The MLB Players Association released its 2026 Players Choice Award finalists on Wednesday. These are the only major awards in the sport voted on by the players themselves, with ballots cast in September and tallied by the accounting firm KPMG. Winners come the week of Oct. 26.
Shohei Ohtani turns up twice. He is a Player of the Year finalist alongside Yordan Alvarez and Pete Crow-Armstrong, and an NL Outstanding Player finalist with Crow-Armstrong and Kyle Schwarber.
Alvarez is the busiest name on the whole ballot. Player of the Year. AL Outstanding Player, with Junior Caminero and Bobby Witt Jr. AL Comeback Player, with Gerrit Cole and Mike Trout. Three categories out of one season.
Parker Messick made the list the morning after an ALCS start
Messick is an AL Outstanding Rookie finalist with Kevin McGonigle and Munetaka Murakami. The night before his name went public, he started Game 2 of the ALCS for Cleveland and gave the Guardians five innings on 83 pitches.
That sequence is the most interesting thing on the list. The players filled out these ballots back in September, when Messick was a rookie starter on a contending club. By the time the results were announced, he was taking the ball in a league championship series. His peers saw where this was going before the bracket did.
The NL rookie field is TJ Rumfield, Sal Stewart and JJ Wetherholt.
Pitchers, comebacks and the awards that are not about numbers
AL Outstanding Pitcher goes to Dylan Cease, Sonny Gray or Cam Schlittler. The NL ballot offers Mason Miller, Jacob Misiorowski and Chris Sale, which is as wide a spread of pitcher types as any one category is likely to produce.
NL Comeback Player comes down to Sandy Alcantara, Martin Perez and Zack Wheeler. Alvarez, Cole and Trout handle the American League side of that one.
The Marvin Miller Man of the Year finalists are Chris Bassitt, Nico Hoerner and Pablo Lopez. The Curt Flood Award, which honors a former player, is down to David Cone and Ted Simmons. Philanthropist of the Year is Matthew Boyd, Jake Burger or Christian Yelich, and the money there is real: the winner directs a $25,000 Players Trust grant to the charity of his choice, with $5,000 going to each runner-up to do the same.
Why this ballot reads differently
Almost every other award in baseball is decided by writers or by fans. This one is decided by the people who had to stand in the box against these pitchers and chase these hitters around for six months. That makes a Players Choice nod a different kind of compliment, and it also makes the finalist lists a decent snapshot of how respect actually moves around the league.
It is also the rare award where the finalists cannot be explained away as a writer’s narrative. Nine times out of ten the arguments about who got snubbed are arguments about who covers which team. Not here.
Notice who the players put in their Player of the Year group. Alvarez, Crow-Armstrong and Ohtani. Not three players with the same profile, and not an obvious consensus. Whoever wins that one in two weeks will have beaten a field the clubhouses themselves assembled.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.