How Much Less Does Pete Crow-Armstrong Need to Swing to Become a Superstar?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images

Pete Crow-Armstrong has yet to register a Barrel in the regular season, according to Statcast. All of his hits on the young year have been ground balls: two hit hard past the first baseman, two gorgeous bunts up the third-base line, and one seeing-eye bouncer the second baseman could only knock down in Monday night's win over the Angels. He's hit a number of pop-ups and lazy fly balls. He often still seems to be swinging too much, leading to unproductive contact.

However, Crow-Armstrong has also drawn two walks in his 18 plate appearances so far, so he has a .389 OBP. He walked twice in 22 plate appearances in the Cactus League, and twice in 21 trips in the World Baseball Classic. For calendar year 2026, Crow-Armstrong has almost exactly a 10% walk rate—roughly double his career mark in the majors through 2025. He's seen 226 pitches across the three types of competition in which he's participated, and swung at 55.3% of them. That's down from a rate just over 60% in each of the last two years.

By now, it should be clear that Crow-Armstrong will never be a patient hitter, in the style of Ian Happ or Alex Bregman. Even swing rates just below 50% and walk rates around 9%—the typical outputs of Dansby Swanson, for context—are probably too much to hope for. Crow-Armstrong will both create and waste offensive opportunities by swinging; he's going to be much more eager than the average batter. The relevant question is: If it's his hyper-aggressiveness that stands between him and stardom (and it is), how much must he mitigate it to get around the problem? In other words, at what swing rate can Crow-Armstrong be a reliably excellent overall hitter?

The answer is much, much higher than it is for most batters. Guys who make a lot of contact (like Nico Hoerner) should err a bit on the side of patience, but Crow-Armstrong has a highly optimized power swing and is going to whiff at a fairly high rate. To make up for that, he needs to go to the plate ready to do damage—especially since he has the bat path to hit more home runs than his frame or his raw bat speed would imply. He also has elite speed, and a near-mad desire to use it. That makes it especially valuable when he reaches base, because he's very likely to steal a base (or two), or to do something similarly game-breaking. (On Monday night, he scored from first on a single when he wasn't even running with the pitch, although it was a high blooper that probably should have been caught.) Ideally, of course, such a player would draw a lot of walks and maximize their OBP, but failing that, putting the ball in play by swinging early in the count leverages his speed well. The bunts Crow-Armstrong laid down in the first two games of the year were exemplars of that, but he can also reach on unintentional infield singles, errors and fielder's choices, and stretch some hits by 90 feet.

All of that makes it good that Crow-Armstrong swings more than most hitters. In the past, though, he's swung so much that he sometimes limits his ability to get a good pitch and put the barrel on it. Is ratcheting that baseline swing rate down from 60% to 55% enough to change that?

Much depends on the shape of his added patience. Crow-Armstrong is swinging a bit less early in counts this spring, and then increasing his aggressiveness as he protects the plate late. His feel for contact outside the zone is better than one would guess, for a player so focused on that lift-and-pull swing, which allows him to foul off pitches until he earns either a mistake or a miss that doesn't tempt him. On Monday night, he took an 11-pitch walk in which the balls were pitches 1, 5, 7, and 11. None of them were close to the zone; he swung at everything that was. But because he fouled off enough pitches to stay alive, he did earn those bad and un-tempting misses.

In his second at-bat against Angels starter Ryan Johnson, Crow-Armstrong took pitches 1 and 4, but swung at everything even remotely close. He fouled off four offerings, then hit the aforementioned, unimpressive single up the middle.

Many pitches Crow-Armstrong will face have a better putaway pitch than Johnson. Falling behind and fouling off four or five pitches per plate appearance is no sustainable formula for success. However, these two at-bats are good glimpses of how Crow-Armstrong can swing a lot without giving away at-bats. If he can spoil some two-strike pitches, be smart about sitting on certain pitches when the situation demands it, utilize the occasional bunt, and be even an iota more patient than he's been in the past, he has the tools to be that 30-homer, 30-steal guy the Cubs saw him become last year—the one in whom they've now invested $115 million.

The swing rate might have to come down a hair more, in order for him to continue actualizing his power. For now, though, Crow-Armstrong seems to have made some small modulations in his approach—and because he's a physical freak with plenty of value in his legs, his glove and his unconventional hitting profile, small modulations might beget big gains in consistency.

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