2026 MLB MVP Race — AL & NL Frontrunners Ranked by NUT
The MVP award is an argument about value: who did the most to help their team win? That’s the exact question NUT Score answers — one number for a player’s production, park- and league-adjusted, on the same scale for everyone. So as the races tighten in August, here’s where the 2026 MVP fields stand ranked by NUT, not narrative. All values below run through August 15.
A quick read on the grades: NUT’s season scale tops out at S (Nutty) above +5.0, then A (Star), B (Solid), and down. Only one hitter in baseball has cleared the S line so far — and he’s running away with one of these races.
AL MVP Race by NUT
Yordan Alvarez isn’t just leading the AL — he’s the only hitter in MLB above +5.0 NUT, the only S-tier bat in either league. His edge over Willson Contreras is nearly two full NUT, the widest frontrunner gap in the sport; a .438 on-base with 36 home runs is the rare line that scores at the top in both getting on base and doing damage. Behind him, Contreras and Junior Caminero give the AL a real second tier, and then it flattens out — Nick Kurtz, Pete Alonso, and Munetaka Murakami are separated by less than a tenth of a NUT. This is Alvarez’s award to lose.
NL MVP Race by NUT
The NL only has a leader once you count both halves of Shohei Ohtani. His bat is +3.0 — fifth in the league, in a pack with four other hitters. His arm is another +1.3 across 85.2 innings at a 1.79 ERA. Add them and he’s at +4.4, 0.8 clear of the field, which is the closest thing the NL has to Alvarez’s cushion in the AL.
Strip the pitching out and this race is a coin flip. James Wood (+3.5), Pete Crow-Armstrong (+3.4), Kyle Schwarber (+3.3), and CJ Abrams (+3.0, tied for the NL RBI lead at 91) sit inside half a NUT of each other, all A-tier. Crow-Armstrong’s case leans on a profile the box score understates — premium center-field defense and baserunning on top of 27 homers — while Schwarber has the league lead in home runs at 37.
A note on how Ohtani’s number is built: NUT grades hitting and pitching on separate scales, so no leaderboard in the app combines them for one player. The +4.4 above is the two sides added by hand — his bat onlyfigure of +3.0 is what you’ll see on the hitting board, and his +1.3 is on the pitching board. For everyone else on this list the two numbers are the same thing, which is exactly why a two-way player breaks a single-number ranking. Treat it as the start of the argument, not the end of it.
What about the Cy Young?
Pitchers get their own value scale in NUT. Jacob Misiorowski (+2.8), Chris Sale (+2.5), and Cristopher Sánchez (+2.4) lead the season pitching board, with Ohtani’s +1.3 in a shortened workload of 85.2 innings — see the full arms race on the pitching leaderboard, sortable by last 7, last 30, or full season.
Want to settle an MVP debate head-to-head? Drop any two names into the stat comparison tool and see the full NUT breakdown side by side.
Related
The MVP races will move all the way to Game 162. The live NUT board — last 7, last 30, or full season — is at baseballnut.app/stats, updated daily.