CHICAGO - The conversation around Pete Crow-Armstrong has started to sound a lot like the one Chicago had about Derrick Rose all those years ago.
Sixteen years ago, Rose asked, “Why not me?” and pushed himself into the MVP race with a season that ended with him becoming the youngest winner in league history. Now Crow-Armstrong has worked his way into a similar kind of question on the North Side: why not him?
Shohei Ohtani was supposed to have this NL MVP race locked up for a third straight year. He still has the aura, the résumé, the whole unicorn package. But his pitching has been idle since July 3, and Crow-Armstrong has kept stacking up reasons to force a real discussion.
Going into Tuesday, Ohtani had a 4.0 fWAR as a hitter and 3.0 as a pitcher. Crow-Armstrong was at 8.2 as a hitter and center fielder.
That gap in roles matters, but so does what Crow-Armstrong is actually doing on the field. He’s the best defensive player in baseball.
He already has 31 homers and 31 stolen bases. His pitch recognition has sharpened, he’s hitting lefties, and he’s producing in the biggest spots.
Cubs infielder Nico Hoerner put it simply: “It’s a one-season award,”
That’s what has made Crow-Armstrong’s case hard to ignore. He’s not just piling up numbers in empty innings. He’s delivering when the game tightens.
Before Tuesday’s 4-3 win over the White Sox, Crow-Armstrong had a 1.094 OPS with runners in scoring position and a .649 slugging percentage in those spots. With two outs, those numbers barely changed, sitting at 1.067 and .638. In late-and-close situations, per Baseball-Reference, he was up to a 1.206 OPS and .719 slugging percentage.
“This is what great players do,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “We’ve got a number of these moments this season from Pete.
It’s a ‘great player’ moment. They step up in situations like this.”
Crow-Armstrong has been candid about the other side of his game, too. He said recently on a podcast that his worst numbers come in low-leverage situations.
But when the pressure rises, he seems to settle in. Coming into this week’s crosstown series in a slump, he said he wanted to play “pedal to the metal” and bring “some conviction” to his swings.
“I swung a lot today,” he said Monday. “I went up there and I didn’t want to waste any chances.”
That approach showed up immediately. On Monday, Crow-Armstrong blasted a walk-off two-run homer in the bottom of the 10th to beat the White Sox, and he also homered in the first inning. It was the first walk-off homer of his MLB career and his second walk-off hit of the season.
Earlier this month in a makeup game against Toronto, he delivered in a different way: a single in the 11th inning, a stolen second, a steal of third on a throw home, and then a run scored on a throwing error.
“When he’s on base, he’s scoring because he’s either driving himself in or he’s stealing bases, getting in scoring position,” Hoerner said. “Making things happen like he did against the Blue Jays, that’s essentially a walk-off to me. Those are wins because of him.”
The Cubs have gotten used to those kinds of nights. Monday marked the 10th time this season Crow-Armstrong has had at least three hits in a game, and Chicago is 10-0 in those games.
“If you look at the moments that Pete’s had,” Hoerner said. “I’m sure there are all sorts of stats on clutch at-bats and win probability added and all those things, but the moments that have actually changed the direction not just of games but of our season, I think he is on a totally incredible level.”
That’s the real force behind the MVP buzz. Crow-Armstrong isn’t just in the race because the favorite has cooled off. He’s in it because he’s becoming the kind of player who can tilt a game, then tilt the conversation right along with it.
And in Chicago, that sounds familiar.
Rose had the story and the momentum. Crow-Armstrong does, too. The question now is the same one Rose once asked: why not him?
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