Pete Crow-Armstrong Wins NL MVP Unanimously — All 30 Voters, One Name

The announcement took one line. Pete Crow-Armstrong is the National League's Most Valuable Player for 2026, and the Baseball Writers' Association of America did not need a second name to say it: all 30 first-place votes, 420 points, and a race that was over long before the ballots were opened.

Shohei Ohtani, the winner of the previous three MVPs, finished second with 264 points. Milwaukee's Brice Turang was third with 190. All three finalists appeared on every ballot; only one of them appeared at the top of any. The award is Crow-Armstrong's first, the Cubs' first since Kris Bryant in 2016, and the first time a Cub has ever won it unanimously.

The season that left no argument

Start with the shape of it. Crow-Armstrong hit .280 with a .372 on-base percentage and a .570 slugging percentage across 726 plate appearances, the most in the National League. Among qualified NL hitters, nobody slugged higher, nobody posted a higher OPS — his .943 led the league — and nobody topped his OPS+.

The counting numbers ran the same way. His 45 home runs tied Kyle Schwarber for the major-league lead. His 119 runs scored led the majors outright. He drove in 107, hit 31 doubles and eight triples, and his 84 extra-base hits led the National League by nine. His 357 total bases were the most in baseball.

Then there is the part no other candidate could answer. Crow-Armstrong stole 41 bases in 48 attempts, which made him the only 40-homer, 40-steal player in the majors this season — one of seven such seasons in the game's history, and the first a Cub has ever produced.

The glove counted too

Most MVP cases are argued from one side of the ball. His was argued from the middle of the diamond. Crow-Armstrong played nearly 1,400 innings in center field, won his second consecutive Gold Glove and the National League's Platinum Glove, and posted a +25 outs above average — the best defensive mark at any position in baseball, per Statcast, and tied with Byron Buxton's 2017 for the best outfield season since the metric began in 2016. He added 16 defensive runs saved on top of it.

Add the two halves together and the value boards were not close. His 9.8 wins above replacement by Baseball-Reference's measure and 10.6 by FanGraphs' both led all of baseball. The FanGraphs figure, per MLB Trade Rumors, ranks among the 40 best position-player seasons the game has ever recorded. He is the seventh National League center fielder ever to win this award, and the first since Andrew McCutchen in 2013.

The start nobody remembers

None of it looked inevitable in May. Through May 20 — fifty games in — Crow-Armstrong was hitting .225/.302/.357 with five home runs, and the season had the shape of 2025, when a similar hot start cooled off and he finished ninth in this same vote. Over his final 112 games he hit .302/.400/.658, with 40 home runs, 87 RBIs and 93 runs scored.

The change was in the approach, not the swing. He cut his chase rate by seven points and more than doubled his walk rate, to 11.4 percent — 83 walks from a hitter pitchers used to game-plan around. The power was always there. The patience made it unavoidable.

The man across the ballot

Ohtani's second-place finish was its own kind of achievement. He stopped pitching after July 3 with a left knee injury, fought a right biceps problem, and spent part of September shelved. He still hit .275 with 30 home runs. His streak of three consecutive MVP wins is over, but the BBWAA notes he has now finished first or second in six straight MVP elections — a record, breaking the tie he shared with Barry Bonds and Mike Trout.

Turang's third place came on a career year of his own: a .286 average, his first 20-homer season and a second Gold Glove. On another ballot, in another year, either season contends. This year the top line was never in doubt.

A clean sweep of a night

The American League made it a matched set. Yordan Alvarez won the AL award unanimously on the same night, and the BBWAA counts only two other years — 2023 and 2024 — when both leagues' winners took every first-place vote. Go one step further and the night stands alone: with Cam Schlittler and Jacob Misiorowski winning the Cy Young Awards unanimously as well, this is the first season since the Cy Young was created in 1956 in which both MVPs and both Cy Young winners were elected without a dissenting ballot.

The Cubs signed Crow-Armstrong to a six-year, $115 million extension in March, before any of this. He collected the Hank Aaron Award as the league's best offensive performer along the way, and he does not turn 25 until March. Chicago waited ten years between MVPs. The one who ended the wait did not leave a single voter anything to decide.