Pete Crow-Armstrong’s Huge Step Forward

If the 2026 regular season finished today, not only would a sub-.500 team qualify for the playoffs, but Shohei Ohtani’s run of three straight Most Valuable Player awards — the last two in the National League, since signing with the Dodgers — would probably end. Pete Crow-Armstrong has been absolutely on fire since late May, as substantial adjustments to his mechanics and approach have helped his offense catch up to his already-elite defense. The 24-year-old center fielder has overtaken Ohtani on the WAR leaderboard at a time when the two-way superstar has been shut down from pitching, and this week, he put himself in the history books in a few different ways.

On Monday night at Wrigley Field, Crow-Armstrong put on a particularly entertaining show against the White Sox, going 4-for-5 with a pair of home runs, a stolen base, two runs scored, and three runs batted in. Batting leadoff for the Cubs, he began the home half of the first inning by homering on Luis Castillo’s first pitch of the evening, a four-seamer on the inner edge of the plate. He singled off Castillo in the second, and after taking strike three looking on a sinker in the fourth, he drew a walk against reliever Tyler Schweitzer in the sixth, doubled off Trevor Richards in the eighth, then capped his night with a walk-off two-run homer off a hanging slider from Hagen Smith in the 10th.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Crow-Armstrong became just the sixth player to hit both a leadoff and walk-off home run in the same game, after the A’s Vic Power (May 7, 1957 vs. the Orioles), the Angels’ Darin Erstad (June 25, 2000 vs. the Twins), the Blue Jays’ Reed Johnson (June 15, 2003 vs. the Cubs), the Rangers’ Ian Kinsler (July 19, 2009 vs. the Twins), and the Diamondbacks’ Chris Young (Aug. 7, 2010 vs. the Padres).

But wait, there’s more! PCA’s game-winning homer was his 30th of the year, making him the first player to reach 30 homers and 30 steals this season (he stole his 30th base on August 7 against the Royals). It’s his second season in a row going 30-30. I’ll have more on that topic momentarily, but not before acknowledging that he also led off the home half of Tuesday night’s game with another homer, this one off the White Sox’s Bryan Hudson. According to Elias, he’s the 13th player (and first Cub) since 1900 to follow a walk-off homer with a leadoff homer in his team’s next game; the Astros’ Jose Altuve was the last to do that, on June 15–16, 2021 against the Rangers. It was Crow-Armstrong’s sixth leadoff homer of the season — tying him for fourth in the majors in that category — and his second time connecting for one on back-to-back days; he also did it on June 15–16 against the Rockies:

As for 30-30, last year a record-high seven players reached both plateaus in the same season, up from three in 2024 and four in ’23. That unprecedented swell owed plenty to the 2023 rule changes — the pitch clock, limitations on pickoff throws, and slightly shorter distance between bases — that favored base stealing; previously, the highest total of 30-30 seasons across a three-year span was 10, from 1996–98, and one had to go back to 2007–09 to find three consecutive seasons that featured at least one such performer. As colleague Michael Baumann noted on Thursday, not only are stolen base attempts and successes down slightly (from 0.94 per team per game in 2024 to 0.91 in ’25 to 0.88 this year in terms of attempts, and from 0.74 to 0.71 to 0.68 across that span in terms of successes), but the power hitters have backed off. Only two other players have at least 20 homers and 20 steals at this juncture, namely the Nationals’ CJ Abrams (29 homers, 24 steals) and the Reds’ Elly De La Cruz (20 homers, 22 steals), making PCA’s feat stand out all the more. Oh, and there’s this: He has joined Bobby Witt Jr. and Julio Rodrígeuz as the only players to bank two 30-30 seasons through their age-24 campaigns.

Crow-Armstrong’s season stands out in several other ways. He’s hitting .279/.378/.550, with his 154 wRC+ first in the NL, his slugging percentage second, and his on-base percentage sixth. By comparison, Ohtani is hitting .291/.388/.554, but even with a higher OBP and SLG, his wRC+ is just 152. Our park adjustments put Wrigley Field as a slightly tougher hitters’ park than Dodger Stadium — a concept that would have once seemed outrageous given the longstanding reputations of the two parks — but the bigger driver is that wOBA doesn’t value intentional walks at all (I don’t love that, but I’ll save my quibble for another day). Ohtani holds a 16-5 edge on Crow-Armstrong in that department, but if you remove those intentional walks from his batting line, his OBP drops 20 points, whereas PCA’s drops only six points.

Given that he banked his first Gold Glove last year, it’s no surprise that Crow-Armstrong has been a human highlight film in center field.

Not surprisingly, he’s the runaway leader at the position in FRV, with 24 runs above average. Statcast attributes 20 of those runs to PCA’s range, with the other four to his arm; he only has five assists, but runners don’t test him that often, with his -4% advancement attempts above average ranking sixth. Not only has Crow-Armstrong nearly lapped the field in FRV — Ceddanne Rafaela ranks a distant second with 13 — but he’s just one run short of the record for center fielders, set by Byron Buxton in 2017. Buxton played 137 games and 1,143 innings in center that season, by far the most of either in his injury-wracked career; Crow-Armstrong has played 124 games and 1,083.2 innings in center, and should easily pass him for playing time and FRV. PCA doesn’t fare as well in DRS as he does in FRV; his total of 14 is third behind Rafaela (19) and Andy Pages (89). But including the additional value of his baserunning (including 31 steals in 38 attempts), he’s got a two-win lead over the field in position player WAR:

Armstrong not only has a higher position player WAR than Ohtani, he’s got a higher mark than Ohtani and his teammate Pages combined, though to be fair, that comparison doesn’t include Ohtani’s contributions as a pitcher. Early in the season, free from the constraints relating to last year’s comeback from his second UCL reconstruction, Ohtani looked as though he could contend for a Cy Young award. He put up a 0.74 ERA and 2.40 FIP in 61 innings over his first 10 starts, and while the BABIP gods soon took their toll, his 1.79 ERA and 2.60 FIP in 85.2 innings through July 3 was still quite impressive. Unfortunately, inflammation in his left knee led the Dodgers to pause his pitching, and subsequent discomfort in his biceps slowed his rehab. He only resumed throwing bullpen sessions off a mound earlier this week, and with the Dodgers eying October, he may not build up to a full starter workload before the end of the regular season. Instead, he could work in multi-inning stints as an opener, as he did last year during the final phase of his rehab from his September 2023 UCL reconstruction.

Still, Ohtani has already contributed 3.0 WAR in his limited time as a pitcher. That closes the gap, but Crow-Armstrong still has an edge:

While I think it’s reasonable to take Crow-Armstrong’s outlier fielding value with a grain of salt, I’ll add that DRS and Baseball Reference’s more gentle position player adjustments for designated hitters give Crow-Armstrong a 7.8 to 6.8 edge over Ohtani in that flavor of WAR. It’s also worth noting that he has another point in his favor when it comes to situational hitting, with an edge over Ohtani in WPA, 5.32 (first in the NL) to 2.98 (third), and in our Clutch score, 1.44 (sixth) to 0.33 (67th). If the season were to end today, I think Crow-Armstrong would be the MVP.

That said, a lot can still happen over these final five weeks to change voters’ impressions. PCA has hit .313/.419/.683 (195 wC+) since June 1, that while averaging a modest 88.9 mph exit velocity, with a .252 xBA and .485 xSLG, suggesting that he’s bound to cool off at some point. Ohtani, who produced a 177 wRC+ from 2023–25, is better suited to reel off a stretch with a 195 wRC+; in fact, he hit .333/.435/.656 (191 wRC+) — with a .309 xBA and .652 xSLG — in June before cooling off while banged up in July. All he had to show for his .312 xBA and .632 xSLG that month was a .273/.330/.557 (127 wRC+) line.

But this isn’t about litigating the NL MVP race to death with roughly 20% of the season remaining so much as it’s about appreciating Crow-Armstrong’s massive step forward on the heels of signing a six-year, $115 million extension in March. Last year he emerged as a star, hitting a wobbly but productive .247/.287/.481 (109 wRC+) with 21 FRV and 5.4 WAR, though his production plummeted from .265/.302/.544 (131 wRC+) in the first half to .216/.262/.372 (72 wRC+) in the second. His splits tell a story of a free-swinging player who tried to get more selective over the course of the season, but his process didn’t pan out; while he cut his chase rate from 43.7% in the first half to 37.7% in the second, with his swing rate dropping from 61.3% to 56.9%, his barrel rate dropped from 14.2% to 10.8%. He overperformed his .507 xSLG by 37 points before the All-Star break, then underperformed a .420 xSLG by 48 points after.

Crow-Armstrong has improved by making some significant adjustments to his mechanics and approach. North Side Baseball’s Matthew Trueblood took a deep dive in early June, just as PCA heated up, noting that he was standing closer to the plate and more upright, with his feet closer together, his stride more controlled, and his swing faster. Two months later, we can see that his setup has been in continual flux from month to month:

Relative to last season, the big changes are a deeper setup in the box, a dramatic decrease between the distance of his feet, and a slight closing up of his stance. Crow-Armstrong went from averaging 32.8 inches between his feet in March and April (when he hit just .241/.307/.362 for an 87 wRC+) to 18.3 inches in June, the first full month of this tear:

On a year-to-year basis, PCA’s average bat speed has increased from 72.7 mph (with a 28.5% fast swing rate) to 74.8 mph (with a 50.3% fast-swing rate), though he was up to 75.3 mph in May and June. Along with these mechanical adjustments, he’s become more discerning, cutting his chase rate from last year’s 41.4% to 33.8%, and his swing rate from 59.5% to 49.2%; those are both the largest decreases in the game by a couple of percentage points. Here’s how it has looked on a rolling 15-game basis dating back to the start of last season:

You can see the aforementioned change in his approach in the second half of last season wasn’t accompanied by an increase in production, but this year, those adjustments have paid off. He’s not actually hitting the ball much harder, but he is hitting it in the air and to his pull side more frequently:

Crow-Armstrong’s pulled air rate jumped from the 61st percentile to the 97th from 2024 to ’25; he ranked ninth in the majors last year, but now he’s third behind only Isaac Paredes and Kyle Schwarber. Meanwhile, his walk rate has jumped from 4.5% to 11.9%. That’s the majors’ largest increase from last year, and a worthwhile payoff even as his strikeout rate has climbed from 24% to 27%.

I think it’s fair to say that at this juncture, Pete Crow-Armstrong is probably on his way to the NL MVP award (and deservedly so) but more emphatically appears to be the majors’ most improved player relative to last year, coupling a huge step forward offensively with perhaps the best center field defense of the Statcast era. At just 24 years old, he’s carving a spot among the game’s elite, and it’s a sight to behold.