The battle for National League MVP is a two-horse race, and it has been for a while now.

Both the Chicago Cubs' Pete Crow-Armstrong and reigning NL MVP Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers have built convincing cases for themselves with a little over a month to go in the regular season.

And for the first time this season, Crow-Armstrong is the NL leader in MLB.com's MVP poll, perhaps signifying a shift in mindset from some of those who will have an MVP vote come November.

Entering play on Tuesday, here's how the two stack up among Baseball Reference's major stat categories:

Evidently, Crow-Armstrong has the edge in eight of the 12 categories, though a few of them are still incredibly close, namely OPS, hits, home runs, and RBI.

Crow-Armstrong's strongest case for MVP is the advantage he has when it comes to Wins Above Replacement (WAR). WAR is an all-encompassing stat used to determine a player's run value compared to that of a replacement-level player (someone on the bench or in the minors).

Baseball-Reference (bWAR) and FanGraphs (fWAR) provide the two most commonly used WAR formulas in baseball. At 7.9 and 8.6, respectively, Crow-Armstrong leads MLB in both. Ohtani's bWAR (6.9) and fWAR (7.0) are both runner-up to Crow-Armstrong as it stands.

WAR is not the be-all, end-all of MVP criteria, but it does hold a lot of weight — in seven of the last nine seasons, the player to lead MLB and/or their respective league in bWAR has also won an MVP award that same season.

Kris Bryant, the most recent Cub to win NL MVP, finished his campaign in 2016 leading the NL in both bWAR and fWAR.

This MVP race feels a little different than in recent years, and that's because of how different Crow-Armstrong and Ohtani are as players.

Offensively, it's easy to draw the comparisons — but it's what each of them offers on the other end that makes it feel more like apples to oranges. It's also led to a lot of drawn-out online debates.

For Crow-Armstrong, his defense is the difference. He is far and away the most elite all-around defender in baseball, leading MLB in Fielding Run Value (24) and the NL in Outs Above Average (23). He won his first Gold Glove award last year and looks poised for another, never mind the Platinum Glove, which could soon be his as well.

And then there's the unicorn that is Ohtani, who is a two-way player unlike anything baseball has ever seen. Ohtani returned to the mound in 2025 after a season-long absence due to a UCL tear and subsequent surgery in late 2023. Last year, he threw just 47 innings, posting a 2.87 ERA.

This year, he was on track to be an NL Cy Young frontrunner, pitching to a sparkling 1.79 ERA in 85.2 innings through late June. His 0.73 ERA through his first eight starts of the season was sixth-best in MLB history, and he was doing it while posting an .885 OPS through his first 214 plate appearances.

However, a knee injury has kept him from pitching since July 3, and it's sparked debate about how valuable he is compared to Crow-Armstrong if he is only hitting.

ESPN's Jesse Rogers polled 21 MLB players on their NL MVP choice, and 15 selected Crow-Armstrong.

"If Ohtani was pitching, it would probably be him," said Reds pitcher Brady Singer. "I like PCA right now."

Athletics pitcher (and former Cub and teammate of Crow-Armstrong's) Mark Leiter Jr. had a strong take on the impact of Crow-Armstrong's defense versus Ohtani's pitching.

"One plays elite defense. The other doesn't play the field. If you take Ohtani out of the rotation, they don't miss a beat. And if you take him out of the lineup, I still don't think they miss a beat," he said.

Leiter Jr. has a point: since July 4, the Ohtani-less Dodgers rotation has the eighth-best ERA (3.99) and fWAR (5.5) in the league. It has since added Tarik Skubal to the mix and also boasts Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki, and Tyler Glasnow.

Crow-Armstrong has appeared in all but four of the Cubs' 132 games this season, and it's hard to imagine the state they'd be in without him.

That's best illustrated above, in which the Cubs' pitchers have been worth an MLB second-worst 3.7 in WAR compared to an MLB-best 31.1 on the offensive side.

Part of that split is undoubtedly due to Crow-Armstrong hitting out of his mind this season, and many other of the Cubs' hitters following suit.

With the amount of injuries to the pitching staff and the uncertainty it brought at the beginning of the year, Crow-Armstrong stepped up to become an even better version of himself, and it's launched the Cubs into real World Series contention (seriously).

Both the Cubs' last MVP winner and last World Series championship came 10 years ago. With every passing day, it's looking more likely that Crow-Armstrong is spearheading a campaign for one (or both) of those to make their way back to Chicago.

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