It’s All About Makin’ That PCA

Pete Crow-Armstrong just had a really good night. He made multiple highlight-reel catches in center field, including robbing Max Muncy of a home run with two outs in the ninth inning.

That was a great play even by PCA’s lofty standards, but his speed and defense are a known quantity. I just had to stop myself from using the word “gamebreaking,” like he’s a cornerback and punt returner from the 1990s or something. Crow-Armstrong’s glove is going to get him on SportsCenter, but it’s on the other side of the ball where he’ll determine how much he can help the Cubs while he’s there, as well as how long he stays in the lineup and how much money he makes over his career. The really exciting part of PCA’s Tuesday night only shows up in the box score: He went 2-for-4 with two RBI.

Crow-Armstrong was built in a lab to have his fame outstrip his usefulness as a prospect. He was a first-round pick with flashy tools, a distinctive name, and a memorable, if unimaginative, initials-based nickname. Crow-Armstrong was bought out of a major college commitment (Vanderbilt) by a big-market team (the Mets), then quickly traded in a deal Mets fans would probably rather have back. Good news: Mets fans aren’t easily rattled by that sort of thing. I should take a trip up the Turnpike and see how they feel about Jarred Kelenic these days.

Even so, players like PCA can still get lost in a sea of Aidens and Gunnars unless there’s a tentpole piece of trivia to remember them by. Playing in the Little League World Series is a good one, or having an unusual haircut or an interesting non-baseball-related skill. Crow-Armstrong has one, and it’s a blessing and a curse. More than 100 games into his big league career, the most-known fact about him is probably still that his mother played Mrs. Heywood in Little Big League.

The one way to change that is to perform, and Crow-Armstrong is still the second-most-successful child of actors who matriculated from Harvard-Westlake School, was drafted in the middle of the first round by an NL East team, got traded, and then established himself as a big leaguer in Chicago. And there’s a ways to go before he catches Lucas Giolito.

But early indications are promising.

Players who can field like PCA — 96th percentile range and 95th percentile arm strength, according to Baseball Savant — and run like PCA — 99th percentile sprint speed — are always going to have some kind of role on a major league roster if they can hit even a little. What kind of role depends, obviously, on how much they hit.

Despite having played just 106 games so far, Crow-Armstrong has produced 5.2 runs above average as a baserunner, which is eighth among all MLB players regardless of playing time. His 10.5 defensive runs rate fifth among all outfielders. (His bonkers Tuesday night alone was worth about a run and a half.) Extrapolating those numbers out to 550 plate appearances and 1,000 defensive innings brings the total to over 20 combined defensive and baserunning runs above average.

If Crow-Armstrong could produce 20 combined defensive and baserunning runs above average, that’d be quite an achievement. It’s been done only nine times in the past 10 seasons by an outfielder with 500 or more plate appearances.

Now, here I had planned to do some rigmarole where I estimated the total value of a plus-20 runner and defender based on various wRC+ cutoffs, sort of the reverse of an article I wrote two winters ago examining Bryan Reynolds’ bat given various defensive outcomes. But as luck would have it, those nine outfield seasons form a perfect illustration of the bell curve I was trying to hint at.

A really terrible hitter with these defensive and baserunning gifts is playable, but any manager who writes his name in a lineup card 150 times a year is going to pray for death several dozen times a year when this player comes up with the game on the line. An average hitter with this glove and those legs — or even a slightly below-average hitter — can be a first-division starter, a Gold Glove winner, and a core member of a playoff team. An above-average hitter with +20 combined defense and baserunning is going to finish in the top 10 in the MVP race.

Overall this season, PCA has a wRC+ of 90, which is kind of in the range of the Ender Inciarte or young Kevin Kiermaier outcome. But he hasn’t just flatlined at that level.

In the first half, PCA hit .203/.253/.329, which is a wRC+ of 64 — Billy Hamilton territory. Since the break, he’s hit .284/.327/.465, which is a hair’s breadth from tickling prime Lorenzo Cain. Now, each of those splits comprises only 150 plate appearances or so, which makes it hard to draw definitive conclusions from results alone. But it’s obvious he’s doing things differently.

Take a look at the following two home runs, the first from April (his first big league homer, in fact), the second from last week. Earlier in the year, Crow-Armstrong had a very flat bat and a very quiet lower half.

Compare that to the more recent swing. Actually, forget the swing itself, and just look at what Crow-Armstrong’s doing before he commits. The bat is closer to 10 o’clock, maybe 10:30, and PCA is lifting his front leg before the pitcher even releases the ball.

I get what he was going for with the first swing. Ordinarily, you don’t want a flat swing geared for soft line drive contact, but this is a left-handed hitter who’s so fast that the inconsistent blue color on the front of his jersey isn’t a printing error, it’s the Doppler effect. It’s OK if he hits the ball on the ground. But he wasn’t doing it enough, or particularly effectively, or avoiding strikeouts. In the first half, Crow-Armstrong had a strikeout rate of 25.9% and a BABIP of just .261.

So if he’s going to strike out anyway, and he’s not Akinori Iwamura-ing his way into a bunch of infield hits, it seems that the time has come to let the big dog eat.

Becoming more of a fly ball hitter hasn’t turned Crow-Armstrong into a guy who cranks 30 pull-side homers a year. In fact, he’s pulling the ball less now than he was before. (Perhaps that .261 first-half BABIP was the result of a multitude of grounders to the second baseman.) But he’s hitting the ball harder, and making better swing decisions, at a minimal cost in contact rate. In fact, because he’s chasing less, Crow-Armstrong has reduced his K% substantially in the second half, to 20.6%.

Even the new Crow-Armstrong is by no means a middle-of-the-order hitter, and we’ll see how durable these changes are, whether they stand up to another trip around the league. And for that matter, there’s no guarantee his gaudy baserunning and defense numbers will last either.

With that said: This is a guy who started the year hitting like a fourth outfielder and pinch runner. We now have almost two months of elite defense and baserunning on top of above-average offense, bordering on plus. If PCA does anything like that going forward, he’s going to be much more than a flashy prospect with an interesting backstory.