AL Cy Young Odds: Schlittler Vs Cease Is A Coin Flip

The Quick Answer

The AL Cy Young odds on Kalshi are a near coin flip: Cam Schlittler at 54 cents (54 percent implied) and Dylan Cease at 44 cents, with the other 40 names splitting pennies. The favorite has flipped twice since August 4, start by start. The full board, the week that repriced it, and what fees do to a 50-cent race are all below.

Most futures markets drift. This one trades like a DFS slate, repricing after every start, and that is exactly why it is worth a DFS player's attention: the AL Cy Young board is a 2.4-million-contract, start-by-start ranking of the aces you pay the most salary for. As of August 10, 2026, Kalshi's KXMLBALCY-26 market makes it a two-man race, and one week in August showed precisely how this market thinks. By the end of this page you will know why that week matters more than any season-long stat line.

Where The AL Cy Young Odds Stand On Kalshi

Prices below are the latest daily closes as of August 10, 2026, read as implied probabilities. This page tracks the market itself; our AI panel's model verdict on the board lands with the next refresh.

The top two sum to roughly 98%, and the whole board sums to somewhat more than 100%, which is the exchange's natural overround. The most telling row is not either favorite. It is Tarik Skubal at a penny: the two-time reigning winner of this award, back-to-back in 2024 and 2025, erased from the race for a three-peat by a trade to the Dodgers, because the award only counts American League work. Markets like this do not price talent, they price eligible paths to a November announcement, the same way MLB Rookie of the Year odds price service-time reality before skill, and the way the MLB home run leader board prices health and at-bats before raw power.

That framing sets up the real question: what separates a 54-cent ace from a 44-cent one?

Schlittler Vs. Cease: Two Different Kinds Of Ace

They are opposite archetypes, and the market is weighing one against the other in public.

Schlittler, in his first full big-league season after a 73-inning debut in 2025, is the volume-and-ratios ace: 10-6 with a 2.21 ERA across 146.2 innings and 25 starts, a 0.93 WHIP, 182 strikeouts against just 31 walks, and a .196 average against. That strikeout-to-walk gap is the cleanest skill signal on the board, and he pairs it with the innings lead.

Cease is the rate monster: a 2.28 ERA with 184 strikeouts in only 126.1 innings, a 13.1 K/9, and a .179 average against that is the best in the race. The outlier stat, the one that moved the market, is his last five starts: 36 innings, four earned runs, a 1.00 ERA, and 47 strikeouts. He has more strikeouts than Schlittler in 20 fewer innings.

The spread in one line: Schlittler has thrown 20 more innings. Cease has two more strikeouts. That is the entire 10-point argument.

In DFS terms, Schlittler is the high-floor SP1 you pay full salary for; Cease is the leverage play whose per-inning projection is arguably better. The market is voting on whether voters reward the workload or the rate, and right now it leans workload by about 10 points. If you want to see how those two profiles project on any given slate, the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub price exactly this trade-off every day.

One Week, Three Repricings

Here is the payoff on that opening promise. Watch the daily closes move with the starts:

Schlittler closed August 3 at 63 cents, roughly where he had closed every day since August 1. That night he lasted 3 innings against the Cardinals, allowed 4 earned runs and walked five, and the market cut him to 51 by the next close. On August 6, Cease threw 7 shutout innings with 10 strikeouts against the Cubs, and by August 7 the board had fully flipped: Cease 55, Schlittler 38. For three days the second-year Yankee was the underdog. Then on August 9 he answered with 7 innings of one-run ball, 11 strikeouts and zero walks against Atlanta, and by August 10 the market flipped back: Schlittler 54, Cease 44.

Three repricings in seven days, each one traceable to a single start. That is the whole personality of this market. It reacts like a live win-probability model, not a preseason futures sheet, which means the current price already contains Sunday's box score. If you like reading markets this way, we run the same exercise daily on the Kalshi MLB picks board, and we grade every one of our market calls in public on the Sims vs. Kalshi ledger.

What Decides It From Here

The number I keep coming back to is 20: the innings gap. That workload cuts both ways: Schlittler has already thrown 146.2 innings in the season after a 73-inning debut year, already double his 2025 big-league total, while Cease sits at 126.1. Each has most of two months of starts left. If New York manages its ace's workload down the stretch with skipped or shortened starts, the volume case erodes toward Cease's rate case. If both run clean through September, voters get the classic volume-versus-rate ballot, and the 10-point spread is the market's live estimate of how that vote breaks. We watched the National League version of the same argument all summer; the NL Cy Young board prices a rate-first favorite against a volume field.

The board's third name is the wins narrative in pitcher form: Sonny Gray at 14-2 with a 2.78 ERA for Boston. Three cents says the market believes wins no longer swing ballots unless the two men ahead of him both stumble. That is probably the right price, and if you take it, understand you are making a deliberate low-probability bet against both favorites finishing clean, with nothing decided until November. September context cuts both ways too: Cleveland's pair of penny arms, Gavin Williams and Parker Messick, are pitching inside the AL Central race we track separately, and contending-team innings tend to stay in the rotation. The market itself settles only when the BBWAA announces the winner in mid-November 2026, so every one of those remaining starts gets priced in first.

From Cents To Implied Probability

The mechanics, briefly, because they matter most in a race priced near 50 cents. A Yes contract pays 1 dollar if the outcome hits, so the price in cents reads directly as an implied probability: Schlittler at 54 cents implies 54%. Two adjustments keep the read honest. First, the sum of all Yes prices runs slightly over 100%, so each name's true market share is a hair below its sticker. Second, Kalshi's trading fee is roughly 7% of price times one minus price per contract, a curve that peaks near 50 cents.

Worked Example: What A 54-Cent Favorite Really Costs

Buy one Schlittler Yes at 54 cents and the fee is about 0.07 x 0.54 x 0.46, or roughly 1.7 cents, so your all-in cost is closer to 55.7 cents. Your implied break-even rises from 54% to about 56%. This race trades almost exactly where that fee curve bites hardest, so on both favorites the effective price is a couple of points worse than the sticker. Our sports prediction markets hub walks through the full price-to-probability toolkit.

The DFS Read: An Ace Ranking You Can Argue With

Zoom back out. A season-long award market and a DFS slate reward the same skill: noticing when the crowd's price and the underlying projection disagree, the case we make in full in prediction markets for DFS players. The AL Cy Young odds currently say the volume ace is worth 10 points more than the strikeout ace, and that spread went from Schlittler +30 to Cease +17 and back to Schlittler +10 inside a week. Whether you side with the market's recency or fade it, the way to test your read is with projections, not vibes. The Stokastic Sims are free to try, and they price these same arms every slate they pitch.

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