On Monday night at Busch Stadium, Dustin May made the most impressive start of his major league career. The right-hander was perfect through six and finished with a one-hit, one-walk shutout. He threw 101 pitches. He struck out nine. If it weren’t for Jacob Misiorowski’s 15-strikeout tour de force last Friday, this might have been the best-pitched game of the season.
With that gem, May brought his ERA under 4.00 and moved into the NL’s top 10 in quality starts and FanGraphs WAR. He owns a 3.38 xERA and a 3.75 SIERA. Only two qualified pitchers in either league have a lower home run rate, a lower walk rate, and a higher strikeout rate this season: Cam Schlittler and Cristopher Sánchez.
A shutout will juice anyone’s numbers, and not everything May is doing right now is sustainable. His home run-to-fly-ball ratio won’t stay so low forever. It’s currently less than half his rate from 2019-25. At the same time, his BABIP is significantly higher than his career average, while his strand rate is markedly lower. That means he’s run into some bad luck to balance out his good fortune. The result is a matching 3.75 ERA and SIERA. Baseball Prospectus agrees that his “deserved ERA” is 3.77, while the ZiPS projection system forecasts a 3.78 mark for him over the rest of the season. The PitchingBot model suggests the quality of his arsenal translates to 3.85 earned runs per nine. All of those metrics use disparate methods to reach their conclusions, but when it comes to May, they end up at the same one: He has earned his success so far in 2026.
May was an honorable mention on MLBTR’s last Top 50 Free Agents ranking. The $12.5MM guarantee he secured from the Cardinals was surprisingly high to some, but it wasn’t a mistake to leave him off the top 50; in terms of total salary, his contract was the 51st largest of the offseason. This winter, May could be much higher on the list. Not only is he healthy and pitching well, but the 2026-27 free agent class is notably thin. It’s so thin that Michael Soroka was one of five players who just missed the top 10 on MLBTR’s latest Free Agent Power Rankings.
Soroka isn’t just catching strays here. I bring him up because he’s a shockingly apt comparison for May. Watch them pitch this year, and you won’t see many similarities between the two. May leads with a sinker that touches 99 against righties and a four-seam that touches 99 against lefties. Soroka’s max velocity is three ticks slower, and his primary pitch is an 80-mph slurve. Yet, the two right-handers, born 33 days apart in 1997, are more alike than you might realize.
Their stories are two chapters from the same book. Once star prospects, May and Soroka lived up to the hype in their debut seasons, only for a series of injuries to derail their careers. Finally, in 2025, they both made double-digit starts for the first time since their rookie campaigns. They proceeded to sign one-year contracts (with mutual options for 2027) in free agency. Here are the career numbers through 2025 that earned them those deals:
- 3.86 ERA, 4.25 SIERA, 21.9% K rate, 8.3% BB rate, 46.6% GB rate
- 3.85 ERA, 4.29 SIERA, 21.8% K rate, 8.0% BB rate, 47.1% GB rate
The first bullet point is May, and the second is Soroka, but I left them unlabelled to drive home the message. For all intents and purposes, the stats are identical. Soroka has thrown more innings in his career, but May has thrown more recently. And on a per-inning basis, these two were pretty much the same pitcher for the first six seasons of their respective careers.
Through their first 14 starts in 2026, May ranks ninth in the National League in FanGraphs WAR. Soroka is one spot ahead, with a lead so small that a rounding error could wipe it out. Soroka has the better ERA, but May has the edge in xERA. Soroka has the lower walk rate, but May has induced more ground balls. SIERA favors Soroka, but most of the major pitch models prefer what May brings to the table. ZiPS projects nearly identical performance from each of them for the rest of the season.
So, if Soroka is on track to be one of next winter’s top 20 free agents, May belongs in that conversation as well. Soroka is a bigger name, thanks to the All-Star appearance, Rookie of the Year runner-up finish, and down-ballot Cy Young votes on his resume. All of that is impressive, but all of that was seven years ago. If either of these two still has an All-Star ceiling, it might be May instead. He throws harder and boasts an even deeper arsenal, with six pitches that he throws at least 5% of the time. In 2026, only three starting pitchers (min. 50 IP) have thrown six different pitches at least that often with an average fastball harder than May’s: Dylan Cease, Sandy Alcantara, and Eury Pérez. There’s more to being an ace than high velocity and a diverse pitch mix, and Pérez is all the proof you need. Nonetheless, those are valuable traits – perhaps even valuable enough to engender a bidding war among teams that think they can get the most out of them. Just last winter, the Blue Jays gave Cease $210MM because they saw the blueprint for a more consistent ace. So far, it’s looking like they were right. May won’t command anything close to nine figures, but that only increases the number of teams that might be interested in his services.
It’s far too soon to start writing May’s blurb for the top 50 list. When the last Free Agent Power Rankings came out, he still 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 pitcher who has already torn his UCL twice. The elbow neuritis he suffered last September proved to be minor, and the esophageal tear that ended his 2024 season had nothing to do with baseball activities. Still, he has never topped 24 starts or 150 innings in a season, at the major or minor league level. But this could be the year that changes.
All he needs to do is stay on the field and keep pitching the way he has. If he can pull that off, Dustin May will be a name to watch this winter. That might be an indication of a weak free agent class, but it would also be a huge accomplishment for a pitcher who has dealt with more than his fair share of setbacks. With every start he makes in 2026, May can boost his free agent stock.
Images courtesy of Jeff Curry, Imagn Images.
