Pete Crow-Armstrong Is Actually On Pace for the Greatest Cubs Season Ever

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Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

It was only fitting that on the very day the Chicago Cubs honored their 150th anniversary team, Pete Crow-Armstrong had his own crowning moment. With multiple franchise legends in attendance, Crow-Armstrong blasted a leadoff home run into the right field bleachers (a feat he accomplished on Sunday as well). His second time up, he lined another home run off of the right field foul pole. 

Then, for good measure, he put the game away his fifth time up to bat, sending a home run into the left-center field bleachers, somewhere he rarely hits home runs these days. For many, that would be seen as the final touch on a career day at the plate. For this center fielder, though, it simply capped the latest in a series of installments, all of which could be referred to as “the Pete Crow-Armstrong game.” 

Yes, he doesn’t have any other three home run games this season. However, by win probability added, Saturday’s game wasn’t even one of his 11 most valuable performances this season, according to Baseball Reference. That stat perfectly encapsulates the numerous times this year that Crow-Armstrong has taken over a game all by his lonesome, deciding that the Cubs weren’t going to lose. 

You most likely already know this: Crow-Armstrong leads all of baseball in FanGraphs WAR. After Saturday’s performance, which was worth 0.5 fWAR, he is up to 9.1 fWAR, which is quite a ways ahead of Shohei Ohtani, who sits at second place with 6.9 fWAR.

With a whole month to go in the season, Crow-Armstrong’s 9.1 fWAR puts him into pretty elite company in Cubs history. It’s already the fifth most valuable season by a position player in the history of the franchise:

Player, Year	Games Played	fWAR	fWAR/Game
Rogers Hornsby, 1929	156	11.0	0.071
Sammy Sosa, 2001	160	9.9	0.062
Ernie Banks, 1959	155	9.7	0.063
Ron Santo, 1967	161	9.5	0.059
Pete Crow-Armstrong, 2026	136	9.1	0.067

The Cubs have 25 games remaining, following Sunday night’s tilt. At his current pace, that would put Crow-Armstrong at 10.8 fWAR at the conclusion of the regular season, which would far surpass everyone other than Hornsby on this list. 

You might remember that the true hype surrounding the Los Angeles native didn’t start until June or so. That’s because he had a slow start to the season. Entering June, he had “just” a 101 wRC+ and 1.9 fWAR. At some point in May, he started walking a whole lot more and his offensive numbers skyrocketed. His monthly splits since then suggest he has a legitimate shot at catching Hornsby:

Month	Games Played	wRC+	fWAR
June	26	236	3.1
July	24	172	1.8
August	26	182	2.3

The MVP candidate has averaged 2.4 fWAR per month since his mid-May turnaround. Pete Crow-Armstrong having the single greatest season by FanGraphs WAR in the history of the Chicago Cubs is very much in play as the team heads down the stretch of the season. 

I have spent a lot of time thinking about fandom as an adult. As a kid, you’re naive enough to think your favorite team has a chance to win the championship every single season until they are mathematically eliminated. As an adult, you get a nice big dose of reality: only one team gets to do that each season, and in all likelihood, it won’t be the one that you root for. 

So, in all likelihood, the Cubs won’t win the World Series this season. Even in a season where they have arguably the best offense in the game and will finish with something like the fifth-best record in baseball, FanGraphs gives them just a 5.1 percent chance of winning the whole thing entering this week’s action.

Still, we all tune in almost every day. One of those reasons is because of hope. The Cubs probably won’t win the World Series this year, but they could. In a similar fashion, the Cubs probably weren’t trading Javier Baez and Trevor Williams to the Mets for a prospect that would go on to win the National League MVP award. But it was possible, and now here we are, and we can all say that we were there for every step of that journey. 

We also tune in to witness special moments and players. In the same way that I was enamored with stories about Santo and Banks growing up, neither of whom won a World Series, it should be noted, I will almost surely be regaling my children about the summer that Pete Crow-Armstrong completely electrified Wrigley Field. I’ll be sharing stories about how it felt like he would catch every single ball hit to him in center field, and about how it felt like every time he came up to bat, something special was going to happen. I’ll tell them about when he hit for the cycle, when he hit both a leadoff and walk off home run in the same game, and about his three-homer game in front of the Cubs’ 150th anniversary team, a metaphorical passing of the torch moment. 

World Series or not, 2026 has been one heck of a memorable season, and that is because we all get to watch Pete Crow-Armstrong jog out to center field every single day. How lucky are we?

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