This has been a banner year for elite starting pitching in the National League, even though preseason Cy Young favorite Paul Skenes has had a down season. By and large, I consider any AXE rating to be awards-worthy once it reaches 130, which means the player has performed at a level three standard deviations better than league average. This standard usually helps narrow each race down to a precious few, but this season nearly the entire NL Cy Young top 10 is made up 130 AXEers, and this doesn't include Tarik Skubal, whose 136 overall AXE is split across both leagues after his deadline trade from the Tigers to the Dodgers.

Despite the array of outstanding pitching in the NL, the betting markets have increasingly tilted toward young Brewers ace Jacob Misiorowski as the NL Cy Young favorite. With a 150.9 pitching AXE, Misiorowski is more than qualified for the award. Yet for much of the season, though not all, he has lagged behind the Phillies' Cristopher Sanchez in AXE.

Well, AXE is just an index, a system to sort out performances so that each narrowed-down pool of players can be considered more deeply. So let's do that with NL Cy Young front-runners Misiorowski, Sanchez, Chris Sale, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Jesus Luzardo, starting with a table of the metrics that feed AXE, along with some others. Good luck, voters!

With advanced numbers all over the place, it might simply come down to this: Misiorowski has the "wow!" factor in a big way, leads the NL with a sub-2.00 ERA and is the ace of the NL's best regular-season team. Though AXE can justifiably disagree, the case for Misiorowski is very easy to make.