Pete Crow-Armstrong Optimized His Power in 2025. Can He Find Better Balance in 2026?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

To hit for power in the major leagues, you have to be pretty strong. Baseball isn't a contact sport, but if you've ever faced competitive pitching, you know that it can feel like one in the batter's box. Making solid contact—let alone hard contact, which sounds like a synonym but really requires that solidity of contact to be combined with good bat speed, a hard thing to muster in the tiny amount of time a good pitch leaves you to accelerate—requires as fierce an explosive movement as getting by an offensive tackle or finishing through a foul at the rim. There's a baseline a hitter must clear to produce any meaningful pop, and it's higher than it looks on TV.

However, once you're clear of that baseline, driving the ball comes down to some of the clever ways you can create more space or time to accelerate with the barrel. Not every hitter can top out at 80 miles an hour of swing speed, but each hitter can tweak their setup, timing mechanism and swing mechanics to pursue power by getting off their 'A' swing more often. Specifically, a hitter who wants to hit lots of homers but lacks elite bat speed can do two important things:

1. Make sure to be working uphill at contact, as steeply as possible; and
2. Catch the ball far out in front of their body.

In fact, these two things are correlated to each other, anyway. Every swing starts with a hitter twisting their trunk and slashing their barrel down into the hitting zone, from its starting point behind their head. At some point, any big-league swing begins to work upward, instead of down, but that comes at a different point in every swing. The more steeply the hitter tilts their bat as they swing, the earlier the barrel starts to move uphill, and the faster their attack angle changes as they rotate. The greater your attack angle at the contact point, the more likely it is that the barrel is now well out in front of you. The further in front of you contact comes, the more awkwardly you would have to be waving at the ball not to be swinging upward.

Pete Crow-Armstrong is a medium-height, slender lefty batter with good-not-great bat speed—although that number was closer to great from mid-May through the end of 2025 than it had been before that, so he's trending up. He hit 31 home runs last season, and was on pace for more like 40 before a late-summer slump. That caught the baseball world by surprise. It's not what you expect when you glance at Crow-Armstrong.

He found all that power (not just the homers, but 37 doubles and four triples, to boot) by being extremely optimized for that outcome. He had a 15° average attack angle on swings in 2025, which put him in the 89th percentile of the league in that statistic. His contact point (a stat that captures both actual contact and the theoretical intercept point of the swing and the ball on swings that come up empty) was 35.6 inches in front of the center of his mass, a 95th-percentile number. He was in go-get-it mode, and when he got it, he was swinging upward steeply enough to produce clean, hard-hit, pulled fly balls. Only six qualifying hitters put a higher percentage of their batted balls in the air to the pull field than did Crow-Armstrong. He was a volume shooter, and it worked like a charm.

As his disastrous late-season swoon proves, though, that kind of swing optimization includes some pretty hefty sacrifices. From the start of August through the end of the regular season, Crow-Armstrong hit just .188/.237/.295. The reason is pretty simple: when you swing with the dual goals of maximizing attack angle and catching the ball well in front of your frame, you're committing to everything early. 

To see what I mean, compare Crow-Armstrong's swing to that of Cardinals would-be slugger Nolan Gorman, another lefty who stands 6 feet tall and who has almost identical bat speed, average attack angles and swing tilt. Here are two visualizations of each of their swings at crucial moments. On the top, we have the moment at which each hitter's swing hits its nadir and starts to move upward. On the bottom, we have them each in the frame nearest their contact point.

Crow-Armstrong is already a better hitter than Gorman, so don't think of this as an aspirational comparison for him. However, it highlights some of the extremes to which Crow-Armstrong pushes his approach, via his mechanics. Note how much farther Crow-Armstrong (again, the same height as Gorman) strides. Note, too, how his front shoulder and hip have rotated farther in both snapshots than Gorman's have at the same points. Gorman would be better if he could rotate a bit farther, to match Crow-Armstrong, but Crow-Armstrong's long stride and reaching swing mean he's committed to his swing extremely early.

This swing optimization virtually forces Crow-Armstrong into the hyperaggressive approach that is often his undoing at the plate. It's why he had a low OBP (given his other numbers) even at his best, and why he was utterly lost at the plate once the good times ceased to roll. It's a double-edged sword. It makes him lethal in the box, when he gets things right, in a way that belies his frame and his reputation as a glove-first star. However, it also puts his barrel far from his body at the moment when he hopes to make contact. That means lots of whiffs, and even more importantly, it means deciding early and triggering the swing so as to get the barrel out there where he wants it.

To tap into better consistent, overall production, Crow-Armstrong will have to rein in his reaching swing just a bit. Even if he and the Cubs were willing to tolerate the low OBP and embrace all that power, sustaining that production with such an aggressive approach and a contact point so far from his body is unlikely. He'll need to find ways to slightly modulate what he's doing, to make slightly more contact, chase slightly fewer bad pitches, and stay through the ball a bit longer. Crucially, though, he can't sacrifice all of that optimization. This is a tricky moment in the development of the could-be superstar. He enters 2026 looking to make an adjustment just big enough to unlock the next level of production and consistency—no bigger, but no smaller, either.

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[Development DL]

Awesome stuff, fits with the technical and mental points , that Bergman has been counseling him on . 

[Bologna_Tugboat]

Wonderful analysis here. @Matthew TruebloodGiven this approach crossroads for PCA, if you are Jed and had to make an extension decision *this* offseason, do you:

 

A) Tender him an extension (a true extension that goes beyond his arb years)

 

B) If yes, how much?

 

I could understand the Cubs wanting to take another year before committing huge dollars to him, at least until they feel that his approach has stabilized to some degree. Luckily for PCA and the Cubs, the floor is so high between the fielding and base running that he provides decent incentive for a long term contract despite the significant risk offensively, IMO.