Pete Crow-Armstrong is a Scintilla of Plate Discipline from Superstardom

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Cubs' young center fielder has a .549 OPS this season, and a .639 for his career. He's a mess at the plate. If someone, anyone, will teach him to swing less, though, he could become an eight-win player overnight.

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images

It's rarely this simple, even for the exceptionally talented big-league ballplayer. Baseball is complicated, and the interaction between the best hitters and pitchers alive is endlessly complex, heaped with layers of adjustments and counter-adjustments; cues and red herrings; incredibly fast and precise physical movements; and a neverending mental game. Even in extreme cases, it's rarely as simple as saying, "Swing less, and your whole life will change."

If Pete Crow-Armstrong just swings less, his whole life will change. He's done every important thing there is to do, en route to true baseball superstardom, except learn not to swing all the time. The good news is that if he checks that final box, all the pieces of a truly terrorizing force are here. Crow-Armstrong could become, very quickly, the 2019 version of Cody Bellinger, or a left-handed version of peak Andrew McCutchen. The bad news is that there's no evidence that he's ready to make that change.

Two batted balls from Tuesday's game against the Rangers illustrate just how close to a breakout Crow-Armstrong really stands. In the second inning, he lined a first-pitch slider from Patrick Corbin into center field for a single. In the eighth, he laced a single to left on a 2-0 count against Hoby Milner, driving in two runs and sealing the Cubs' 10-6 win. 

Each of those balls came on a swing of at least 78 mph in bat speed, according to Statcast. They had 11° and 10° launch angles, respectively, and each had a 96 mph exit velocity. Crow-Armstrong had never hit a ball with those parameters before: a bat speed in excess of 78 mph (one of them came on a swing north of 81 mph), a launch angle between 5° and 15°, and an exit speed below 97 mph. In this game, alone, he hit two. 

That's noteworthy, because that type of batted ball is rare throughout the league. Since the start of 2023, here are the only 11 batters to meet those criteria on 10 or more batted balls:

• Giancarlo Stanton: 16
• Julio Rodríguez: 13
• Elly De La Cruz: 12
• Oneil Cruz: 12
• Manny Machado: 11
• Luis Robert Jr.: 11
• Yordan Alvarez: 11
• Austin Riley: 11
• Ronald Acuña Jr.: 10
• Jorge Soler: 10
• Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: 10

As it happens, this is also a pretty good list of the players in the league with the most raw power. It's not quite that, because Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are missing, but we're in that neighborhood. Sure, Crow-Armstrong has only done it twice, but another way to say that is that Crow-Armstrong has done it twice this week, something only Guerrero can also say.

Let's pause and unpack what these batted balls indicate, though, because I'm sure it's a bit strange to see a maximum exit velocity on a selection of hits for study, especially since using that produced a list of such fearsome sluggers. Here's the thing: If you swing that hard (well in excess of the league-average bat speed, which is somewhere south of 72 mph) and hit the ball on that kind of trajectory (a low line drive), you're almost always going to hit it harder than 97 mph. To have a swing that registers somewhere near 80 mph not produce a triple-digit exit speed, you have to mishit the ball, and almost no one is mishitting the ball when they hit a 10° line drive.

Crow-Armstrong belongs to the group that does that, though. He's added a tick of bat speed this year—not as much as it might have appeared after a handful of games, but enough to be average, with plenty of upside, He swings faster than he used to, and can swing as fast as almost anyone when he really cuts it loose. He also has a swing designed to lift the ball.

Four hundred thirty big-league hitters have registered at least 50 batted balls Statcast labeled "Squared Up" since the start of 2024. Those are batted balls where the actual exit velocity was at least 80% of the maximum possible exit velocity, given the speed of the hitter's swing and the incoming pitch. In that cohort, Crow-Armstrong ranks in the 91st percentile for average launch angle on Squared-Up balls, at 21°. Ahead of him are the most power-focused, fly ball-oriented hitters in the league: Judge, Matt Wallner, Kyle Tucker, Eugenio Suárez, Max Muncy, and so on. The leader of the entire pack, Cubs fans will be unsurprised to hear, is Patrick Wisdom.

That's the kind of hitter Crow-Armstrong has designed himself to be. While he might still not have elite bat speed, he can sometimes access it, and even when he doesn't, his swing is geared to allow him to hit home runs when he gets the ball on the sweet spot.

Alas, right now, he doesn't do that especially well. Here's a scatterplot of the 200 hitters who have taken the most swings so far this season in the big leagues, showing their average bat speed and the rate at which they square the ball up, on a per-swing basis.

I chose the other two players highlighted here for good reasons, but ignore them for the moment. As you can see, Crow-Armstrong is close to average on both axes. That's kind of a miracle, really, given how much he swings. It's a testament to his raw talent—his "feel to hit," as scouts used to say. Look just below his name, and you'll see the face of Cubs teammate Ian Happ. Inarguably, Happ is a better hitter than Crow-Armstrong, but this year, Crow-Armstrong is both generating the same bat speed and squaring the ball up more often than Happ. There's no question which of these players is more talented. It's just that Happ works walks that keeps him more valuable than Crow-Armstrong.

Now, let's talk about Jackson Merrill and Kerry Carpenter, because they're exemplars of just how limitless Crow-Armstrong's ceiling is. As you can see, Carpenter and Crow-Armstrong have basically identical bat speed. Merrill's is a hair better, but not substantially. What each of them do meaningfully better than Crow-Armstrong is not swing harder, but meet the ball more cleanly—and they do it by being more selective.

Neither Carpenter nor Merrill is a truly patient hitter, by any means. Since the start of 2024, Carpenter has swung at 70.8% of pitches inside the zone and 32.2% of those outside it. Merrill is even more extreme, swinging at 77.2% of strikes and 35.7% of would-be balls. Crow-Armstrong, though, is even wilder. He swings a hair less within the zone than does Merrill (75.1%), but he's chased 41.1% of non-strikes since the start of last year. There's no way to work around plate discipline that poor and get to all of one's power. Crow-Armstrong just puts himself into too many bad counts, and puts too many borderline pitches in play, to boot.

Despite the similar bat speed and the fact that Crow-Armstrong is using a similar approach to both Merrill's and Carpenter's in terms of bat path and how to launch, the results could not be more different. Focusing solely on the plate appearances that end in contact (and thus, sparing Crow-Armstrong the penalty he should suffer for walking so infrequently), and using expected weighted on-base average on contact (xwOBACon, the stat created so that people who make jokes about how bad acronyms are taking over baseball could finally be right), Merrill is at .515. Carpenter owns a whopping .591. Crow-Armstrong's figure is .305. He's making fairly anemic, undangerous contact, despite both bat speed and a bat path that give him every chance to emerge as one of the game's most dynamic hitters.

He might need another tweak to his stance and swing. The leg kick he implemented last summer, to such fanfare and with such great results, is gone again this season, and he does a very poor job of staying back from his more spread-out stance. He taps his toe and goes, and he often seems off-balance or unable to really decide about whether to swing; his body demands that he flail at everything.

As you can see, there's some inevitable balance created by being more spread-out. I've included the black line in each image to show the change in distance and angle from center of mass to his average contact point. Compared even to late last year, after he'd slid deeper into the batter's box and adopted the leg kick, Crow-Armstrong is making contact closer to his own body this spring. That means he's more under control through the hitting zone, which (since we know he's only gained bat speed) can only be counted as a good thing. To wit, his whiff rate on swings is down from 29.9% last year to 23.2% in 2025.

He just has to swing less. A change to his stance could help with that. Some kind of carrot-and-stick incentive system could, too, perhaps. It's incredible, though, how simple everything is where Crow-Armstrong is concerned. Every other bad hitter in the league is two really good adjustments from even being decent. Crow-Armstrong, one of the league's very worst hitters, is one adjustment from being downright great. He'll either learn to swing less, and win an MVP award by decade's end, or never do so, and lose his job by season's end.

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[We Got The Whole 9]

1 point of contention: He has an 8.8% walk rate and 80 pts between his BA and OBP stateside. 85 wRC+ is bad but for PCA, if he plays at that pace all year he's a 5 win player. 

 

Bottom line remains the same - his ceiling is insane. He just looks like he's guessing up there and getting embarrassed in the cat-and-mouse game. Not sure why he dumped the leg kick; he looks out of sorts.