MLB MVP Odds: Ohtani's Coin Flip, Alvarez At 90¢

The Quick Answer

The MLB MVP odds on Kalshi split into two very different races as of August 10, 2026. The NL is a coin flip: Shohei Ohtani at 51 to 52 cents (about 52 percent implied) and Pete Crow-Armstrong at 50 to 51, after Crow-Armstrong closed at 37 cents just a week earlier. The AL is nearly decided: Yordan Alvarez at 89 to 90 cents, with the next name at 6. Both full boards, the injury math behind them, and why a 4-cent catcher is the most traded contract in the American League are all below.

Roughly 6.4 million contracts have traded across the two boards (KXMLBALMVP-26 and KXMLBNLMVP-26, per Kalshi's public market data), and what all that volume is pricing is the thing DFS players price every single slate: playing time and role. The AL race broke when Aaron Judge's ribs took him off the field. The NL race is repricing in real time as Ohtani's knee keeps him off the mound. Read both boards that way, projections logic instead of narrative, and almost every number makes sense. One number is stranger than the rest, and we will get to the Detroit catcher behind it.

The AL MVP Board: A 90-Cent Favorite By Attrition

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

Alvarez has earned the sticker: .322/.435/.624 with 35 home runs and 86 RBI through 117 games, an OPS of 1.059 that laps the league. But the shape of the board is attrition. Judge, the back-to-back winner, has been out since May 31 with a stress fracture in his first right rib and has played just 59 games; he is cleared for light activity and says he will return this season, which for an award decided by season-long value is worth about a penny. Cal Raleigh's follow-up season has collapsed to .161 with a .570 OPS through 85 games. A designated hitter at 90 percent is unusual, because DH-only seasons carry no defensive value on a ballot, but a projections lens agrees with the market here: when the two names who opened the year as the class of the league combine for maybe 150 games of ordinary production, the best surviving bat wins by default.

That word, surviving, is why the board's real intrigue lives below the favorite.

The 4-Cent Catcher The Market Keeps Buying

Here is the payoff on that opening promise. Over the last two weeks, the most traded contract on the entire AL board is not Alvarez. It is Dillon Dingler, more than 86,000 contracts, at 3 to 4 cents. The Tigers catcher is hitting .272 with 26 home runs and 80 RBI through 109 games, and catcher is the most valuable positional adjustment in baseball. A projections model that weighs position and defense sees Dingler's season as far closer to Alvarez's than the 86-point price gap implies, and the volume says plenty of traders have noticed. Junior Caminero, 33 homers at .278 as a 23-year-old third baseman, is the same idea one rung up at 6 cents. Bobby Witt Jr. at 3 cents is the opposite case: five-category talent, but a lower-back injury sent him to the injured list for the first time in his career in late July, on top of six games missed in June with a knee sprain. He sits at 100 games played, and this market has already shown you what it does to missing games. This is exactly how service-time reality outranks skill on the MLB Rookie of the Year board, and how health and at-bats outrank raw power on the MLB home run leader board.

The AL, then, is a settled race with an interesting undercard. The NL is the opposite: the most contested award market in baseball.

The NL MVP Board: A Coin Flip Repriced In One Week

Two names above a penny, and their implied probabilities sum to about 102 percent on the midpoints of those ranges, which is the exchange's natural overround telling you this is a true two-man race. A week before August 10, Ohtani closed at 63 cents and Crow-Armstrong at 37. Crow-Armstrong's 14-cent climb has a concrete cause. Ohtani's season line is a two-way monster: .292 with 26 home runs and a .937 OPS at the plate, plus an 8-2 record and a 1.79 ERA with 95 strikeouts across 14 starts on the mound. But he has not pitched since July 3 while the Dodgers manage knee inflammation, and Los Angeles reporting points to a mid-to-late August return at the earliest. Every day he stays a DH-only bat, the pitching half of his MVP case stays frozen in early July.

Crow-Armstrong's case is the one a projections model builds from scratch: .286, 26 home runs, 30 steals, 84 runs through 119 games, with elite center-field defense attached. In DFS terms he is the five-category stud, value in every column, at the position where the ballot rewards it. The market spent a week deciding that a healthy everyday center fielder compounding counting stats is worth roughly the same as a frozen two-way premium. The last two weeks alone traded more than 540,000 NL MVP contracts, with Ohtani and Crow-Armstrong each clearing 200,000; volume follows disagreement, and this is where the disagreement lives. Whether the mound return actually lands is the single biggest swing input left in either race: if Ohtani takes the ball again in August, voters get roughly the final six weeks of a starting pitcher who also slugs, and if he does not, the coin flip keeps drifting toward Wrigley. The one I keep coming back to is that 37-to-51 move, because it is the market doing openly what our projections do quietly: repricing a player the moment his role changes. The MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub run that exact exercise on every slate, and it is the same discipline we argue for in prediction markets for DFS players.

From Cents To Implied Probability

The mechanics, briefly, because a coin-flip race is where they matter most. A Yes contract pays one dollar if the outcome hits, so the price in cents reads directly as an implied probability: Ohtani at 51 to 52 cents implies about 52 percent. Two adjustments keep the read honest. First, each board's prices sum to slightly more than 100 percent, so every name's true market share is a hair below its sticker. Second, Kalshi's trading fee runs roughly 7 percent of price times one minus price per contract, a curve that peaks at 50 cents.

Worked Example: What The NL Coin Flip Really Costs

Buy one Crow-Armstrong Yes at 51 cents and the fee is about 0.07 x 0.51 x 0.49, roughly 1.7 cents, so the all-in cost is closer to 52.7 cents and the implied break-even rises from 51 percent to about 53 percent. That reframes the whole NL section above: the board says coin flip, but after the toll, either side has to be better than roughly a 53 percent winner before its sticker price is fair, so "too close to call" is itself the actionable read. Alvarez at 89 cents carries a much smaller fee, about 0.7 cents, which is one honest argument for why near-settled boards like the AL are cheaper to trade than contested ones. The rest of the price-to-probability toolkit, including when the fee actually changes a read, lives on our sports prediction markets hub.

More on this: MLB Best Record Odds: Brewers And Dodgers One Cent Apart On Kalshi · MLB Playoff Odds: Brewers At 99%, White Sox At 69% And Three Races Still Open · MLB Division Race Odds: Three AL Races Are Wide Open · MLB Rookie of the Year Odds: The Panel Fades Both Favorites · NFL MVP Odds 2026: The Fantasy Build-Around Read

The DFS Read: Two Races, One Lesson

Judge's ribs and Ohtani's knee moved these boards more than any hot streak all season, and that is the one lesson both races teach: award markets, like projections, pay playing time first, the same way a role change moves a player's sim outcomes more than a three-game heater. That is the transferable skill, and it is why an award board is worth a DFS player's attention even with no position taken; it is a season-long version of the pricing argument we grade ourselves on, in public, in the Sims vs. Kalshi ledger, and the same lens we point at football on the Heisman Trophy board. Whether you think the market has Crow-Armstrong right or the two-way premium comes roaring back in late August, the way to test the read is projections, not narrative. The Stokastic Sims are free to try, and they reprice these same players every slate.

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