Pete Crow-Armstrong keeps stacking up reasons to sit at the center of the MVP conversation, and Wednesday gave the Cubs center fielder another loud chapter in a season that already feels out of scale.
He went deep twice and added a triple, lifting his OPS 18 points to .956 as Chicago heads into this weekend’s series in Cincinnati. Those two home runs also pushed Crow-Armstrong past Billy Williams for the most single-season homers by a left-handed hitter in Cubs history. They tied him with Ernie Banks for the most home runs by a Cub in a season before turning 25, with Crow-Armstrong now at 44.
That’s the headline number, but the bigger story is how he got here. After a first half that can basically be shelved, the 24-year-old entered the matchup against the Reds with a .282/.375/.581 slash line and a 159 wRC+. For a franchise that just turned 150 this year, those are the kinds of numbers that belong in the top tier of team history.
A major piece of the turnaround has been discipline, but not the boring kind. Crow-Armstrong has bumped his walk rate by 6.9 percent and cut down on chase, which has forced pitchers to live in the zone more often. Cubs hitting coach Dustin Kelly told The Athletic’s Patrick Mooney that the most important change he’s seen is Crow-Armstrong’s ability to be selectively aggressive.
Kelly has watched that development closely since Crow-Armstrong came over in the 2021 deadline deal for Javier Baez and Trevor Williams, when Kelly was the minor-league hitting coordinator. This season, he said, the difference is not just that Crow-Armstrong is chasing less. He’s swinging less overall, too, dropping from 60.1 percent of the time last year to 49.9 percent.
And when he does let it go, Kelly said, "he’s getting his 'A' swing off a ton."
That matters because Crow-Armstrong can cover so much of the strike zone with elite 75 mph swing speed. He’s using that bat speed to punish pitches in a wide range of spots, getting to his hardest and fastest swings more often than most hitters can dream of.
The damage has shown up everywhere. More than a third of his home runs have come on pitches in the bottom third of the strike zone or lower, but he hasn’t been an easy target up in the zone either.
Kelly said about high fastballs, "It’s not that there’s a ton of damage," Kelly added about the challenges of hitting the high heat. "But it’s not an out, and it’s not a swing-and-miss.
It’s a foul ball. He’s managing the top part of that zone."
Crow-Armstrong is also punishing the pitches in the heart of the plate. He has 10 home runs and 19 extra-base hits on middle-middle mistakes alone.
The result is a hitter who is forcing pitchers into bad decisions and then making them pay. He’s laying off or spoiling the kinds of pitches that usually get hitters out, then jumping on the mistakes that remain. Kelly pointed to a home run against Brewers right-hander Logan Henderson as a perfect example, when Crow-Armstrong launched a changeup more than 400 feet to center even though it was just 1.2 feet off the ground.
He’s also making pitchers think twice about challenging him inside, which leaves very little margin for error anywhere else.
Crow-Armstrong has been a star prospect since his days on USA Baseball’s 12U national team, and this version of him has only kept proving people wrong. The Cubs have him locked up for the next six years, and this season has turned into one of the most remarkable in franchise history.
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