Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Signature Single, Which is Sometimes a Double

It wasn't enough to give the Cubs breathing room and win the game Thursday afternoon, but Pete Crow-Armstrong sparked a go-ahead rally in the top of the eighth inning. On a 1-0 pitch, he cracked a double to put himself instantly into scoring position—although in this particular case, "cracked" feels a bit cheeky. This was not, as the kids would say, an especially ethical double. It wasn't even a clean single, by a certain reckoning. When people talk about hitters getting lucky, this is often (rightly or wrongly) what they mean.

Here's the thing, though: that wasn't luck. Firstly, give Crow-Armstrong credit. His speed made this a double; it's a single for most hitters. But secondly (and more importantly, for our purposes), this kind of hit is a new and durable part of the evolving offensive skill set Crow-Armstrong has showed off during his searing-hot stretch since May 22. 

When you start working to get your pitch, the balls you put in play start to cluster more in certain areas of the zone. We know how much better Crow-Armstrong has gotten at that lately, as he's drawn nearly as many walks (28) in the last 43 games as he drew in all of 2025 (29). Here's a heat map showing where the pitches on which he's put the ball in play have been this year, though, split into before and after the off day I've repeatedly cited as the starting point of his breakout.

That's step one in making ferocious contact. Step two, of course, is swinging fast enough to deliver the barrel to the ball with massive force; Crow-Armstrong has also gotten much better at that. He made a big jump in bat speed from last season to this spring, but has also swung faster as this season has progressed.

Step three in being a dangerous slugger is to find a swing path that allows one to consistently work uphill through the ball and pull it, rather than hitting too many grounders or using the big part of the park too much. Ironically, this is the thing Crow-Armstrong showed a knack for the soonest. All players develop uniquely, but one of the fascinating quirks about Crow-Armstrong is that he's gone through the three steps of blossoming into a great power hitter in the opposite of the most common and logically clear order.

Now, though, let's talk about the bonus value a great power hitter can find, if and when they master the three steps above. You have your swing figured out; it's on plane and on time. It's also extremely violent, so even a mishit ball goes somewhere. You've tightened your zone, so that your mishits are just slight errors in the execution of a swing so fierce, rather than wild variants on an inconsistent stroke that sacrifice a lot of bat speed just to touch the ball. Your best moments are still when you click on the ball, the way Crow-Armstrong did for two home runs Wednesday night. But when you don't quite do so, you also get a residual benefit: a bunch of flared singles (and, if you're speedy, doubles).

This season, Crow-Armstrong has 11 hits on batted balls with an exit velocity between 63 and 78 miles per hour and a launch angle between 25° and 40°. No other player in the league has more than eight such hits on the year. That's only part of the story, though. Of those 11 hits for Crow-Armstrong, 10 have come since the beginning of June. It's only once he started organizing his zone so well that he tapped this vein of balls that aren't well-hit, but are going to fall in just about every time. They look like this:

And like this:

And like this:

His average swing speed on the 11 hits we're talking about (you can find more hits that fit this genre more loosely by changing the constraints, of course, but these 11 capture the skill he's found perfectly) is 75.8 MPH. That ensures that these balls get up in the air and over the infielders. They're also in hittable locations, because Crow-Armstrong has become so much more selective in his aggressiveness; that's why he's hitting lofted wedges instead of pure popups, lazy flies or impotent choppers. And because outfielders must both start in deep positioning to respect his near-elite power and initially read these swings as full and aggressive, they have almost no chance of reading the ball well enough to cover the ground required to make the catch in the time it actually spends in the air.

He's htting them off the end of the bat, and off the label. He's getting slightly under them. But these are swings on which Crow-Armstrong is only missing by a little, and because his is such a dangerous swing and such a newly mature approach, the result is a series of balls finding parts of the field that the defense can't fill. 

Hitting for power is great. Crow-Armstrong brought that element last year, and turned into a star because of it. Now, however, he's much more than a power hitter. With an approach that puts him on base via the walk consistently and this ability to hit for average by finding singles even when he doesn't square the ball up, he's essentially unstoppable. Since May 22, he leads qualified batters in batting average, OBP and slugging—yes, in OPS, but also in each individual segment of the slash line. That's because he's become so complete that he now gets to profit from slugger's singles, as well as racking up extra-base hits and taking his base when pitchers show well-founded fear of him. When you bake in the fact that he's also a plus on the bases and in the field, it gets very, very easy to build an MVP case for him, even in a world he must share with Shohei Ohtani.