From our other sites
The story
On the 22nd, MLB’s official website released the results of its final MVP straw poll of the season. Every single National League voter put the Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong (PCA) in first place, with the site declaring it’s “not even in doubt anymore.” That effectively pushes a fifth MVP award further out of reach for the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, and on 5channel’s Entertainment/Sports News+ board, opinions split over how to weigh his injury absence, the physical toll of his two-way role, and comparisons based on WAR.
Full-Count, 09/23/2026
MLB’s final MVP straw poll of the season… PCA takes all 38 first-place votes
A fifth MVP award is slipping further away for Dodgers pitcher-hitter Shohei Ohtani. On the 22nd (the 23rd in Japan), MLB’s official website released the results of its final MVP straw poll of the season. In the National League, outfielder Pete “PCA” Crow-Armstrong (Cubs) received every single first-place vote. The site said of PCA’s MVP case that it’s “not even in doubt anymore.”
Source: full-count.jp / Original article here
What people said
That's what happens when you make him do everything
Of course that's how it goes
Re: #12
The way you're talking, it's like he's been out for half the season
He was already getting crushed by PCA even before he went on the IL
Forget the 40 homers, the 13 wins don't mean anything.
He'd need to pitch 150 innings for that to even count
and he'd probably still lose the WAR battle anyway
DH-only guys can't win votes, right?
He can play outfield, so he should just switch
Can we really expect good outfield defense from 'Chubby-tani with the achy knees' these days…
Look at Seiya (Suzuki), even he struggles out there, so can we really say Ohtani could handle the outfield?
And honestly, you can already see the injury coming a mile away
That's just the kind of player Ohtani is
All that's left to see now is the decline
He's probably way behind on WAR at this point
Ohtani can't run anymore these days, so optics-wise he'd need something like 60 home runs to make up for it
Name me a player who led the league in OPS twice or more — steroid suspects aside — and didn't make the Hall of Fame
Don't go look it up, know-it-all
Or is 'done' just done?
The pain settles down when he rests, but the knee inflammation comes right back once he starts playing again
All he can do is cycle between playing and resting to fake his way through it
Who out there actually thinks Ohtani's winning MVP?
The faithful just keep chanting 'Guerrero this, Tatis that' and never even say PCA's name
PCA's having a season on a whole different level from Guerrero and Tatis, and it's the faithful who keep dragging Ohtani down by ignoring that
If he hadn't tried the two-way thing, he could've had a long career as a great hitter or a great pitcher
It's a shame to watch from the outside, but it's his life, so what can you do
If he wasn't two-way, he'd have just ended up an injury-prone pitcher
He probably wouldn't have even joined the Fighters in the first place, so he'd have blown out his elbow on the slicker MLB ball before ever getting called up — his availability could've been even worse than this (Fighters = Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, his original Japanese team)
A two-way player — between being injured and being a commercial spokesman
Nitpicking on "Zion" (unclear who this is referring to)
At this point no other candidate is even worth putting on stage this year
But every time people rave about how amazing 40-40 is, it just makes you appreciate all over again how otherworldly the 50-50 season really was
Doing 40-40 while also playing solid defense is the more impressive feat
Background and Points of Debate
MLB’s official “straw poll” is a separate exercise from the actual BBWAA members who hold real MVP votes, so it doesn’t guarantee how the official vote will go. Still, the fact that all roughly 36 National League voters put Crow-Armstrong (PCA) in first place is being treated as a sign that the mood around Ohtani’s case is different from past years. On the thread, opinions split over how to weigh the stretch of the season Ohtani missed — some questioned the physical toll of the two-way role itself, while others argued the injury was simply unavoidable. Some also claimed Ohtani “doesn’t get evaluated fairly because he’s Japanese,” but that argument wasn’t backed by any specific voting criteria or evidence of bias, so readers should treat it as speculation rather than established fact. Comparisons using objective metrics like WAR also came up, but the actual award outcome will have to wait for the official vote after the season ends.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Entertainment/Sports News+) thread “Ohtani ‘Crushed’ 38-0 — What the MVP Straw Poll Reveals… US Reporter: ‘Not Even in Doubt Anymore’“.
Leave a Reply