Cubs 3, Pirates 2: Pete Crow-Armstrong Got Freaky-Deaky on a Baseball Thursday Night

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

I'm out of ideas. The league is out of ideas. At this point, as utterly ludicrous as this would have sounded just a month or two ago, maybe Pete Crow-Armstrong is just going to hit 40 home runs this season. He neither cuts that kind of figure in the batter's box, nor has the polished, impressive approach that one expects from an elite power hitter in a slender body. Yet, there he is, twice a week, hitting a homer. I can't explain it. Neither can you.

Entering Thursday night, Crow-Armstrong had hit two of the lowest home runs (in terms of the location of the pitch as it reached his hitting zone) in recent memory, anywhere in the league. That, though, makes sense. Crow-Armstrong has a steep swing, and it's operating at maximum efficiency when he can work down through the ball and then steeply uphill. If he can identify a breaking ball early (or anticipate it and guess right), he can drive it out of the park, even if it's ankle-high. That accords with what I discussed about his swing way back in mid-April, before he caught the heat that has burned through him for the last two solid months. I understand when he gets all the way down on a breaking ball and golfs it somewhere.

As the season has progressed, though, Crow-Armstrong has shown a remarkable capacity for adapting that swing plane and covering the whole zone. He can outguess a pitcher on a triple-digit fastball, just as he can on a backfoot curve, and he has shown the ability to flatten out his swing, get the bat head around that pitch even on the outer half, and apply some leverage to it.

That, I would not have guessed he could do, at least not this well. He's even shown the ability to climb the ladder a little bit and keep some loft in his swing on pitches in the upper third of the zone. Thursday night, though, he did something that broke the scale, and broke my brain. 

Here's the location plot for Crow-Armstrong's first 17 homers of 2025. It's what we'd expect, based on what we've already talked about. Crow-Armstrong gets to his power by getting through the ball and pulling it sharply. He doesn't hit 440-foot monsters, but many of his homers are no-doubters, because he hits them close to the foul line. He's hitting 380-foot fly balls to parts of the park where the fences tend to be just 340 feet away. He's doing it mostly (though not solely; not when he guesses right) on mistakes with lots of zone around them.

Now, look at the top line of that animation of the strike zone. Then imagine another fuchsia dot, about two baseballs above it. That's where Andrew Heaney put a pitch Thursday night, on which Crow-Armstrong nonetheless got around, got his bat working uphill, and got the barrel.

There's a highly technical hitting term for this: freaky nonsense. This is freaky nonsense. Crow-Armstrong had to sit on the high fastball, decide not to worry much about whether it was actually a strike, and unleash a swing that perfectly balanced the mandates of being flat enough to get to the ball and lofted enough to get some air under it. You can count on one hand the number of hitters in the league who can hit this pitch out of the park, and all of the guys corresponding with those fingers will be:

1. Taller than Crow-Armstrong; and
2. Unable to hit that ankle-high breaking ball out of the park.

Somehow, Crow-Armstrong has used his feel for hitting and his sheer, ferocious athleticism to tap into an elite power tool. It shouldn't work, but it would be foolish to pretend it's all been a fluke, at this point. Swinging at pitches like these will still beget some ugly outs, including some in key situations. He'll run into some slumps. At this point, though, Crow-Armstrong has to be considered a legitimate frontrunner to win the Most Valuable Player Award, and he's extremely likely to hit 35 or 40 home runs.

The Cubs made that extraordinary feat stand up and clung on to win Thursday night. Doing so also required a Seiya Suzuki home run and a clutch performance from the Cubs bullpen, in support of Jameson Taillon. Craig Counsell continues to push his luck with very slow hooks on his starters, by modern standards, and has put his relievers into needlessly stressful situations a few times lately. Thursday night was no exception, as Counsell let Taillon run out of steam in the seventh inning before rushing Brad Keller into the game. Keller walked in a run and was on the brink of blowing the lead altogether, but found the right pitch for a huge strikeout of Oneil Cruz to escape the jam he and his skipper had co-created.

Interestingly, Counsell then deployed Daniel Palencia in the eighth inning, against the heart of the Pirates order, and let Ryan Pressly close down a one-run win and collect the save. It's not a full vote of renewed confidence in Pressly as the closer, but that was a good reminder of the fluidity with which Counsell prefers to approach his bullpen. It worked like a charm Thursday, so there should be no complaints. The Cubs offense needs to get out of neutral and fully back to life, but for one night at Wrigley Field, Crow-Armstrong exploring new realms of wonder was enough to get them into the win column.

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[Jeff Alson]

Great article. The chart was particularly educational for those of us who don't have access to the data.

Freaky nonsense indeed. The technical term I have been using is unicorn.

Even more impressive and incredible, last night's home run was off a lefty, against whom PCA has mightily struggled all year (.182/.213/.390/603), with just 2 walks in 81 PA. If he can continue to adjust and better control the strike zone against lefties, he just might get enough good pitches to hit that 35-40 home runs is indeed possible.

[Jason Ross]

41 minutes ago, Jeff Alson said:

Great article. The chart was particularly educational for those of us who don't have access to the data.

Freaky nonsense indeed. The technical term I have been using is unicorn.

Even more impressive and incredible, last night's home run was off a lefty, against whom PCA has mightily struggled all year (.182/.213/.390/603), with just 2 walks in 81 PA. If he can continue to adjust and better control the strike zone against lefties, he just might get enough good pitches to hit that 35-40 home runs is indeed possible.

Welcome, Jeff!

[We Got The Whole 9]

It's interesting that he has 2 dongs hit way below the zone but none in the bottom third where you would expect his swing to do major damage...

 

He has also hit a handful of shots to the CF warning track. He really has geared his swing for major slug.