Yordan Alvarez and Pete Crow-Armstrong were named Most Valuable Player of the American and National Leagues on Thursday, November 12, 2026, and neither result was close. Each of the 30 Baseball Writers' Association of America voters in each league put the same name first, giving both players the maximum 420 points.
The sweep extends beyond the MVP. Cam Schlittler of the New York Yankees and Jacob Misiorowski of the Milwaukee Brewers had taken the Cy Young awards unanimously on Wednesday. No previous season has produced four unanimous winners in baseball's two headline awards.
Alvarez: a batting title after a lost year
Alvarez, 29, spent 2026 as the Houston Astros' designated hitter and led the American League with a .316 average. He finished second in home runs, with 42, and second in runs batted in, with 106.
The number that explains the ballot is a quieter one: 109 walks, the most in Major League Baseball, which carried his on-base percentage to .432 — 46 points clear of the next-best hitter in either league. Pitchers, in other words, stopped giving him anything to hit, and he collected the bases anyway.
He also played 158 games, after a 2025 season cut to 48 by a fractured wrist and a sprained ankle.
Alvarez is the third Astro to win the award, after Jeff Bagwell in 1994 and Jose Altuve in 2017, and the 31st player in history to win both an MVP and a Rookie of the Year.
Junior Caminero of the Tampa Bay Rays finished second with 267 points, built on 27 second-place votes, and Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royals was third with 188. Schlittler, the unanimous Cy Young winner, came fourth in the MVP voting with 181 points.
Crow-Armstrong: the move to leadoff
Crow-Armstrong, 24, was in his fourth season as the Chicago Cubs' center fielder. He hit .280 with 45 home runs and 41 stolen bases, led both leagues with 10.6 wins above replacement by FanGraphs' measure, and won a Gold Glove.
His season turned in the middle of May, when the Cubs moved him to the top of the order. From there he hit .300 with a .398 on-base percentage, and he drew 83 walks over the year — up from 29 the season before, the single clearest sign of a hitter who changed what he was willing to swing at.
He is the 25th unanimous MVP in the award's history and the 13th Cub to win it, the first since Kris Bryant in 2016.
Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers was runner-up with 264 points and 26 second-place votes; Brice Turang of the Brewers was third with 190, and Elly De La Cruz of the Cincinnati Reds fourth with 173.
How the ballots work
Each league's electorate is 30 writers, two per city, who rank ten players. A first-place vote is worth 14 points, a second-place vote 9, a third 8, and so on down to one point for tenth. A unanimous winner therefore needs 30 first-place votes and lands on exactly 420 — the figure both Alvarez and Crow-Armstrong reached.
That double unanimity, in the same week that both Cy Young races were also swept, is the statistical oddity of the 2026 season: four awards decided by writers in two leagues, and not a single dissenting first-place vote among 120 ballots.
Reporting from MLB.com's published voting results and ESPN.
