Pete Crow-Armstrong Will Set a Pre-Arbitration Bonus Pool Earnings Record This Month

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When the Cubs and Pete Crow-Armstrong agreed on a lucrative six-year contract extension this spring, Crow-Armstrong received a $5-million signing bonus. The deal technically begins in 2027, though, so rather than having his salary boosted significantly this year, he played his MVP-caliber breakout season on a salary of $894,000. The injustice of that number will be ameliorated somewhat later this month, when Crow-Armstrong officially receives what will certainly be the largest payout in the brief history of the league's pre-arbitration bonus pool.

Next Thursday, Crow-Armstrong will be named the 2026 National League Most Valuable Player. That will trigger a $2.5-million bonus for him, as part of the $50-million league-wide bonus distribution that goes to players who have yet to qualify for arbitration. The pool was created as part of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, to correct some of the imbalance in earning power between veterans and young players who are still under team control.

Awards bonuses are just one part of the bonus pool. Whatever money is left from the $50 million in initial funds is distributed proportionally, based on the wins above replacement (according to a joint WAR formula that uses both FanGraphs's and Baseball Reference's versions of the stat) accumulated by the top 100 pre-arbitration players. Crow-Armstrong's historic season saw him compile 10.2 jWAR, which is a whopping 3.2% of the total jWAR generated by those 100 leaders. Therefore, even though this year will see a record number of awards bonuses doled out and more of the fund taken up by those payments than is typical, Crow-Armstrong will get more than $1 million for his WAR totals, in addition to the bonus for winning the MVP. That will edge him past Paul Skenes for the honor of having earned the most money via this system in one season, since the system was created ahead of the 2022 campaign. Skenes earned $3.43 million last year, when he was the Cy Young Award winner in the NL. Crow-Armstrong is likely to earn around $3.56 million, according to a North Side Baseball review of the relevant WAR totals and projections of awards balloting.

That's a nice head start on the earning that will begin in earnest for Crow-Armstrong next season. His 2027 salary will be $10 million. Adding his 2026 salary, his pre-arbitration bonus payday, his signing bonus for the long-term deal and a (small) playoff share, he'll make nearly that much this year, too. Since he'll no longer be in the pre-arbitration service time bracket, Crow-Armstrong can't earn bonuses via the same system again next fall, but he'll still be in position to boost his earnings if he earns MVP votes again.

Crow-Armstrong's contract contains escalators based on his finishes in MVP voting over the first five of the six-year term of the deal. His 2031 and 2032 salaries each rise by $2 million for each MVP award he wins, beginning in 2027. For each time he finishes second or third, those years' salaries rise by $1 million. For each time he finishes fourth or fifth, it's an extra $750,000 in those last two seasons, and for each time he finishes sixth through 10th, it's $500,000. If (for instance) Crow-Armstrong wins a second MVP award, finishes third once more and lands in the top 10 another time between now and 2030, he'd make $7 million more in 2031 and 2032 than his guaranteed $60 million across those two campaigns. How he finishes in 2031 can also boost his 2032 salary, so he has a lot of chances to increase his earnings by a wide margin over the next half-decade.

The pre-arbitration pool is meant to mirror contract clauses like the one in Crow-Armstrong's new deal. Although it mostly serves to shift leverage from teams to players in contract negotiations like the ones between the Cubs and their center fielder early this year, it also facilitates those negotiations in some team-friendly ways. Absent the pool and its promise of boosting Crow-Armstrong's 2026 earnings if he had just this kind of season, the player and his agent might have been more reluctant to have a long-term deal start next season, rather than this one. Getting deals like this done is easier when a team doesn't have to rejigger its budget for the season just weeks ahead to do it, and the pool therefore made it easier for the sides to get together on the Crow-Armstrong contract—one of the chief achievements of Jed Hoyer's tenure as the Cubs' top baseball decision-maker.

The only bad news, for the Cubs, is that Crow-Armstrong was almost alone in earning a chunk of the pool this year. Ben Brown will get somewhere around $220,000 for his strong (though injury-disrupted) season, but in March, the team surely hoped that players like Matt Shaw, Daniel Palencia and Moisés Ballesteros would qualify for payouts via this system. Ranking by jWAR is hardly a perfect way to capture players' real value, but in short, the Cubs had only one of the top 80 pre-arbitration players in 2026, and only two of the top 100. Every other NL Central club had at least two of the top 50. In the top 100, the Brewers had five players; the Pirates and Cardinals had four each; and the Reds had two.

With a veteran core and far more spending power than their rivals, the Cubs don't need to lead the league in bonus pool payouts or players who qualify for it. Getting players over the line and into that group of payees reflects a real ability to find and create value with cost-controlled players, though, and the Cubs need to do it better, going forward. In so many ways, the 2026 season was a story of Crow-Armstrong carrying an organization that otherwise failed on most markers. This is one last way to throw that state of affairs into sharp relief, but it's also another chance to marvel at how far ahead of the field Crow-Armstrong's season stood, in so many ways—and how much the team will benefit from having locked him up through 2032 before he busted out.