Pete Crow-Armstrong Just Wants a Hug

You can’t keep Pete Crow-Armstrong away from the baseball field. I mean that in the sense that he’s a passionate young star who loves the game and plays with his hair on fire all the time. But I also mean that in a more literal sense. The Cubs might need to devise a system for keeping Crow-Armstrong away from the baseball field. He has a problem.

The Cubs walked off the Rockies on Monday night. The score was 3-3. With one out and two on in the bottom of the 11th inning, rookie Matt Shaw stayed back and punched a Tyler Kinley slider into right field, scoring Jon Berti from second base. It was thrilling. (For the Cubs, anyway; for the Rockies, it was probably akin to the feeling you have when you go to bed with a tickle in your throat and you just know that it’s a really bad cold coming on even though there’s no tangible basis for that certainty, and then you do in fact wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible cold.) As you’d expect after a thrilling(-slash-miserable) walk-off hit, Shaw got mobbed by his teammates.

Well, he got mobbed by one teammate, anyway. There’s Shaw, moments after his big hit, engaged in an intimate leaping chest bump with Crow-Armstrong. I mean “intimate” in the sense that it seemed like a special moment, but I also mean it in the sense that it’s just the two of them all alone on the grass under the romantic Chicago skies, smiling at each other like there’s nobody else in the whole wide world. The rest of the Cubs are just out of frame, celebrating too.

They would arrive a second or two later, but PCA got there first, and he got there first for one reason: He cheated. Here’s a still from the exact moment Berti’s right foot touched home plate.

I count 15 different Cubs headed out toward Shaw at this point. Crow-Armstrong wasn’t even the first one out of the dugout, but there he is in full stride, a solid 10 feet onto the field by the time the run scores. Just to state the obvious here, that’s not allowed. Players can’t just run onto the field in the middle of an active play whenever they feel like it. There’s a rule against that. I think. I’m pretty sure there might be a rule against that.

We’ll circle back to that point later. For now, let’s go back to April 22. As Greg Huss of Cubs on Deck noted, Monday wasn’t the first time Crow-Armstrong had been caught offsides. In that April game, the Cubs walked off the Dodgers on an Ian Happ single, and once again, PCA was guilty of a false start. There he is well onto the field as Vidal Bruján slides across the plate to win the game, and there he is hugging Happ tightly like a little kid desperate to keep a squirmy puppy from escaping his clutches.

You can see Happ looking toward the dugout, trying to see how long he’s got before the mob arrives to rip the jersey off his back and crown him with a Dubble Bubble bucket. But Crow-Armstrong is so far ahead of everyone else that Happ appears to be squinting way off toward the horizon like a plains traveler who has sensed a shift in the air pressure and is now hunting the skies for signs of an impending thunderstorm. In the meantime, Crow-Armstrong has the man of the hour all to himself.

Crow-Armstrong isn’t hurting anybody here (unless he’s actually hugging his teammates as tightly as he appears to be hugging them). Although he’s been on the field when he shouldn’t, he’s never interfered with the play. He’s just guilty of the kind of enthusiasm that we all want to see anyway. Still, he’s an outlier here. I’ve watched every Cubs walk-off since the team called Crow-Armstrong up, looking for a common thread. What is it exactly that so overwhelms his compunctions about entering the field of play while the play is still underway?

On August 1 of last year, Crow-Armstrong was also the first player on the field, well before the winning run actually crossed the plate, to congratulate Mike Tauchman. This despite the fact that it was Crow-Armstrong’s turn at the plate and Tauchman was pinch-hitting for him. He couldn’t wait until the game was actually over even to congratulate the player who took the bat out of his hands!

That was the only other real chance Crow-Armstrong had to run onto the field. Some of the other walk-offs were home runs, during which everyone congregates around home plate to congratulate the batter. Some were plays at the plate, during which even someone as bold as Crow-Armstrong knows to stay out of the way. Even in those cases, though, he finds a way to express his enthusiasm.

And even when he doesn’t have the chance to run onto the field early, he still finds a way to be the first and hug the hardest.

When Nico Hoerner walked off the Diamondbacks on July 21, Crow-Armstrong followed him around like a puppy so that he could place the Dubble Bubble bucket on his head. When Seiya Suzuki walked off the Blue Jays on August 16, Crow-Armstrong was there second, ripping the jersey off his frame. I know I put a lot of pictures and GIFs into this article, but believe me when I tell you that I could have easily included twice as many. The guy just loves to celebrate. I’m not even sure we could keep him off the field if we wanted to. Would a fence do the trick? Just build a nice, high fence?

No, something tells me a fence wouldn’t work. More like Pete Crow-Legstrong. To answer the question I posed earlier, I think Crow-Armstrong just wants to celebrate. Quite simply, he’s rushing onto the field so early because that’s where the hugs are.

As for the other question, remember when I said that PCA couldn’t just run onto the field whenever he wanted because there was definitely a rule against that? Well, he definitely shouldn’t do that. If he were to do so, the other team would object and the umpires would agree. But I’m not sure what exactly they would be able to do about it.

I skimmed through the rulebook twice, and I have to tell you that the rules of baseball are weird. For example, Rule 6.03(b) says you can get away with batting out of turn scot-free as long as the other team doesn’t object in time. That’s not a loophole. It’s the direct intention of the rule, as a comment explains: “The umpire shall not direct the attention of any person to the presence in the batter’s box of an improper batter. This rule is designed to require constant vigilance by the players and managers of both teams.” Why should the rules explicitly demand constant vigilance? It’s a game, and one that includes four umpires, an official scorer, and a pitch clock operator. You shouldn’t have to be both a shortstop and a compliance monitor.

There are plenty of rules that explain what happens should a player, coach, or spectator interfere with the defense.

Rule 6.01(b) says players shall vacate any space needed by a fielder attempting to field a ball. Rule 5.12(b)(7) says the umpire must call time before ordering someone off the field, but 5.12(b)(8) specifies the situations when an umpire is allowed to call “Time,” and Pete Crow-Armstrong bounding across the field like a golden retriever isn’t one of them. Rule 5.03(c) says a base coach who keeps leaving the coaching box will get a warning, then an ejection (and be subject to discipline from the league). Rule 5.08(b) says the runner gets the next base if fans rush the field and keep them from touching it. Rule 6.01(a)(4) says it’s interference if members of the offensive team stand or gather around the base to which the runner is advancing, but only if they’re doing so specifically to confuse, hinder, or add to the difficulty of the fielders.

But what if the player doesn’t want to hinder anybody? What he doesn’t want to interfere or confuse. What if he just wants to be with his friends and give big hugs because he’s bursting with love? How would you even write a rulebook like that?

Sadly, this isn’t quite an Air Bud situation. There is a very clear rule that says a player can’t do what Crow-Armstrong is doing. But it’s not particularly strict. I give you Rule 5.10(k): “Players and substitutes of both teams shall confine themselves to their team’s benches unless actually participating in the play or preparing to enter the game, or coaching at first or third base… PENALTY: For violation the umpire may, after warning, remove the offender from the field.”

So the worst thing the umpire could do to Crow-Armstrong is say, “Hey, young Cub, I’m warning you to get off the field,” at which point Crow-Armstrong could keep on holding his teammate tight, going in for that serious kind of hug where you lean your head against theirs so they can feel your face nuzzling their neck. Only at that point could the umpire say, “OK, this is no longer a warning. You have to get off the field or I’ll throw you out of this game.” But as long as Crow-Armstrong is doing this on the last play of the game, and as long as he’s not interfering with anybody, that’s not going to matter much. By the time the umpire gives the warning, the game will be over. It does mean that Crow-Armstrong can’t spend the entire bottom of the 10th inning wandering around the field and blowing a party horn, but it doesn’t mean he can’t sprint out there even earlier the next time the Cubs walk someone off, spread his arms just as wide, and hold his teammate like he’ll never let them go.