What will decide heavyweight MVP race between Shohei Ohtani, Pete Crow-Armstrong?

DENVER –– This year, they’ve been the two best players in baseball.And this week, they’ve traded MVP-race blows even from 1,000 miles away.Punch: On Monday night, Pete Crow-Armstrong hit a leadoff home run for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Counter-punch: Hours later, Shohei Ohtani went deep in back-to-back at-bats for the Dodgers at Coors Field in Denver.Punch: Ohtani would go on to record a season-high four hits in the Dodgers’ 11-5 win over the Rockies.Counter-punch: Crow-Armstrong would do the same, only with the exclamation mark of a walk-off homer in the Cubs’ extra-innings 7-5 victory.Punch: Crow-Armstrong hit another leadoff homer in another Cubs win on Tuesday, helping him maintain an edge over Ohtani in long balls, wins-above-replacement, and the all-encompassing metric of wRC+.Counter-punch: Ohtani went deep himself later in the Dodgers’ Tuesday night victory, keeping him above Crow-Armstrong in batting average, OPS, RBIs and a different all-encompassing metric of OPS+.In a riveting two-man bout with little obvious separation, it all served as a reminder that this year’s neck-and-neck MVP race is on pace to go the distance.“I think it’s great for baseball,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said, “that Pete’s made it a race.”Indeed, earlier this season, Ohtani seemed to be running away with his fifth career MVP.Not only was he still one of the best hitters in the sport, but he had returned from a second-career Tommy John surgery as one of its most dominant pitchers as well.Through play on June 3, his .941 OPS ranked third in the majors (to go along with a .301 batting average, 10 home runs, and 33 RBIs) while his 0.74 pitching ERA was nearly twice as good as any one else with at least 10 starts.Crow-Armstrong, on the other hand, entered June 3 with a .242 batting average, .718 OPS and only seven home runs.At that point, some sportsbooks had his MVP odds as long as 100-to-1.Over the following five weeks, however, the fabric of ...