Pete Crow-Armstrong Isn’t Slowing Down

The NL MVP race is over. Truthfully, it’s been over since the Dodgers announced that Shohei Ohtani was taking a break from pitching all the way back in July. Pete Crow-Armstrong had so thoroughly lapped the field by then that only a unicorn like Ohtani had a shot at some kind of narrative-based upset, and without the chance of him putting up Cy Young-caliber starts to go along with bruising slugging, that was that. Likewise, the Cubs haven’t really been in a playoff race since July; they’re a lock for one of the top two Wild Card spots, but they’re surely not catching the Brewers.

It’s natural for you to take your eye off the ball in a situation like this. How good is Crow-Armstrong? How good are the Cubs? Well, good enough that you don’t have to think about them again until October. If you’re a neutral fan, I wouldn’t blame you for filing away your view of team and player, tuning back in to your local nine, and resting assured that you already know who the best player in the league was this year, regardless of what transpired the rest of the way.

But while you were (potentially) looking away, Crow-Armstrong is still on a tear. He’s not just the best player in the majors this year; he’s also been the best player in the majors over the past month. Where last year he melted in the late-summer heat, this year he’s getting better as time passes. Not only that, the way he’s doing it has me revising my long-term outlook on him.

When Crow-Armstrong broke out in 2025, he had an obvious weakness. He simply never saw a pitch he didn’t think he could tattoo. That made him run hot and cold; he paired incredible runs of scalded contact with stretches where he couldn’t buy a hit. Early this year, he was alternating between swing-happy stretches and periods of extreme patience. As Jay Jaffe pointed out, that helped him get the ball in the air to the pull side more frequently, in addition to forcing pitchers to venture into the zone more often or give up free passes.

Around the time that Crow-Armstrong locked up the MVP race, he was at his most discerning; the lowest 10-game chase rate he’s recorded came almost exactly at the All-Star break. For me, that felt concerning; when a player is making enormous changes, I worry about whether he’ll be able to stabilize at a level that consolidates his gains without seeing fall-offs elsewhere. Think of lift-and-pull types who end up with popup and strikeout problems, contact-happy strike zone defenders who expand their chase until they’re OBP sieves, or to expand the comparisons, pitchers who cut down on fastballs until they’ve built the whole plane out of sliders and suddenly can’t throw a strike.

That too-much-of-a-good-thing problem has emphatically not happened in Crow-Armstrong’s case. He’s kept his chase and swing rates in a tight band throughout the summer, sticking with his increased patience without taking it too far:

Lest you think that’s just a normal graph for him, consider that in 2025, his yearlong O-Swing% was a hair above 40%. He hasn’t had a 10-game stretch of chasing that often since early June. If you and I were to make subjective odds on Crow-Armstrong’s ability to sustainably adjust to a lower-chase, lower-volatility approach, we would likely have started with a pretty low estimate of success before this year. I would have raised my guess moderately when he aggressively cut his chase rate early in the year – and in fact, I did raise my estimation of his odds of finding a good long-term hitting approach when I ranked him third in the Trade Value series. But even then, in mid-July, I was still unsure if he’d be able to maintain the positive aspects of his approach long-term. Another two months of confirmation since then – two more months of making pitchers come to him and feasting on the results – has made me ever more confident that this is a real skill, not just random fluctuation or a temporary stratagem.

This plan only works if you have the horsepower to do damage when pitchers inevitably start to venture into the strike zone. On that front, I have a chart to show you:

That’s slugging percentage per ball in play, my favorite measure of damage when I’m looking at a strike zone chart. And while you shouldn’t read too much into the numbers in any one cell, you absolutely should read into how many of his slugging percentage numbers there have four digits. This is pretty easy to interpret: If you leave something over the middle and he hits it, it’ll land a long way away.

Showing pitchers the error of their zone-filling ways has been the theme of Crow-Armstrong’s last month of dominance. He leads baseball with 15 home runs in the last 30 days. Out of those 15 homers, 14 have come on pitches in the strike zone. Heck, nine have come on four-seam fastballs in the strike zone. This isn’t some bad-ball-fueled power binge, not a Javy Báez-esque mirage where he hit six balls from his shoelaces in a few weeks and made the slash line sing. As it turns out, Crow-Armstrong doesn’t have to do that to have a hot streak, particularly now that he’s not giving away free strikes as often. If you brought a preconception from prior years, you’d never guess this chart of home run pitch locations was his:

That’s a large change from my personal mental heuristic for Crow-Armstrong. I blame it on my feeble human pattern-matching brain. We’ve all seen players who fit the same generic mold – electric defenders with big raw power and an expansive approach to the strike zone. In my head, they all go together. I mentioned Báez as a paragon of this style, but he’s hardly the only one whose production comes in this shape. You don’t even have to look beyond center field to find guys like this; Julio Rodríguez and Ceddanne Rafaela are both great defenders and great overall players who swing too often, for example.

Those guys crush the ball when it’s over the plate too, but they swing at enough bad balls that they don’t get pitches to hit at the same clip as Crow-Armstrong – or at least, they put enough bad pitches into play that their contact quality plays down. That gives me hope that, rather than 2026 being an outlier career year for him, this is just who PCA is now. Sure, he’s on a hot streak, but even if he comes back to earth somewhat, his approach should continue to pay dividends now that he’s at least nodding toward plate discipline.

One way I’m thinking about it: Over the last six years, there have been 73 qualified player-seasons with an ISO of .250 or higher. That’s big bopper territory. The lowest home run total in that group is 30 — Munetaka Murakami this season. (The lowest full-season total is 31, from Corbin Carroll last year.) The lowest wRC+ is 101, from Adam Duvall in 2021, but he’s an exception here — the average wRC+ in this group is an enviable 147. This group features, for the most part, sluggers in their primes. And very few of them – six of the 73 – have run chase rates of 35% or higher.

I picked 35% somewhat arbitrarily, to put Crow-Armstrong’s 2025 season above the line and his 2026 season below it. But I think there’s something instructive in the distribution of these values. Great sluggers aren’t notably patient – the average chase rate of this group is 28.5%, pretty close to the league average over that time period. But the distribution is truncated. There are plenty of hitters who chase a little bit more than league average and sustainably hit for power. Venture too far into chase land, however, and the odds of producing a huge power season start coming down quickly. Sure, maybe you’ll spike the occasional Salvador Perez-in-2021 outcome – 48 dingers, 4.2% walk rate – but it’s instructive that Perez followed that year up with a 96 wRC+ over his next 1,000 plate appearances. Or maybe you’d prefer Luis Robert Jr. in 2023 as an example. He socked 38 homers that year despite atrocious plate discipline (5.0% walk rate, 28.9% strikeout rate), but then the form vanished, and he’s managed only an 87 wRC+ in the subsequent three seasons.

I feared for that outcome when I was evaluating Crow-Armstrong earlier this summer. But the longer that he keeps looking like a conventional slugger, the more I’m willing to believe that he’s a different player than he was a year ago. One constructive way of thinking about it for me: Last year, 20% of the pitches he saw came with him ahead in the count. This year, he’s up to 25%, a massive increase. That’s the difference between the first and 34th percentile for that statistic – and of course, he’s cut his behind-in-the-count pitches by roughly the same amount. Last year, his plate discipline made him a clear outlier, most at home with defensive specialists and light-hitting outfielders. This season, he looks like a pretty standard good slugger. That’s a major change.

When a player is as good of a defender as Crow-Armstrong – he’s the best there is – and also has big power, it’s natural to group him with other similar types. I’m not even arguing that this is a bad instinct in general. It’s usually right to group like players together; it saves valuable space in your brain for more important stuff, like remembering who won the 2017 AL Cy Young or where you left your keys. But when someone slides from one zone – glove-first outfielder with pop – to another zone – MVP candidate – be careful not to get caught in the past.

Another way of looking at it: By late July, Crow-Armstrong was prohibitively likely to finish the season with more WAR than anyone else. Now that we’re in the middle of September, Crow-Armstrong is a lock to finish the season with more WAR than anyone else. In that sense, nothing changed. Except, that’s not really the case. There’s valuable signal in his ability to sustain this new form through the dog days of summer. These games don’t count less because they don’t have much bearing on the MVP race. If you follow baseball like I do – the whole league, but not all at once, with notes and views on players filed away for later evaluation – you’re liable to miss moves like these. So consider this a PCA PSA: It’s time to start watching him, because if you haven’t been tuning in, you’ve been missing out.