas, Red Sox 1B; Masataka Yoshida, Red Sox LF
The dark horse: Cole Ragans, Royals SP

The majors’ no. 1 prospect entering the season, Henderson hasn’t been quite as outstanding as Carroll—though he’s excelled since a slow start in April—but his Rookie of the Year lead is only slightly less secure. The only AL rookies hitting as well as Henderson trail him by a wide margin in either defensive value (Casas and Yoshida) or playing time (the Twins’ Edouard Julien and Royce Lewis and the Rangers’ Josh Jung)—or both (Tampa Bay’s Luke Raley, Detroit’s Kerry Carpenter, and Oakland’s Ryan Noda). Barring a shocking September swoon, the only feasible challenger for Henderson might be Ragans, the majors’ pitching fWAR leader since his first start with the Royals, who with another magical month could contend for the award in limited playing time like Gary Sánchez did in his runner-up 2016 campaign.

AL Cy Young

The favorite: Gerrit Cole, Yankees
The contenders: Sonny Gray, Twins; Kevin Gausman, Blue Jays; Luis Castillo, Mariners; George Kirby, Mariners; Framber Valdez, Astros
The dark horse: A Shohei Ohtani with two functional UCLs :(

This is far from Cole’s best individual season; his strikeout rate has declined by a third since 2019, when he also posted a 2.50 ERA and 20 wins. Yet against a relatively weak field, he enters September as the favorite to win his first Cy Young award.

That’s not to say Cole is a massive favorite, to be clear. The first three awards on this list are all but locked up, while the last three are all wide open with a month to go. It’s just that there isn’t a single overwhelming candidate who’s made a case to surpass Cole in the AL’s pitching pecking order.

Instead, all the league leaderboards are scrambled, with different hurlers ahead in different stats. Castillo leads in WHIP and batting average allowed. Kirby leads in walk rate. Gausman leads in strikeouts and strikeout rate. Gray leads in home run rate and ERA. Gausman and Gray are tied for the lead in FIP.

For now, Cole’s combination of volume (he leads the league with 174 innings) and consistency (he’s in the top 10 of every one of those leaderboards) gives him the likely edge. But the field is so compressed that this race is far from settled, and all it will take is one hot month for any of the pitchers mentioned here to win.

NL Cy Young

The favorite: Blake Snell, Padres
The contenders: Spencer Strider, Atlanta; Zac Gallen, Diamondbacks; Zack Wheeler, Phillies; Logan Webb, Giants
The dark horse: Justin Steele, Cubs

The AL Cy Young field might be weak, but compared to the NL race, the AL’s looks like the scintillating Jake Arrieta–Zack Greinke–Clayton Kershaw melee from 2015. At the moment, Snell leads NL pitchers with just 4.2 bWAR, putting him on pace for about 5.0 wins above replacement by season’s end. That would be the lowest league-leading total for any AL or NL pitcher since the start of the 20th century (2020 excepted).

Out of that relative mediocrity, one winner must emerge. Perhaps it will be Snell, lifting his second Cy Young trophy, because control problems—he leads the majors in walks allowed and all qualified pitchers in walk rate—haven’t stymied his overall pitching line. In 18 starts since May 25, the Padres southpaw has a 1.38 ERA.

Or perhaps it will be Strider, whose 38 percent strikeout rate is the second highest in MLB history (behind only Cole’s 2019 mark; again, 2020 excepted), or Webb, who leads in innings pitched, or the two Zac(k)s, who might offer the best combination of workload and per-inning effectiveness. As in the American League, any of these top contenders could claim the award with a strong September.

But the dark horse here is worth further discussion, in part because all the pitchers in the Cy Young discussion have some level of national fame—except Steele, a relatively anonymous Cubs lefty. Steele deserves more attention, though, because he’s currently tied for the MLB lead with 15 wins (same as Strider) and is only a smidge behind Snell for the ERA lead among qualified pitchers (2.60 to Snell’s 2.69). If he finishes the season as the leader in both meat-and-potatoes stats—say, 20 wins and a mid-2s ERA—it will be hard to deny Steele the trophy even if he doesn’t lead in any of the more advanced metrics that analysts use in 2023.

NL MVP

The favorites: Mookie Betts, Dodgers RF/2B/SS; Ronald Acuña Jr., Atlanta RF
The contenders: Freddie Freeman, Dodgers 1B; Matt Olson, Atlanta 1B
The dark horses: None

This weekend’s series between Atlanta and L.A. isn’t just a matchup of the top two teams in the majors, in a potential NLCS preview. It’s also a head-to-head-to-head-to-head battle of the top four candidates—the only four candidates, really—for NL MVP.

In another season, the first basemen would boast good-to-great cases for the award. Freeman touts an outrageous .338/.413/.586 slash line and leads the NL in doubles, extra-base hits, and total bases. Olson leads in homers and RBI—a strong MVP foundation, especially because he’s played every game for the team with the best record in the majors.

But neither Freeman nor Olson touts the best MVP case on their own team, because Betts and Acuña have been just that remarkable. The latter was the heavy favorite for the award at the midseason point, and he hasn’t slowed at all, with a 165 wRC+ at the All-Star break and a 164 mark since then; he became the inaugural member of the 30-homer, 60-steal club with a grand slam in Dodger Stadium on Thursday night. His chance of winning this award has fallen through no fault of his own. It’s just that Betts, seeking to join Frank Robinson and become just the second player in MLB history to win both AL and NL MVP, caught fire after April and hasn’t been doused since. He one-upped Acuña with two homers of his own on Thursday.

If the season ended today, Betts would probably deserve the award by the slimmest of margins. The two stars’ offensive production is essentially equivalent thus far, with Betts doing more at the plate and Acuña more on the basepaths. Maybe you prefer Betts’s offense because his OPS is 39 points higher than Acuña’s, or maybe you prefer Acuña because of his steals. If we account for stolen bases by effectively turning 61 of Acuña’s singles into doubles (because he has 61 steals) and turning 11 of his singles into outs (because he’s been caught stealing 11 times) and then do the same for Betts’s 10 steals and three extra outs, Acuña holds a “running-adjusted OPS” lead of 28 points.

Either way, the difference is quite small: FanGraphs calculates that Betts has been worth 56 runs above average on offense this season and Acuña 54 runs above average. (That small advantage for Betts is because Dodger Stadium is more of a pitcher’s park than Truist.)

But Betts has been inarguably the better, more versatile defender of the pair. Acuña rates as a below-average outfielder this season, with a strong arm but a negative range score. Betts, though, is a plus defensive outfielder—albeit not the league leader he was in Boston—who’s also filled in with 440 innings in the middle infield to bolster a depleted Dodgers depth chart.

How many other MLB players, let alone star hitters, could moonlight as a capable shortstop—the hardest non-catcher defensive position on the diamond!—when they last started a game at the position in 2012 in Low-A? How many could play consistently at second base with so little recent experience? Betts hadn’t played more than 46 innings in the infield in any season since he debuted in the majors in 2014.

But even if Betts has the slightest advantage for now, Acuña has plenty of time to regain the lead. Atlanta and L.A. already have their division titles effectively sewn up, but their best players have as much to play for as anyone down the stretch.