Unhitched: Pete Crow-Armstrong Has His Hands Moving On Time Again. Can He Keep It Up This Time?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

We've documented this carefully, throughout the summer. Pete Crow-Armstrong started ice-cold this spring, but he quickly got into a mode in which he was consistently able to pull the ball in the air, with thunderous authority. Then, in late June, some grit got into the mechanism. Specifically, he found himself overstriding, which elongated his swing and made him frequently late on the fastball. In turn, that made him more susceptible to chasing and missing (or at least mis-hitting) soft stuff below the strike zone. This is not mere supposition; he explained the problem in clear-eyed detail in the final week before the All-Star break.

He focused on fixing that problem throughout early July, and did achieve a revival of his best swing in the week or two just after the break. Thereafter, though, he fell back into the same bad habit—this time, worse, and for longer. For much of the last six weeks, he's looked utterly lost at the plate, despite being aware of the issue and fighting to solve it.

Lately, though, there have been important signs of life. Crow-Armstrong's bat woke with a roar Monday night in Pittsburgh, as he hit a long home run and a booming double. Even before that, he'd looked slightly better in September than in August. The big problem he'd run into had been a sharply declining attack angle, indicating that he was late to the ball relative to the best version of his swing. Even before Monday, though, that had started to trend back in the right direction.

That chart shows the whole narrative given in words and links above, in one image. Crow-Armstrong was consistently able to get his barrel beneath and working up through the ball, and then he wasn't. Then he very briefly was again, and then he wasn't. So the key question is: can this second recovery be a more lasting one?

There's some reason to believe so. To understand why, consider a few shots of Crow-Armstrong addressing an incoming pitch, at the moment when his front foot lands. On the left, you can see a pitch that turned into a harmless flyout to left field, a month ago in Toronto. In the center, he's about to ground out to first base in the suburbs of Atlanta, last week. On the right, he's en route to hitting that home run in Pittsburgh.

The difference should be immediately apparent. It doesn't take an expert hitting coach. Crow-Armstrong has, progressively, eliminated the hitch in his swing. A month ago, he wasn't even really pushing off his back leg until his front foot landed, which both sapped some of the force from his swing and led to his hands being late. Even a week ago, as he was more consciously driving off the back leg even as he came forward, the hands weren't getting started early enough. As a result, he had to rush the barrel to the zone, and even when he got there, he was never in full control of his swing. He was missing a lot of hittable pitches, tapping them unthreateningly because the good part of the bat was somewhere else when he found the ball.

Twice, Monday night, he got the barrel all the way to the ball, because his swing had rhythm and connection. His upper and lower halves were in sync in a way that had been missing for weeks. Encouragingly, the homer came on a fat fastball, but the double came on a decent strike-to-ball offspeed offering. He's on time for both kinds of pitches, because he's also more adaptable when he's working fluidly from head to toe.

That does not, alas, mean he's permanently fixed and will sustain this brilliance now for the balance of the year. He's made progress, and Monday marked a big mile marker on the road back to his first-half excellence, but he's still a very free swinger whose swing has proved hard to calibrate and repeat over long periods. He still has some issues with stride length; he's just mitigating them by making his move sooner and quicker. However, it's not unreasonable to draw major optimism from Monday's explosion. Crow-Armstrong has addressed an important weakness in his game, and if it proves to be a fix he can maintain, he can get right back to being the superstar we saw in the first half. That would be an improbable recovery, given the nature of his shortcomings and how little time is left in the year, but he's already done a substantial piece of the work.

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