Pete Crow-Armstrong's World Baseball Classic Breakout Gave Cubs Fans One Thing To Dream On

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Image courtesy of © Troy Taormina-Imagn Images

There’s no sense beating around the bush on this. We all know exactly what Pete Crow-Armstrong has to do in order to become a successful hitter. The man himself seems to know what he has to do in order to become a successful hitter. 

“It’s definitely the swing decisions. I know what I do well. I know what I don’t do well. I know that I chase. I know I can get away with hitting bad balls and doing damage on bad balls, but there is no consistency there. It’s very sporadic,” he told Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic last month.

In fact, according to Baseball Savant, the young center fielder swung at 41.7 percent of pitches outside the strike zone last year, the fifth highest rate in baseball. That alone doesn’t make you an unsuccessful hitter. It just doesn’t give you a whole lot of room for error. 

What’s neat about this preseason, and the World Baseball Classic, is that we have a small set of meaningful games that we can point to in order to give us a basis of a guy’s improvement from the offseason. Crow-Armstrong, in particular, had a very successful tournament for Team USA. 

After starting pool play as a late-game defensive substitute, he injected the team with some sorely needed energy with a two home run performance against Team Italy, stealing the primary center field job from Byron Buxton in the process. The Cubs’ slugger ended up being one of eight core guys for Team USA that logged 20 plate appearances. He hit .263/.333/.632, and of those eight guys, his .402 wOBA trailed only Kyle Schwarber and Brice Turang. 

Was anything different under the hood? Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this article if it wasn’t! Crow-Armstrong saw 40 pitches outside of the strike zone in this tournament, and he swung at 13 of them. That is a chase rate of 32.5 percent. 

The league average last year, for what it’s worth, was 28.2 percent. So, we’re still not talking about Juan Soto here. Still, that is a meaningful decline, enough to pull him from fifth-worst among qualified hitters to 28th-worst, which is an area where plenty of successful hitters live. It’s the difference between Crow-Armstrong striking out on uncompetitive pitches routinely and working himself back into a few plate appearances. 

This backs up what we have seen in the less meaningful games, too. Per FanGraphs, he has swung at 30.8 percent of pitches outside of the strike zone in 14 Cactus League plate appearances. 

Whether all of this will continue into the season remains to be seen. A 162-game season is a long grind, and when you are in the middle of a slump, it’s hard to stick to a process like this. And after all, it should be noted, this is all based on small sample sizes. What is encouraging to me, though, is that the youngster has both acknowledged what needs to change, and has shown a willingness to change it. A more mature Pete Crow-Armstrong would be a terrifying threat against the rest of the league.

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