Shohei Ohtani is once again breaking baseball. Through the first months of the 2026 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ two-way phenom is pitching at a historical level on the mound — yet despite putting up numbers that rival the greatest pitching seasons of the modern era, Ohtani remains far from a lock to finally claim the one major individual honor that has eluded him throughout his career: the Cy Young Award.

A Career-Long Pursuit

The Cy Young chase is not a new ambition for Ohtani, but rather one that traces back to his earliest baseball aspirations. When Shohei Ohtani was in high school in Iwate, Japan, he wrote down a list of life goals, many of them tied to baseball. In nine Major League seasons so far, he’s already produced a body of work that is unmatched in the game’s history as a superstar on the mound and at the plate. He’s a four-time MVP — one of only two players in MLB history to win more than three MVP honors — a five-time All-Star, a four-time Silver Slugger Award winner, the 2025 National League Championship Series MVP, and a two-time World Series champion. But the Cy Young Award has eluded him, and he wants it badly. On his high school list, he had penciled in a goal of winning that honor by age 22 — a lofty aspiration even for a player as supremely talented as Ohtani.

A Historically Dominant Stretch

Early in the 2026 season, Ohtani delivered exactly the kind of statement performance that suggested this could finally be the year. Shohei Ohtani’s quest for the Cy Young Award began with six shutout innings for the Los Angeles Dodgers in his first outing on the mound this season. At the plate, the two-way superstar went 1 for 3 with two walks and a strikeout in a rainy 4-1 win over the Cleveland Guardians.

That dominance continued deep into the season. Through his first 10 starts of the 2026 campaign, Ohtani was pitching to a minuscule 0.74 ERA, the third-lowest mark of any pitcher since earned runs became an official statistic in 1913. Only Jacob deGrom, who posted a 0.56 ERA in 2021, and Juan Marichal, who posted a 0.59 ERA in 1966, have ever recorded better marks at that point in a season. Ohtani’s outward metrics backed up the historic ERA: he pitched to a 0.787 WHIP with 67 strikeouts and only 18 walks, a 3.72 strikeout-to-walk ratio. The underlying advanced metrics loved him even more, with a 100th percentile Pitching and Breaking Run Value and a 98th percentile Fastball Run Value.

A More Recent Rough Patch

Despite that dominant stretch, Ohtani’s invincibility on the mound has shown some cracks more recently. In a start against the Pittsburgh Pirates, Ohtani experienced what was statistically the worst pitching outing of his season, with three earned runs, six hits, and three walks allowed across 6 2/3 innings. He was pulled mid-inning for the first time all season, with a two-out, two-run, seventh-inning double from Pirates second baseman Brandon Lowe ultimately knocking him from the game. Even with that rougher outing factored in, Ohtani’s ERA rose to a still-minuscule 1.06, underscoring just how big a cushion his earlier dominance had built.

The Central Obstacle: Innings

Despite the eye-popping rate statistics, the central question hanging over Ohtani’s Cy Young candidacy has nothing to do with his ability and everything to do with workload. In order to protect Ohtani’s arm and their investment in him, the Dodgers have exclusively used a six-man rotation this year. Because of this, his innings totals naturally lag behind the rest of the league — a structural deficit that voters have historically weighed heavily when comparing starting pitchers for the award.

That workload concern is not new to this season. Ohtani has qualified for an ERA title only once in his career. He pitches for the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that has the luxury of slow-playing their starting pitchers until the postseason, given the organization’s deep roster and championship aspirations.

The Competition He’s Up Against

Ohtani also faces a deep and accomplished field of National League starting pitchers, several of whom have posted their own historic numbers this season while throwing significantly more innings. Rivals for the award include Phillies left-hander Cristopher Sánchez, who posted a 1.47 ERA over 79 1/3 innings; Brewers phenom Jacob Misiorowski, with a 1.65 ERA and an incredible 39.6% strikeout rate; and reigning NL Cy Young winner Paul Skenes of the Pirates, who has a 2.89 ERA over 65 1/3 innings.

To overcome the innings disadvantage built into his usage pattern, Ohtani will likely need to finish with an ERA under 2.00 over the full season in order to compensate. Whether he can sustain his historically low ERA over a complete campaign remains an open question — the lowest ERA for a qualified starter since the pitching mound was lowered to its current height in 1969 belongs to Dwight Gooden, who posted a 1.53 ERA over 35 starts for the Mets in 1985.

A Strikeout Rate Slightly Below His Career Norm

One additional data point working against Ohtani’s case involves his strikeout rate relative to his own established career standard. Ohtani’s career strikeout rate as a pitcher is 31.1%. So far in 2026, he’s below that figure, at 28.6%. With Misiorowski posting historic velocity-driven strikeout numbers unlike anything seen before, Ohtani will need to find ways to close that gap if he hopes to compete directly with the league’s most dominant strikeout artists on a rate basis.

What a Realistic Path Looks Like

Entering the season, evaluators had a useful baseline for projecting what an award-worthy Ohtani campaign might look like. On a per-162-game basis, he had averaged a 13-7 record with a 3.00 ERA, a 143 ERA+, 228 strikeouts, and 5.5 bWAR entering this season — numbers that would have represented a great jumping-off point even before accounting for his historically dominant early-season form in 2026.

With the season now past its midpoint, Ohtani’s Cy Young case will likely come down to two intertwined factors: whether he can sustain an ERA in the range that compensates for his reduced innings total under the Dodgers’ six-man rotation, and whether voters are ultimately willing to reward dominant rate statistics over the larger workloads posted by rivals like Sánchez, Misiorowski, and Skenes. Given Ohtani’s unprecedented two-way burden and the historic nature of his rate numbers through the season’s first half, his candidacy remains a genuine storyline to track — even if the most decorated player of his generation still has work to do to finally cross his lifelong goal off the list.