{"id":688107,"date":"2026-06-06T15:09:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T15:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/688107\/"},"modified":"2026-06-06T15:09:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T15:09:15","slug":"why-dodgers-shohei-ohtani-is-going-to-have-a-tough-time-winning-nl-cy-young-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/688107\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani is going to have a tough time winning NL Cy Young award"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani is going to have a tough time winning NL Cy Young award<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a>. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a> have won back-to-back World Series titles, and they’ve seen their big free agent addition, Shohei Ohtani<\/a>, win back-to-back MVPs as well.<\/p>\n

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This season, Ohtani is already looking like a lock for the MVP award. No one else is close to what he’s doing offensively and on the mound combined. Looking solely at this pitching production this season, he’s well on pace for Cy Young votes.<\/p>\n

But can he win the NL Cy Young award? As Katie Woo of The Athletic<\/a> highlighted, it’s going to be very difficult for Ohtani to win this award for a few reasons.<\/p>\n

Why Shohei Ohtani is going to have a tough time winning NL Cy Young award<\/p>\n

One of the biggest knocks against Ohtani right now is his lower innings count. He has thrown just 61 innings this season. That’s significantly fewer than the rest of the NL Cy Young competition.<\/p>\n

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Jacob Misiorowski<\/a> has 71 innings pitched this season, while Cristopher Sanchez<\/a>, the likely frontrunner for the award right now, has thrown a league-leading 86.1 innings.<\/p>\n

But, as Woo writes, “The discrepancy is not because of lack of efficiency in Ohtani’s starts.”\u00a0Ohtani has a ridiculously impressive 0.74 ERA this season, a bit better than Sanchez’s 1.46 ERA.<\/p>\n

The issue is the innings difference, which doesn’t look likely to improve this season. Ohtani, sitting well behind Sanchez and the rest of the competition for the NL Cy Young award this season, doesn’t look likely to get close to the pack.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0Phillies extending Cristopher Sanchez to his $107 million deal was genius<\/a><\/p>\n

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“The chance of (Ohtani and Yamamoto<\/a>) pitching on regular rest in the regular season, I won’t say zero, but it’s not much higher than that,” Mark Prior said.<\/p>\n

Of course, if Ohtani keeps dominating and not allowing any runners to score this season, then he would have a chance to win the NL Cy Young even with a lower innings count.<\/p>\n

But, with the way things are trending, it’s going to be very difficult for Ohtani to win this award unless his top competition begins to struggle mightily this season.<\/p>\n

With how good Sanchez, Misiorowski, Chase Burns<\/a>, Chris Sale<\/a>, and other top contenders have looked in a larger sample size, Ohtani winning this highly coveted award seems like a long shot.<\/p>\n

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More MLB news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani is going to have a tough time winning NL Cy Young award originally appeared…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":688108,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[38903,90189,121508,72017,13260,2323,363,298819,8894,3956,99,4706,30706],"class_list":["post-688107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-chase-burns","tag-chris-sale","tag-cristopher-sanchez","tag-cy-young","tag-jacob-misiorowski","tag-los-angeles-dodgers","tag-mlb","tag-nl-cy-young","tag-phillies","tag-shohei-ohtani","tag-sports","tag-tarik-skubal","tag-yamamoto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/688108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}