'Listen to This Crowd': Pete Crow-Armstrong's Capstone Moment Epitomized One of Chicago Sports' Greatest Seasons

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If the Wrigley Field crowd had had its way, the game might have stopped for a while. Speeches could have been given. The commissioner could have strode onto the field, while a microphone was hastily placed behind home plate. A ceremony could have been performed. Certainly, a long video of highlights and tributes would have met no great resistance. Pete Crow-Armstrong, however, just tried to keep it together.

"Don't cry on the baseball field—not that that's not ok," Crow-Armstrong said after the game, when asked what was going through his mind at second base, "but that's emotional stuff. I mean, I've gotten so much love, and I'm so lucky for that, and it's something I'm grateful for every day."

Crow-Armstrong had just stolen his 40th base of the season, putting him in the illustrious 40/40 club. It was the chance the fans needed to finally hit him with the waves of adulation that had been lapping at the shore for weeks—to crash over him with their admiration and gratitude for what has been the greatest individual season in Cubs history.

There's something a bit tawdry and small, really, about 40/40. Power and speed in the same package was once quite rare, and indeed, speed was not applied on the field the way it is now until roughly the mid-1950s. Now, though, the best athletes on the diamond are often capable of both hitting for power and stealing bases. José Canseco opened the 40/40 club in 1988, generating a certain amount of awe, but (while relatively few players have followed him through the door he busted open) power-speed combos are much more common now.

Statistically, the club evokes a blend of thunder and lightning, but it sketches them roughly. The two achievements are monumentally imbalanced. Every home run is worth about four times as much as a stolen base. Counting up these two particular events is also a bit unsatisfying, unless you grew up with the numbers on the back of an old-fashioned baseball card. Doubles and triples matter; walks matter; taking extra bases on non-steals matter. When you hear that someone has accomplished 40/40, there's a suggestion of well-roundedness that extends beyond power and speed, but that suggestion has often been deception. Canseco was a meathead who played like one, hurting his team with poor defense and bad baserunning decisions. Alfonso Soriano drew so few walks that power was almost his whole game offensively, and he, too, was a lousy defender.

Still, it was an occasion. It was like a birthday party, when we half-arbitrarily find an excuse to celebrate someone for no real reason other than that we love and are thankful for them. Crow-Armstrong's achievement, if it had only been 40 homers and 40 steals, would have meant something, but not something huge. The season he's had, though, merited something more than applause in response to each individual moment of mastery. He's been much too heroic not to stop and marvel.

The full 40/40 club is, as you've heard a dozen times by now, Canseco, Alfonso Soriano, Barry Bonds, Álex Rodríguez, Ronald Acuña Jr., Shohei Ohtani, and Crow-Armstrong. That company is illustrious, but we can do even better. According to Baseball Reference, Crow-Armstrong is also a member of the 40/15/10 club: 40 or more runs above average at the plate; 15 or more runs above average as a fielder; and 10 or more runs above average via baserunning and double-play avoidance. That club has only two other members: Rickey Henderson, in 1980, and Mike Trout, in 2012.

If you want to confine yourself to stats based on raw outcomes without adjustments or interpretations, we can still do better than merely counting homers and steals. Crow-Armstrong has 355 total bases and has drawn 82 walks. The only players with 350 or more total bases, 75 or more walks and 30 or more steals in a season are Crow-Armstrong, Ohtani, Acuña, Vladimir Guerrero, Larry Walker, Henry Aaron and Willie Mays. The only 40/40 club members who were caught stealing fewer than 10 times the year they achieved their status were Bonds and Ohtani; Crow-Armstrong has only been caught seven times.

It's important that we link Crow-Armstrong's season to these names—Mays, Bonds, Trout and Ohtani, especially. That conveys how great his campaign has been in an honest way. We have another 10 years to find out whether he can actually be as good as those guys, but this year has been as good as those guys' best. That, in itself, is remarkable. However, it's not what the fans were really cheering for. Rather, what has made Crow-Armstrong's summer so special is all the resonances that supersede the national attention and the historic accolades for Chicagoans: the ones that tie him inextricably to this city and its pride in its sports history.

Obviously, no Cubs player had ever before gone 40/40, but just as importantly, only one player in the annals of the franchise had ever stolen 40 and hit 40 homers in any season, even if it be two separate ones: Ryne Sandberg, whose death (too young) last July is still a visible scar on the hearts of Cubs fans. Billy Williams (happily, still with us) was the only left-handed hitter ever to hit 40 homers in a season for the team. Crow-Armstrong's baserunning regularly elicits comparisons to Javier Báez. His sonic boom of a gear shift in late May and throughout June evoked Sammy Sosa, who later showed up for the team's celebration of its 150th anniversary and prophesized about the three-homer game Crow-Armstrong produced that very day.

Crow-Armstrong has knitted himself into the fabric of the franchise by weaving his own legacy as warp across the weft of the team's greatest and most beloved stars. It hasn't all happened this year, but it all came together this year. He filled a hole, too. A team that has had a franchise shortstop (Ernie Banks), a franchise second baseman (Sandberg), a franchise third baseman (Ron Santo), a franchise first baseman (Mark Grace, Anthony Rizzo, take your pick), a franchise left fielder (Williams) and a franchise right fielder (Sosa) has never had a truly great center fielder. That has finally changed.

In the same way he seems to be stretching across and enmeshing himself within team history, he's doing the same with the wider Chicago sports landscape. His friendship with Caleb Williams has been exhaustively documented, but when Williams, Matas Buzelis, Caleb Wilson and more showed up to sit in the front row behind the Cubs dugout one night late in the summer, the point was driven home. Crow-Armstrong is part of a wave of talent that gives an underachieving sports town new hope for shaking off that label.

Of course, when you talk about Chicago sports icons, there's really only one name. That one didn't come into direct contact with Crow-Armstrong's this year, and maybe it never will. The comparisons are going to become unavoidable soon enough, though. Crow-Armstrong isn't the next Sosa, or the next Báez, or the next Sandberg. He's not just Caleb Williams or Conor Bedard. Though he comes in (so far, anyway) a much more grounded, cuddly outer wrapping, Crow-Armstrong is a hurricane of talent and ambition as strong as Michael Jordan—the only athlete about whom that can be said who has stepped foot in the city since Jordan left it.

That's what fans respond to so forcefully, even if most of them don't realize it. They're not explicitly looking to recapitulate the 1990s Bulls, because we do not live our lives solely in reference to our pasts, but then again, our pasts are never really past, are they? They don't actively want another Jordan, whose toxicity toward teammates would never fly now and was irresponsible even then. They don't expect six championships from Crow-Armstrong, because that would be utterly unreasonable; it's not how baseball works, or how the 21st century works.

But that's what Crow-Armstrong is. What fans love is not only his talent, but the drive they can see on his face, and the way he seems to sizzle with the need to win. He's not without swagger, but while outsiders might misconstrue his attitude as selfish or self-aggrandizing, Cubs fans know better. What they see—what objective viewers can see, too, as long as they don't bring too much of their own baggage to the viewing party—is that Crow-Armstrong's every move and thought is oriented toward winning. He argues vehemently with umpires, but only on behalf of his team—never when the stakes are only his own statistics. He hustles unreservedly. He slams his bat and fires his helmet when things are going badly, but it's all born of the eagerness he feels to deliver on the fans' demands or to save his shaky team from itself.

He doesn't, for instance, rack up garbage-time steals. Of his 40 thefts this year, only nine came in low-leverage situations; that's 22.5%. In the modern game (especially since the rules changes that bolstered the running game in 2023), the percentage of steals that come in unimportant moments has risen.

Crow-Armstrong, though, has just those nine steals and has only been caught once when it didn't matter much. Even most of the technically low-leverage steals came as the back half of a first-and-third play, or in the third inning, when things were far from decided. He's no stat padder, and yet, look how good his stats are.

The Cubs will win a World Series with Crow-Armstrong, someday. It probably won't be this year, but it will happen. That that feels so certain is not just a reflection of his talent, the way a Bears fan might say that Williams's talent at a position with so much power makes an eventual Super Bowl win feel likely. It's more. It's the way Crow-Armstrong carries himself. It's the maturity it has taken for him to handle his exploding fame relatively well, and to listen to teammates and get better because of his interactions with them. It's the sagacity of his thoughts on the game itself—on his craft. He's as detail-oriented and hard-working as Jordan, but a better teammate. He's a winner.

He's also, of course, going to be here a while. That's the final thing that went through the crowd, as they applauded so long and loud in that moment after Crow-Armstrong's landmark steal. As warm as the memories of the 2016 team will always be for most fans, those players all left. The only ones to sign contract extensions after joining the organization were Rizzo and Kyle Hendricks. The only one to sign a long-term deal after the title itself was Hendricks. It's easier for players to move on, these days, and if many fans couldn't imagine Kris Bryant ever wearing another uniform after he was the centerpiece of that championship drought-breaking team, they're wiser and sadder now.

Crow-Armstrong is the cure for that sadness, without dimming the wisdom. He's extremely proud to be a Cub. He's going to be a Cub for a long time. And he's finishing the greatest season ever put together by a Cub. His willingness to belong to the team and the city has made the city desperate to show him how much they also feel they belong to him. Sports or not, in 2026, it's even harder to find that kind of mutual devotion than it is to find 40 homers and 40 steals on one baseball card.