Pete Crow-Armstrong is So Locked In That Even the Gods Are Helping Him

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

There's no more lethal offensive player in the majors right now than Pete Crow-Armstrong. He's not at all likely to stay this hot, and to maintain an edge in batting and baserunning brilliance over the likes of Shohei Ohtani and Bobby Witt Jr., but over the last four weeks, Crow-Armstrong has been raking at a historic rate. He homered in his third straight game Wednesday night—a batted ball that both affirmed how locked-in he is and reminded everyone that any good hot streak requires a bit of good luck.

For those who didn't see it, here is the homer Crow-Armstrong hit in the bottom of the fourth inning. It's equal parts majestic and silly.

Believe it or not, this isn't the highest homer of Crow-Armstrong's career. Last April, he hit a pair of skyscrapers with launch angles similar to the 41° on this one during the same April road trip to the West Coast, and he added another in Detroit last June. However, as you can see, it's reasonable to debate whether he really even hit a homer this time. The ball sure appears to be foul, doesn't it? It's very close, and after a crew chief review and consultation with the league's replay center in New Jersey, the call stood. But I mean, it looks foul. We didn't get a great camera angle on it, or at least, not a steady enough one to see what really happened, but even Crow-Armstrong seemed surprised when he got to keep his dinger.

First, let's talk about this looked so much like a foul ball, but really might have been fair. As you probably know, Wrigley Field has the deepest foul poles of any park in the majors, which is part of why this was in question—but which also might turn out to be why he got the call. According to Statcast, this only would have been a homer in 20 parks—not because it wasn't hit far enough, but because in the other 10, it would have twisted foul before reaching the pole. Statcast's flight tracking on batted balls like this is less precise than the league would like you to believe, but its story is (in brief) that the ball flew foul, but managed not to do so until after reaching the pole. Crow-Armstrong hit another ball on which that was the case earlier this year, in Tampa, but because the foul pole is much closer to home at Tropicana Field, that homer was uncontroversial.

Ok, but Statcast's eyes aren't human ones, and you and I are sometimes smarter than it is. This one can't have been fair because it waited long enough before twisting foul, because it was foul before it got to the pole. If anything—there really is a chance this happened, but we can't prove it either way based on the video feeds we've seen—the ball was foul as it passed the front of the pole, but was coming back toward the field and kissed the back side of the pole on its way by.

Here's the first frame (from the Marquee broadcast) in which the ball appears as it falls steeply from its great height, already quite close to the pole.

That looks foul, but just to reassure you that it's not merely a camera-angle or still-frame confusion, here's another moment in its descent, wherein it's clearly getting closer to the pole, taking an unusual angle for a batted ball headed to either corner—but especially to a batter's pull field.

Now, here's the moment that I would guess led both to the initial call and to its being upheld, though not confirmed outright. The ball pretty clearly hits the line on which the flags atop the pole are flown, and although I'm not sure whether those lines count as part of the pole, it also looks like it probably hits the pole itself, anyway.

It's an extremely difficult call, because it's such an unusual batted ball. Either way, I don't think you can blame the umpires or the video center for what they decided. Few balls come down that steeply, right at the pole, like a tee shot on a Par 3. Even fewer start foul, then come back toward fair territory. Let's talk a little about how that happened.

The wind was in Crow-Armstrong's favor here. At that very moment in the evening, a storm was brewing to the west, and the wind was gusting pretty impressively at times, from the south-southwest. That pushed this ball toward fair territory, and because Crow-Armstrong hit it so high and not overwhelmingly hard (under 100 MPH off the bat), the wind had lots of time to act on it. 

But the way Crow-Armstrong met the ball was also a factor. He caught this thing 53.6 inches—near four and a half feet!—in front of his center of mass. His attack direction (the horizontal angle of the barrel at the point of contact) was 21° toward his pull field. He flattened out his swing gorgeously to handle a sweeper that stayed up, but he still caught it off the end of the bat and got under it. If his bat speed weren't an eye-popping 85 MPH on the swing, the ball wouldn't have come anywhere near being fair, or a homer.

Since he did clip it that way, though, Crow-Armstrong produced a ball that wasn't destined to hook, the way most pulled fly balls do. In fast, the combination of attack direction, attack angle, ball and bat speed and placement of ball on bat better mimicked a fly ball hit to center or left-center by the lefty batter; everything was just turned about 45° to the right.

So, while it seems absurd, yes, this ball probably was fair—and while the elements helped, so did Crow-Armstrong's unique ability to produce huge bat speed and catch the ball well even when his timing is slightly off. Statcast's rendering of the ball's flight, by the way, shows it hitting the pole—though again, the precision of the data isn't good enough to call that conclusive, and anyway, the ball is not as wide as the tracer on this visual.

Whatever help you think he got—from the umps, or from Zephyrus, or from a truly lousy pitch by Ryan Sullivan—Crow-Armstrong hit his third homer in as many nights, and now has 10 bombs (en route to a 1.203 OPS) since May 22, which we've identified as the start of his historic heater because of the changes he made then to his stance and setup. To wrap this conversation, let's look at the way those changes have affected his ability to be on time—and what happens when he isn't.

As you surely remember, Crow-Armstrong was tremendous in the first half of 2025, but he slumped badly over the final two months. He also started this season sluggishly, despite his boost in bat speed. Unlike superficially similar hitters who go into similar slumps, though, Crow-Armstrong never did have a big strikeout binge in there. From August 1 through the end of last year, he only struck out 51 times in 200 plate appearances. That's more than you'd like, but it's not far from his baseline at all. Crow-Armstrong's problems, when he's had them, have been about getting himself out by swinging at bad pitches and hitting them weakly. As such, the best way to tell whether he's locked in is by how well he's timing and squaring up the balls he does put in play. 

Here are the numbers, drawn from Statcast's new swing timing metrics, on Crow-Armstrong being on time (as opposed to early or late) and centering the ball on the barrel of his bat (as opposed to finding the end or the label/handle), over four spans: the first half of last year, the second half, and before and after that May 21 off day we've talked about as his moment of turning it on this spring.

Span	On Time %	Centered %
1st Half, 2025	83	78
2nd Half, 2025	76	81
2026 thru 5/20	83	74
2026 since 5/22	88	79

It's pretty straightforward, in that first column. Crow-Armstrong started to mishit a lot of balls late last year, because he was often early even when he put the ball in play. That's a problem. He got it fixed to begin this year, but has really turned it on since changing his setup in the box to make himself more selective and better able to adapt his swing to what he sees out of the hand.

The second column tells a messier story. Where on the bat you hit the ball, horizontally, broadly controls how hard you hit it. Almost all hard contact comes when the ball is centered on the barrel. Pitchers get ground balls with sinkers not by making you hit the top of the ball, but by getting in on your handle. Guys whose fastballs are straight give up more power than those with some wiggle, because the ball tends to crawl just off the sweet spot. Yet, Crow-Armstrong was centering it on his barrel as often during his struggles late last season as he ever has. Why didn't he come up with better results?

Well, firstly, we come back to the timing question. He was often early on the balls he did center, which meant that he sometimes hit the top of the ball:

But even when he stayed beneath it, he was often running out of barrel, and would hit it off the end of the lumber.

This comes back, in a strange little way, to last year's hot topic: the torpedo bat. Not everyone has the same sweet spot on the bat. When Crow-Armstrong is on, he will sometimes be tied up slightly, and have the ball run up his bat toward the label. Broadly speaking, the centered stat still tells us something useful about Crow-Armstrong's contact profile, but it's not telling us the same thing as the same number would tell us about another hitter. If Crow-Armstrong is centering it on the barrel more often than usual, he's probably doing so on balls that belong slightly up the barrel toward his hands, and he's probably wasting too many of his best swings by catching it off the end of the bat.

But there's another key reason why he's been more productive this year, while centering the ball on the barrel less often. It's the other main variable in the equation for exit velocity. If the degree to which you center the ball on the barrel decides the "mass" in the force equation, then it should be obvious what else we need to look at: "acceleration," or bat speed. So let's do that previous table again.

Span	On Time %	Centered %	Bat Speed
1st Half, 2025	83	78	74.3
2nd Half, 2025	76	81	73.9
2026 thru 5/20	83	74	77.9
2026 since 5/22	88	79	76.3

Swinging much, much faster this year has allowed Crow-Armstrong to thrive even when he slightly mishits the ball, in terms of horizontal barrel location. He got way, way faster this year, and once he learned to rein that in just enough to also be on time, it didn't matter that much whether he found the very center of the barrel or not.

Those already getting familiar with these numbers might wonder where the usual third column for them is. The way Statcast reports the data on whether hitters are over the ball, under it or lined up with it vertically, we can't get much out of looking at that for balls in play. Virtually all balls in play count as Lined Up, by Statcast's reckoning, so I left out a couple of 99% and 100% figures to ease our collective numerical digestion.

However, teams and players can use this data differently, and in a way, so can we. Here are the timing distributions in all three dimensions for Crow-Armstrong's swings in the second half of 2025, and for all of 2026 to date.

With Statcast's tolerances, the area described as Lined Up is 4 inches wide. That's wider than both a ball and the barrel of an actual bat. Naturally, then, anything you hit into the 90° wedge that is fair territory was probably met solidly enough to count as Lined Up. But that also means that there are more and less valuable ways to be Lined Up. I've drawn boxes to show that, late last year, Crow-Armstrong was slightly above the center of the ball slightly more often than he has been this year, even isolating the balls he lined up well enough to put in play. I've also shown how he's more often very slightly below the center of the ball this year. Thence come the hard fly balls and line drives. 

You can also spot some of the things we've already discussed in these plots. Crow-Armstrong is much less prone to be early on balls in play than he was last year, even though he was very early on the one Wednesday night. He's also living more in his sweet spot, just off the technical center of the barrel, whereas in the second half of last year, he was less likely to miss the barrel by a big margin but had a more diffuse distribution along the bat, because he just wasn't locked in and delivering his well-engineered pull-it-in-the-air stroke consistently.

The winds of fortune are blowing Crow-Armstrong's way right now, but he's also making his own luck. This is as good as any Cubs hitter has looked over this long a period since before the pandemic, and yes, the echoes of Sammy Sosa's 1998 are only getting easier to spot. Wednesday's homer was just the latest reminder that Crow-Armstrong can do things on a diamond that no one else can do, right now.

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[Patrick88]

You could get a nice package of prospects for PCA.  I will know duck out of the away.  

[Tryptamine]

30 minutes ago, Patrick88 said:

You could get a nice package of prospects for PCA.  I will know duck out of the away.  

The package would have to be unprecedented

[17 Seconds]

13 hours ago, Tryptamine said:

The package would have to be unprecedented

nothing would be enough. you don't trade a 24 year old superstar with hall of fame potential, especially if you're the chicago cubs.

[Backtobanks]

1 hour ago, 17 Seconds said:

nothing would be enough. you don't trade a 24 year old superstar with hall of fame potential, especially if you're the chicago cubs.

If only Ernie Broglio was available.

[Geographyhater8888]

A 1432 OPS, 2.8 fWAR and 10 homers, 6 stolen bases over his last 19 and the Cubs are 9-10. 

At this rate though I’d be disappointed if his wRC+ is under 130 at seasons end. I would’ve been ecstatic if he finished with a 120 before the season started.

Edited 1 hour ago by Geographyhater8888