Six Arms, One Trophy, and the Math That Doesn’t Favor Atlanta

Two-twenty-three.

That is Chris Sale’s earned run average through twelve starts, and in any other year it would be the number that ends the conversation. A 37-year-old defending the Cy Young with a 2.23 ERA, 86 strikeouts, and an 8-4 record on the best team in baseball — the speech writes itself.

Except six other pitchers are writing better ones.

The 2026 National League Cy Young race has no modern precedent. Six pitchers have cleared 50 innings with an ERA below 2.00 and a strikeout rate above one per inning — a threshold the award hasn’t seen since it split by league in 1967. The field is so deep that Sale, who won the trophy eighteen months ago, sits fifth in betting odds at +750. That isn’t a slight. It’s arithmetic.

Start with Cristopher Sanchez, who has spent the first two months of the season pitching like a man auditioning for history. The Phillies’ left-hander carries a 1.46 ERA and a 1.79 FIP across 86.1 innings — both numbers that support each other, which is the statistical equivalent of a clean bill of health. His 44.2 consecutive scoreless innings broke a Phillies franchise record that had belonged to Grover Cleveland Alexander for 115 years. In May alone, Sanchez made five starts without allowing a run. The last pitcher to do that was Orel Hershiser in 1988. That is not a comp you invoke lightly.

Then there is Jacob Misiorowski, who is doing things to a baseball that the baseball did not consent to. The Brewers’ 23-year-old right-hander leads the majors with 108 strikeouts and a 0.79 WHIP. His May was a month out of science fiction: 5-0, a 0.23 ERA, 57 strikeouts in 38.1 innings, opponents hitting .109 against him. He threw 241 fastballs at 100-plus mph in May alone, with 71 pitches clocking 102 or higher — a velocity profile that has no precedent since pitch tracking began in 2008. His FIP sits at 1.89. The ERA is real.

Shohei Ohtani, because of course, carries a 0.74 ERA through ten starts. That number is tied for the fourth-lowest through nine starts by any pitcher since earned runs became official in 1913. It is also built on a .197 BABIP that will not hold, an xFIP of 3.16 that actually favors Sale, and a workload question — 61 innings through ten starts puts him on pace for roughly 150, below the 162 most voters want to see. The talent is extraterrestrial. The innings may not cooperate.

Chase Burns (1.96 ERA, but a 3.75 FIP that screams correction) and Kyle Harrison (1.57 ERA, 73 strikeouts, quietly the second-best arm on Milwaukee’s own staff) round out a field that makes a 2.23 ERA look like the middle of the pack.

Which brings us back to Sale, and the tension between what the ERA says and what lies beneath it.

The FIP tells a different story. Sale’s sits at 3.19 — more than a full run higher than Sanchez’s 1.79, and 1.3 runs above Misiorowski’s 1.89. Fielding Independent Pitching strips out the noise of defense and luck and asks what a pitcher’s outcomes should look like based on strikeouts, walks, and home runs. Sale’s answer is closer to a 3.00 ERA pitcher than the 2.23 his ledger currently shows. His June 4 start against Toronto — 10 hits and 3 earned runs in 5.2 innings, his first genuinely rough outing — was less an aberration than a glimpse of where the peripherals have been pointing.

Through twelve starts in his 2024 Cy Young season, Sale’s FIP was 2.78. This year, it’s 3.19. The ERA is lower in 2026. The underlying performance is not.

None of this diminishes what Sale is doing at 37. His 2,659 career strikeouts rank 28th all-time, seventh among left-handers — he passed Tom Glavine earlier this season. His one-year, $27 million extension through 2027 looks like a bargain. He is the anchor of a pitching staff carrying the best record in baseball at 42-21. And the craft — the sequencing, the ability to win without the 97-mph fastball that defined his twenties — is a different kind of dominance, the kind that earns its authority from pattern recognition rather than raw force.

But the Cy Young is not a lifetime achievement award, and the 2026 field does not grade on sentiment. Sanchez leads Sale in ERA, FIP, WAR, innings, and strikeouts. Misiorowski leads him in every category except wins, which is the one metric the sabermetric community has spent two decades arguing against using. Ohtani’s ERA is an act of statistical absurdity that may or may not survive the innings threshold.

There is a version of this season where Sale goes 18-6 with a 2.40 ERA and finishes fourth. There is a version where Ohtani’s workload costs him votes and Sanchez or Misiorowski fades, and Sale’s narrative — the 37-year-old defending his crown against the deepest field in sixty years — carries him to a second trophy. Back-to-back Cy Youngs at his age would place him alongside Randy Johnson, who won four straight from ages 35 to 38, and Roger Clemens, who took back-to-back at 34 and 35.

The history would be real. The math, right now, says it is unlikely.

Baseball does not resolve its best arguments in June. It lets them compound across a hundred more games, adding starts and innings and earned runs until the arithmetic sorts itself. Sale knows this. He has thrown 72.2 innings of 2.23-ERA baseball for the best team in the sport, and the honest answer to whether that is enough is: not yet, and maybe not at all, and that is what makes this race worth watching every fifth day until October.