Ask the sportsbooks who the best pitcher in the National League is right now and they’ll point you to Jacob Misiorowski, breaking his own velocity record and sitting at -300 to win the Cy Young. Ask the rate stats and you get a different name entirely, one currently priced at +750 like an afterthought.
That name is Zack Wheeler. And the gap between where the market has him and what his numbers actually say is the whole story here. Cy Young voters have been shown almost this exact case twice before, and both times they punished the pitcher for the wrong reason.
What a Rib Removal Actually Costs a Pitcher
Start with what Wheeler’s 2026 season almost wasn’t. He had a blood clot removed near his right shoulder last September, then underwent thoracic outlet decompression surgery that included removing a rib, after doctors diagnosed him with thoracic outlet syndrome. He spent the winter rehabbing in Philadelphia instead of his usual Atlanta offseason base. He didn’t throw his first pitch of 2026 until April 25.
That’s the deficit he’s spent four months clawing back. Every start he’s made since is a start some other Cy Young candidate got for free in March.
Why Cy Young Voters Punish Missed Time
This part of the case doesn’t need Wheeler’s 2026 line to work at all. Voters have already shown their hand on this exact scenario, twice, with Wheeler as the test case both times.
In 2021, Wheeler led all of MLB in innings pitched and strikeouts with a 2.78 ERA, tied for the most first-place votes of any pitcher in the league, and still lost the NL Cy Young by the smallest margin in the award’s history. Elite, full-season value still wasn’t enough to close the gap with a narrative that had already been written for someone else. Then in 2025, Wheeler put up a 2.42 ERA across 11 starts and went 6-1 before his season ended early, and still finished ninth. Not on the ballot’s fringe by accident. Ninth, with an ERA that would’ve contended for the league lead over a full year, because voters treat missed time as disqualifying rather than as a smaller sample of the same excellence.
That’s the pattern the 2026 case has to overcome. It’s not that Wheeler hasn’t pitched well enough before. It’s that “well enough, but not enough of it” has been the voting bloc’s verdict on him specifically, in back-to-back opportunities, for different reasons that add up to the same outcome.
Is Zack Wheeler the Best Pitcher in the NL Right Now?
By rate stats, yes. Wheeler is running a 2.16 ERA and 0.88 WHIP through 100 innings this season, both career bests for him, with 117 strikeouts working out to 10.5 per nine, in a season where he’s thrown fewer than two-thirds of a normal workload. Run prevention that clean over a full slate would be a runaway Cy Young case with a month to spare. Over a partial one, it’s a betting afterthought.
The counterargument writes itself, and it isn’t wrong on its face: fewer innings means fewer chances to fail, and the sample is smaller than a full-season leader’s. But that’s a workload argument, not a quality argument, and the two keep getting treated as the same thing.
The Innings Gap Is Closing Faster Than the Narrative
The gap is also closing faster than the market has adjusted for. Wheeler’s odds sat around +2200 two weeks ago; they’re +750 now, the largest recent mover in the field. Per PhillyVoice’s analysis, his 4.7 pitching WAR ranks second among all MLB starters even though he’s made roughly six fewer starts than the pitchers around him on that leaderboard — value accumulating at a rate that’s outrunning the missed time itself. He hadn’t yet reached ERA-title innings qualification as of that analysis, but he’s projected to clear that bar by August.
Since the All-Star break, the version of Wheeler on the mound has been the best version yet: 19 strikeouts against 2 earned runs across 13 innings. That’s not a pitcher managing a workload back into form. That’s a pitcher who’s already there.
It wasn’t always this obvious. Two starts into his return in May, even the fans still sounded surprised by it:
https://x.com/TheGoodPhight/status/2050384825232531739
Wheeler isn’t without believers making the louder case. Matt Gelb of The Athletic has publicly predicted Wheeler wins the 2026 NL Cy Young outright, pointing to the 2.71 ERA he carried across 24 starts in 2025 before the blood clot diagnosis ended that bid. That’s still a writer calling for a longshot to come through, not a consensus already forming around him. Even the believers are framing this as an upset.
Wheeler isn’t chasing the Cy Young alone, either. His own rotation-mate Cristopher Sanchez has built his own historic scoreless streak into a top-five case, which says less about competition inside the Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse and more about how deep the NL field actually is this year. Misiorowski’s velocity is the story that sells. Sanchez’s streak is the story that’s already been told. Wheeler’s is the one still being written, and it’s the one the rate stats are shouting about while the odds board stays quiet.
None of this requires the comeback framing to work. Strip it out entirely and the same conclusion holds: by the numbers that measure what a pitcher actually does on the mound, Wheeler is performing like the best pitcher in the league right now, missed time included in that math rather than excused from it. The only reason that isn’t the consensus is that Cy Young voting has never really been about rate stats — it’s been about workload, and workload is the one category where Wheeler still trails.
If his rates hold through September and he clears the innings threshold with the field this bunched, don’t be surprised when his name is the one that keeps showing up on ballots, whatever the sportsbooks say about him this week.
