Monday night at Busch Stadium, Dustin May he made the best start of his major league career. The right-hander was excellent from six overs and finished with one strike, shutout without one walk. He threw 101 pitches. He hit nine. If it wasn’t for Jacob Misiorowski‘s 15-strikeout tour de force last Friday, this may have been his best performance of the season.
With that feat, May brought his ERA under 4.00 and moved into the NL’s top 10 in quality starts and FanGraphs WAR. He has a 3.38 xERA and a 3.75 SIERA. Only two professional players in any major league have a lower home run rate, lower walk rate, and higher strikeout rate this season: Cam Schlittler again Christopher Sánchez.
Hanging up will give anyone’s numbers, and not everything May is doing right now is going on. His home run average won’t stay so low forever. It is currently less than half of his average from 2019-25. At the same time, his BABIP is significantly higher than his career average, while his strike rate is significantly lower. That means he’s had some bad luck to balance his luck. The result is a 3.75 ERA similar to SIERA. Baseball Prospectus agrees that his “fair” ERA is 3.77, while the ZiPS projection system projects a 3.78 mark for him over the course of the season. The PitchingBot model suggests the quality of his arsenal translates into his 3.85 earned runs per nine innings. All of those metrics use different methods to reach their conclusions, but when May rolls around, they all come down to the same thing: He’s achieved his feat so far in 2026.
May it be an honorable speech MLBTR’s final ranking of the top 50 free agents. The $12.5MM guarantee he received from the Cardinals was surprisingly high for some, but it wasn’t a mistake to leave him outside the top 50; in terms of total salary, his contract was the 51st largest this offseason. This winter, May may be at the top of the list. Not only is he healthy and playing well, but the 2026-27 free agency is very young. It’s thin like that Michael Soroka he was one five players who just missed the top 10 MLBTR Free Agent Power Ratings.
Soroka doesn’t just catch strays here. I brought her up because she looks remarkably like May. Watch them play this year, and you won’t see many similarities between the two. May leads with a 99-hit sinker for righties and a 99-hit four-seam for lefties. Soroka’s top speed is three ticks slower, and his main pitch is an 80-mph slurve. However, the two right-handers, who were born 33 days apart in 1997, are more alike than you might think.
Their stories are two chapters of one book. Once star prospects, May and Soroka lived up to the hype in their first seasons, only for a series of injuries to derail their careers. Finally, in 2025, both made double digits for the first time since their rookie campaigns. They went on to sign one-year contracts (with matching options for 2027) in free agency. Here are the job numbers through 2025 that earned them those deals:
- 3.86 ERA, 4.25 SIERA, 21.9% K average, 8.3% BB rate, 46.6% GB rate
- 3.85 ERA, 4.29 SIERA, 21.8% K average, 8.0% BB rate, 47.1% GB rate
The first point of the bullet is May, the second is Soroka, but I left them unwritten to drive the message home. For all intents and purposes, the math is the same. Soroka has pitched many innings in his career, but May has thrown more recently. And on a per-inning basis, the two have been very similar through the first six seasons of their respective careers.
Through their first 14 starts in 2026, May ranked ninth in the National League in FanGraphs WAR. Soroka is one point ahead, with such a small lead that a rounding error could wipe it out. Soroka has the better ERA, but May has the edge in xERA. Soroka has a low walk rate, but May attracted a lot of ground balls. SIERA likes Soroka, but most of the big pitch models prefer what May brings to the table. The ZiPS project is almost identical to the operation of the entire season.
So, if Soroka is on track to be one of the 20 free agents next winter, May is part of that conversation as well. Soroka is a bigger name, thanks to an All-Star appearance, a Rookie of the Year runner-up finish, and low Cy Young votes on his resume. All of that is impressive, but that all happened seven years ago. If one of those two still has an All-Star cap, it might be in May instead. He throws hard and boasts an even deeper arsenal, with six pitches he throws at least 5% of the time. In 2026, only three starting pitchers (min. 50 IP) have thrown six different pitches at least as often with a stronger average fastball than May: Dylan Cease, Sandy Alcantaraagain Eury Pérez. There’s more to being an ace than top speed and a varied pitch mix, and Pérez is the proof you need. Still, those are important factors — perhaps important enough to set up a bidding war between parties who think they can get the most out of them. Just last winter, the Blue Jays offered Cease $210MM because they saw a consistent blueprint for the ace. So far, it looks like they were right. May won’t command anything close to nine figures, but that only increases the number of teams who may be interested in his services.
It’s almost too soon to start listing the bleakest voices of May in the top 50 list. When the Free Agent Power Rankings came out, he had a 4.59 ERA. That was less than two weeks ago. Things can change quickly. May also has to stay healthy, which is far from a given. This is a striker who has already torn his UCL twice. The elbow neuritis he suffered last September appeared to be minor, and the esophageal tear that ended his 2024 season was unrelated to baseball activities. Still, he never topped 24 innings or 150 innings in a season, at the major or minor league level. But this could be a changing year.
All he has to do is stay on the field and continue to excel in the way he is doing. If he can pull that off, Dustin May will be a name to watch this winter. That might be indicative of a weak free agent class, but it would also be a huge accomplishment for a pitcher who has faced more than his fair share of struggles. With every start he makes in 2026, May can increase his free agent stock.
Photos courtesy of Jeff Curry, Imagn Images.
