Pete Crow-Armstrong Is Going Through One Of His Mature Stretches

Whenever a team is operating within a torrid stretch of play, it becomes worth wondering how the drivers of a team's offense stand in proximity to such a period. With Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Chicago Cubs' own recent run, that relationship became fairly obvious on Wednesday night. 

With the Cubs needing a minor miracle to rattle off yet another win at Wrigley Field (and in the late-April-early-May period of the season), Crow-Armstrong deposited a 0-0 pitch from his shoe tops to the netting in left-center field to level the score and allow the Cubs to win in 10 innings. That it would only have been a homer at the Friendly Confines is hardly consequential to the overall point we're making.

Had this stretch of play for the Cubs occurred early in the season, the juxtaposition with Crow-Armstrong's output would have looked very different. 

Through his first 111 plate appearances of the season (through April 25), he featured a slash of just .235/.291/.314 with a wRC+ of 70. He had just a single home run to his name and was rattling off strikeouts at a 30.6 percent clip. Had it not been for Michael Busch's own slow start to the year, his production would have sat at the bottom of the list in terms of output from Cubs regulars. As one might expect, the underlying plate discipline looking rather woeful was a significant contributor. 

As of that point on the calendar, Crow-Armstrong was swinging at a 57.8 percent rate. That mark was 12 points higher than the next closest player (Busch) on the roster. His 46.7 percent chase rate was nearly 11 points higher than Nico Hoerner's 35.4 Chase%, without the obvious element of bat-to-ball skills that his infield counterpart possesses. He was still able to make hard contact (46.4 percent), but the erratic nature of his approach held his expected batting average down to just .211. 

Since that particular point in time, though, we've seen a rather notable shift in Crow-Armstrong's approach: 

While it's not without its own game-to-game volatility, there's a calmer version of Pete Crow-Armstrong manifesting at the plate since April 25. His overall chase rate is down to 37.2 percent in the 41 plate appearances since and has slipped his overall swing rate to under 50 percent (49.7). His contact rate, meanwhile, has graduated from 71.7 percent in that first stretch to 81.6 in the subsequent plate appearances. That latter figure trails only Seiya Suzuki and (more obviously) Hoerner among regulars. 

It goes without saying, then, that the production has been ascending for Crow-Armstrong in this two-week period. His slash reads .278/.366/.611 with a wRC+ of 170. His strikeout rate has been cut nearly in half (17.1 percent) with a walk rate that has nearly doubled (9.8 percent). Three of his four home runs have come in that 41 PA sample, with an xBA all the way up at .325. It almost feels too obvious that a more disciplined iteration of Crow-Armstrong is directly responsible for the production we've seen over these past couple of weeks. 

Were there something in his pitch selection or in his mechanics (vis-à-vis bat tracking) that was indicative of his recent run of play, then perhaps there would be room for a different discussion. The reality is, though, that those things are still varying as much on a given night that a trend has yet to be uncovered. Which leads us to the only rational conclusion that we have with as wild a swinger as our subject: he's tamped it down.

It's probably unreasonable, however, to think that this is something sustainable. We've seen Crow-Armstrong endure stretches where he calms down some at the plate, increases his production, and then gradually works his way back into the free-swinger that his baseball identity finds impossible to conceal over any sort of prolonged stretch. On the unrealistic chance that this is something real, though, we can at least look upon this period as a transitional moment into a new foundation. Of course, we're going to need a much, much longer sample before we can declare that even a remote possibility.

It's important to note that such pessimism surrounding its permanence doesn't take anything away from his play of late. Regardless of how he got there, Crow-Armstrong needed a stretch like this following a rough start to the year. Even if it's eventually going to result in an inevitable regression in his plate approach, getting him back on track performance-wise was paramount to keeping the Cubs atop the NL Central.