The Flying Circus: Cubs Are Becoming the Pete Crow-Armstrong Show, in Good Ways and Bad

Talking about the Chicago Cubs right now is hard. You have to talk about the many ways in which they could and should have (but haven't) methodically built a roster that can compete with the Milwaukee Brewers. You have to acknowledge the real streakiness that is part of their identity, without giving in to old saws about the nature of consistency and volatility in baseball. You have to talk about the many important players slumping or declining or trying to solve major problems. But it also feels ludicrous—absurd—to talk about anything but Pete Crow-Armstrong.

I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin, as a Bulls, Cubs and Packers fan. I watched the final three years of Michael Jordan's career; the halcyon decade of Sammy Sosa's time with the Cubs; and 25 years worth of Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay. I know from cults of personality within sports teams, is what I'm trying to say. It's my normal. It's what I grew up with. It's been a long time, though, since I saw a baseball team as dominated by one player's talent and personality—one player's greatness and their terribleness; their scintillations and their calamities—as the current Cubs are by Crow-Armstrong.

If anyone (at least, anyone who spends much time online) tells you this has been a fun ride, they're a dangerous lunatic or a liar. What's happening around the Cubs right now is a steady and inexorable rise in background toxicity, like there's an unreported leak into the water supply or a poorly contained radiation event nearby. Crow-Armstrong, who seemed so unusually authentic and self-assured at this time last year, has gone through a disastrous slump to end 2025; a winter of cement setting on his stardom; and a spring loaded with great new opportunities but lots of extra expectations, and he's handling it all terribly. He's also having an incredible season that could end with him in the thick of the MVP conversation. 

In the field, Crow-Armstrong burst out of the gate this spring playing center field as well as anyone has done it since Willie Mays. His anticipation, explosiveness and ability to field the ball cleanly at top speed are unmatched. His arm is a rocket, and he uses extraordinary footwork to make the most of it, most of the time. He's also had five or six of the worst, dumbest mistakes you'll see an outfielder make. The universe seems to be against him, too. He lost a Shea Langeliers fly ball in the bright, impossible sky Thursday night, leading to an inside-the-park homer on what should have been a routine flyout. He made the initial mistake of misreading the ball off the bat, but the particular hues of sunset sky in which the ball hung while he searched for it in desperation are expert concealers. No player could have found that ball, once it was lost up there. On evenings like that, you only get the initial moment to draw your bead; there's no recovery opportunity. Crow-Armstrong was, in that sense, unlucky.

All year, though, there's been what's happened to Crow-Armstrong (and to his team), and how he's reacted to it. What happens can only make a baseball season hard. How you react to it—by hurling abuse at a fan in the heat of a play, or by trying to do way too much, or by needing to be corralled after trying to get a look at some heckler after a frightful mistake—can make one truly miserable.

Of course, there's also another distinction: how you react, in terms of visible emotional displays, and how you react, in terms of playing the game. After losing that ball (and then standing flat-footed to watch the rest of the play, and then being ready to take issue with fans), Crow-Armstrong delivered two huge swings that turned the game around. He hit a blistered solo home run in the bottom of the same inning, at 110 MPH off the bat. He hit the walk-off single that won the game after his teammates' spirited rally in the bottom of the ninth, capping an insane night with a cathartic roar.

Several times this season, Crow-Armstrong's on-field response to a bad mistake has been a display of such ferocious brilliance that it's made up for that mistake, and then some. This was something Sosa also often did—and Favre, too, for that matter. In baseball, one player can't get an outsize share of the chances and become the sole focus of a game, the way a quarterback or a basketball player can. But if you do everything with sufficient intensity, you can fill up the box score, both literally and metaphorically. Crow-Armstrong is perfecting the art of taking over a baseball game, even though he'll sometimes give away the game, too.

This can be a recipe for a championship. Teams have been led to glory by players who sucked up all the media attention and all the oxygen in the room. It's just not going to be fun, or easy, or comfortable—and it might get very ugly. Any teammate or reporter can tell you, even if many fans cannot, that it was often unpleasant to be around Sosa, Jordan and Favre, for lots of reasons. The most fun teams to follow and to be a part of are the ones with diffuse leadership and a team ethos, on and off the field. Ironically, the Cubs have worked hard to cultivate that, including by bringing in a manager who believes as fervently in having 26 leaders on a 26-man roster as anyone in the game. They've eschewed the pursuit of incandescent superstars via trade or free agency, not only for budgetary reasons, but for philosophical ones.

Too bad. Crow-Armstrong is such a forceful personality—there's so much charisma in his presence on the field, and so much volatility in his interactions with everyone surrounding it—that he's changing all of that, whether anyone likes it or not. Even he doesn't necessarily seem to like it, but he doesn't have the self-control to stop it.

This is a team out of control, It's a player out of control. It's a situation that makes you hear a high-pitched ringing you can't place. That ringing is the song of the blade. It's the universe drawing its bow across a string pulled so taut the note is above the top of the scale, just like Crow-Armstrong's fielding ability, his newfound bat speed, and his unreserved aggressiveness. It is, in a word, danger.

The 2023 Cubs won 83 games. The 2024 team won the same number. The 2025 team got to 92 wins, but still felt stuck in the middle. If you're sick of that averageness, I have great news. It's over. Despite their current record, the Cubs are destined either for greatness or destruction this year. They're at the mercy of a player whose talent can turn being badly jammed by a 99-MPH fastball into a game-winning muscle single (because he swung the bat at 87.4 MPH, so the ball got up the handle, but he was already around on it), and who can catch anything—but who can also absolutely blow it sometimes, and whose intensity has begotten angry outbursts that are no longer directed only at himself. He can pull a team of slightly declining veterans all the way to the World Series.

If he explodes, though—if all this volatility slips even further beyond his control, as it has for so many players with a similar combination of potential and insecurity—everything and everyone else around the Cubs will go kaput with him. So, keep tuning in. This is HBO stuff. It's high drama with high stakes and all the nastiness you love—the stuff they won't show you on basic cable. It's scary, and not exactly in a good way. There's a real risk you're going to learn all the wrong lessons from it. Irrefutably, though, it's entertaining as hell.