How Pete Crow-Armstrong's Second Half Answered One of Cubs History's Biggest 'What-If's

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images

For Cubs fans of a certain age, there are a host of haunting 'what-if' scenarios attached to the team's 2003 season. On the whole, that was a great year, featuring the team's first division title in 14 years and almost as many postseason games (12) as they'd played from 1945 through 2002 (13). It was the last season of Sammy Sosa's prime, although also the start of his fall from grace. It was the peak season for Kerry Wood and Mark Prior. It felt like the beginning of something, and indeed, the franchise has 14 winning seasons in the 22 full campaigns beginning with that year.

Yet, they also fell just shy of winning the team's first pennant in 58 years. The core they thought they were building around—Prior, Wood, Carlos Zambrano, Corey Patterson and Hee-Seop Choi—turned out to be much less robust than they'd hoped. They were right on the verge of a curse-breaking bit of magic, but instead, the season ended in heartbreak. Thanks both to what happened that year and what came afterward, Patterson became perhaps the best emblem of their not-quite-breakthrough.

For much of the first half, Patterson looked like he was turning the corner toward stardom. He'd played a full season in 2002, but it had been a bumpy rookie ride. The extremely free-swinging lefty drew just 19 walks against 142 strikeouts, and his 49 extra-base hits didn't really make up for the lack of plate discipline—especially in the power-happy context of the league at that time. His athleticism made him fun to watch, when he could get anything going at the plate, but the slumps outnumbered the streaks. Though he played great defense in center field, Patterson entered 2003 as an enigma: the team needed a lot from him but wasn't sure what it could actually expect.

All of that changed in 2003. New manager Dusty Baker took some pressure off Patterson by batting him in the lower third of the order early in the season, and that helped the youngster tap into his talent more fully. By June, he was often batting third, because he'd come on like a house afire. On July 6, he was batting .298/.329/.511. In 347 plate appearances, he was striking out as often as ever, but he'd roughly doubled his walk rate, with 15 of them in 347 plate appearances. He also had a whopping 37 extra-base hits during that half-season of breakout performance. Then, in a gasp and a sudden silence, he tore his ACL beating out an infield single and was lost for the balance of that season. When he came back the next year, it wasn't the same. Patterson was fine in 2004, but would never again be the kind of player he was in the first half of 2003. By 2006, he was an Oriole.

Ever since, it's been almost impossible to answer the aching question: How would things have gone if Patterson hadn't gone down that summer? Was there yet another level of brilliance, just one more pivotal adjustment away? Could he have learned and grown in a way that would have paid dividends for the balance of his career? In short: did that injury scupper his push toward stardom, or was that dream doomed all along?

The answer was probably always the sad, boring, unsatisfying one: Patterson swung too much, and was swinging too much even in his great half-season. He never learned to stop swinging so much, and was probably never going to learn to stop swinging so much. He didn't have the right people in his ear at the right ages, helping him understand how to handle big-league pitching and organize his strike zone. He probably would have run into trouble during the second half of that campaign. The Cubs traded for Kenny Lofton to replace Patterson, and he would post a .381 OBP for them. The 2003 team was almost certainly better for Patterson having gotten hurt, and his career probably wasn't that much altered.

Pete Crow-Armstrong stayed healthy, and maybe the 2025 Cubs were worse for it. Crow-Armstrong was hitting .270/.308/.563 in late June, when he hit a bit of a skid until the week before the All-Star break. He bobbed back up coming out of the break, and was hitting .272/.309/.559 at the end of July. Thereafter, he batted an execrable .188/.237/.295 in 200 regular-season plate appearances, and was somehow even worse (.185/.214/.185) in 29 plate appearances in the playoffs. Crow-Armstrong is an even better fielder than Patterson was, but his glove didn't make up for the horrendousness of his stick late in the season; the Cubs would have been better off giving the job to Kevin Alcántara or trading for even a low-wattage replacement in August and September.

The fascinating questions we're left with, then, center on the different fortunes of these two very similar young players at crucial moments in their careers. Crow-Armstrong swings too much, just like Patterson did. Did this midstream failure, with no physical externality to blame it on, teach him something important? Is his makeup better than Patterson's, to a sufficient extent to make him capable of adjusting where Patterson failed to? Will he get better instruction than Patterson did? Though the 2025 Cubs might have made it further or had an easier final stretch without him, will the team and the player be better off in the long run because he stayed healthy long enough to have his breakout season turn sour?

It feels like a soft argument, but there's a decent case for it. Crow-Armstrong will probably always be overly aggressive at the plate. His swing rate certainly seems to be (at least partly) a matter of disposition; he hums with aggressiveness whenever he's on the field. However, he got ample chances to learn hard lessons in 2025. He didn't hit well in the postseason, but he did come up with a couple of clutch hits, one of which came directly as a result of a good plate appearance in which he demonstrated some patience; perhaps that reinforced good habits. His confidence should benefit from that small course correction. 

Sometimes, it also helps to get embarrassed. On the back-breaking home runs in the Brewers' Game 2 and Game 5 wins (by Jackson Chourio and Brice Turang, respectively), Crow-Armstrong raced back to the wall at Uecker Field in Milwaukee and leaped heroically—for balls that flew far over the wall and left Crow-Armstrong looking desperate and helpless and foolish at the base thereof.

Whatever pride Crow-Armstrong stored for himself in his defense amid a brutal stretch at the plate, it had to be bruised by the end of the NLDS. He didn't even play well in the field in that series. It's very possible he was worn out, after a very long year and one of the league's heaviest all-around individual workloads. Still, he got a ton of chances to feel the flush of humiliation under a national spotlight, and even before that, he went through a humbling period of prolonged helplessness at the plate. 

Every player is different. Every person processes success and failure in their own ways. Crow-Armstrong might not benefit from what he just went through; maybe it would have been exactly what Patterson needed. However, despite the pain and ugliness of it, the best bet is that Crow-Armstrong will come out better for having stayed on the field throughout a miserable two-plus months to end 2025. It feels, by extension, like Patterson would have benefited from that, too. The 2003 Cubs might not have gone as far if he'd stayed on the field, and the 2025 Cubs might have been better with less Crow-Armstrong down the stretch. In the long run, though, it's going to be better for this version of the team that Crow-Armstrong had to wade hip-deep through the muck of that second half. They got lucky, in a funny little way, by having their most exciting young player fall flat on his face (almost literally) at the end of his breakout season.

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[Victor Reichman]

I would take the gamble with PCA and sign him to a long term extension. With his serious hitting decline the last half, I think the price will be far less than what it would have been in June. Time for action by both sides. We could buy out his arbitration years and insure a yr. or 2 after that., perhaps with hitting incentives.