It’s a Good Day To Be PCA’s CPA

Late last night, Jeff Passan of ESPN reported that the Cubs and star center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong had reached an agreement on a long-term contract extension. That deal, worth $115 million over six years, keeps one of baseball’s most popular young stars in the fold through 2032.

This extension, the largest ever for a player with so little service time, begins in 2027, buys out two of Crow-Armstrong’s free agent years, and includes escalators that could increase the value to $133 million. But shockingly, (and to the immense relief of those of us who are still parsing the inscrutable Julio Rodríguez extension), it does not include any option years. Whatever happens, Crow-Armstrong can still hit free agency after his age-30 season.

Crow-Armstrong, who turns 24 tomorrow, has already played 293 highly productive games in the majors, in which he’s socked 41 home runs, stolen 64 bases, and roped in untold highlight-reel catches in center field. Crow-Armstrong is a dynamic athlete, the likes of which the American youth baseball setup usually loses to football, with a compellingly flashy style of play. This dude was born to be a star; the longer he plays on a good team in a big market, the hotter he’s going to get.

I once wrote that the young Fernando Tatis Jr. made lots of mistakes on the field, but not from a lack of concentration or effort; rather, he played like he was testing the boundaries of the sport, as if he believed limits were for other people. Crow-Armstrong plays that way too, and when a player like that falls into your lap, you do whatever it takes to keep him around.

Baseball teams run on production, not vibes, and “he’s so cool” doesn’t exactly fly as a reason to give a ballplayer $115 million. The good news is that Crow-Armstrong is genuinely really good. He led a good Cubs team in WAR last year, and with 31 homers, 35 steals, and plus-17.5 defense at a premium up-the-middle position, he’s an impact player in every phase of the game.

He is, however, not a perfect player. Acknowledging that players who post 5 WAR or more in their age-23 seasons usually go on to long and productive careers, there’s more uncertainty — for good and ill — around PCA than most players who fit that description.

For that reason, I’ve written about this guy a lot over his brief career, so I’ll try to keep the review of previous material as brief as possible.

In short, Crow-Armstrong was built in a lab to be overhyped as a prospect: Elite athlete with a memorable bit of trivia in his personal bio. First-round pick out of a talent factory high school, turned down a scholarship to Vandy to play for the Mets, who then let him go in a brutal trade that led to a nightmarish meltdown. (Both “brutal” and “nightmarish” even by the Mets’ standards.)

On the field, the stuff Crow-Armstrong does well is both exciting and easy to spot, while his deficiencies aren’t apparent on a highlight reel. Plus-plus speed, strength, power… but the hit tool and batting eye were then, and are now, relative weaknesses. Easy enough to spot if you can see the .287 on-base percentage he posted last year; less easy to explain to the talk radio caller or the loudmouth at the bar.

Any discussion of Crow-Armstrong’s game has to start with the glove; this has been special throughout his career. But fast guys with plus-plus defense in center field are fairly common, and the difference between Cristian Pache and prime Lorenzo Cain can be vanishingly small.

Since arriving in the majors, PCA has made steady improvements on this front. Plenty of great defensive center fielders have put up a few All-Star-level seasons with a slap-hitting, ground-and-pound approach, but that’s never been his game. He’s always been fairly strong and hit a decent number of balls in the air.

Crow-Armstrong has made three changes to his game (or maybe one change, with three distinct effects) that allowed him to evolve from Zoomer Kevin Kiermaier to American J-Rod.

First: He’s swinging the bat harder. Crow-Armstrong’s average bat speed jumped from 70.6 mph in 2024 to 72.7 mph in 2025, and his fast-swing rate improved from 8.0% to 28.5%. Swing harder and you’ll hit the ball harder; Crow-Armstrong’s EV90 climbed from 101.8 mph in his first full season to 105.2 in his second.

That’s decent, but I don’t know if I’d call it plus power or anything; Crow-Armstrong’s EV90 in 2025 was 81st out of 145 qualified hitters. That’s where the other two changes come in. As a rookie, PCA had a 79.2% Z-Contact%. Anything below 80% in that mark is survivable, but it’s hard to thrive in that range without truly elite power. In 2025, he raised his in-zone contact rate to 83.8%.

Third: He is getting the absolute maximum out of what contact he makes. The most valuable batted balls, in general, are hit in the air and to the pull side. In 2024, Crow-Armstrong put 19.3% of his batted balls in that direction, which is above average, even good. In 2025, that number was 30.2%, which was the seventh-highest figure out of 251 players on Baseball Savant’s leaderboard.

Crow-Armstrong hit 31 home runs last year because he got the absolute maximum out of his plate discipline and quality-of-contact numbers. Add in the defense and the baserunning, and I think this might literally be the best all-around baseball player you could have with a 4.5% walk rate and a .247 batting average.

But he’s still a player with a .247 batting average and a 4.5% walk rate. Or, to use the more legible figure I mentioned above, a .287 OBP. Last year, Crow-Armstrong made more outs per plate appearance than Nick Castellanos, Lenyn Sosa, and Ke’Bryan Hayes. Is it possible to be a franchise player if that’s true? We’ll find out.

And that’s the big question going forward.

On one hand, Crow-Armstrong is already a five-win player who’s made huge strides in a brief big league career. He’s shown the capacity to learn and adapt at the major league level, which bodes well for his future development. Again, he’s younger than 15 of the 110 prospects on our preseason Top 100 list.

But the path to sustained superstardom with a 4.5% walk rate is steep, narrow, and full of snakes. I mentioned this last offseason, just before another young star center fielder, Jackson Merrill, parlayed a five-win season into his own nine-figure extension.

Merrill is nowhere near as good a runner or defender as Crow-Armstrong is, but he’s a far better hitter overall. And rather than taking a step forward in Year 1 of his new contract, Merrill’s Z-Contact% dropped into that dreaded mid-to-upper-70s range, his batting average fell 28 points, and his wRC+ dropped from 130 to 116. An ankle injury hobbled the Padres’ young star, and limited him to 115 games; that contributed to his drop from 5.3 WAR to 3.0, but even on a per-game basis, Merrill wasn’t as good in 2025 as he had been in 2024.

That’s the risk: That a drop in bat speed or contact rate, or an adjustment from opposing pitchers, could send the whole house of cards tumbling down. Maybe even more so for PCA than for Merrill, because he’s already picked off so much low-hanging fruit to get to this point as a hitter. If anything, I’d be more cautious to extend him because of this, because his years of peak athleticism are already under team control.

Or he could add a little more muscle, learn to draw the occasional walk, and turn into Ken Griffey Jr. Best to lock him up now, just in case that happens.