This is What Trying Too Hard Looks Like: Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs' Careen Into Disaster

Turn on a Cubs game, lately, and you won't have to wait long for confirmation that the team is fighting it—not only losing, but panicking about it, and trying to turn a losing streak into their next winning streak in a way that's only pushing them deeper into the losing spiral. At this point, you almost—almost—can't even blame them. The predicament they face is very real. This is a team built to win now, if ever, and it doesn't look like they're built to win now, after all. In a highly competitive NL Central, they're dead last, and the only team they really need to worry about (the perennial, inevitable Central champions, the Brewers) sits comfortably in first, even if it's only 4.5 games from penthouse to cellar right now. They're in scramble mode, because they really can't afford the way things have gone, and they certainly can't allow it to go on any longer.

No one ever got out of a hole by digging frantically, though, and that's what the Cubs have been doing lately. Injuries and a collective slump by half their lineup have played big roles in throwing them into this pit of despair, but their desperation to escape is increasingly counterproductive. Nowhere is that more clear than in center field, where Pete Crow-Armstrong has lost it and is playing like an extremely talented, extremely dysregulated fool.

Because Cade Horton, Matthew Boyd and Edward Cabrera are all on the injured list, Jordan Wicks was recalled from Triple-A Iowa to take Cabrera's turn in the rotation Tuesday night. That was an utterly doomed endeavor, and Wicks wasted no time proving that. However, his woes were exacerbated just moments after he toed the rubber.

That Wicks gave up hits to the first two batters he faced can hardly have surprised anyone. Unfortunately, it also didn't come as any surprise when Crow-Armstrong tried to do way too much and wound up making the situation instantly worse. He had no hope of throwing out Konnor Griffin at third base on this line-drive single, but because he's become convinced that he needs to lift the team out of its torpor through the sheer force of his will, he tried, anyway. His errant throw gave Brandon Lowe a free base and made Wicks's job harder, rather than easier. Crow-Armstrong is very lucky, too, that the ball didn't sail or skip a bit higher, landing in the Pirates dugout. He gave away one base (though, unaccountably, he wasn't charged with an error on the play), but it could easily have been more.

To call this a pattern would, by now, be an understatement. Crow-Armstrong should have come into this season with a certain measure of security and comfort, after a breakout 2025 season and a strong showing in the World Baseball Classic. Instead, he's played all year like a starving man forever trying to start a brawl over half a rotisserie chicken. So insatiable is Crow-Armstrong's appetite for greatness and championship glory that it's eating him, from the inside out.

Lamentably, the final note in the stirring song of Crow-Armstrong's 2025 was a pair of plays on which he tried to scale the center-field wall in Milwaukee to pull back clutch homers by the Brewers in the NLDS—despite each ball clearing the fence by dozens of feet. One image summed up the futility especially tidily, and seemed like the universe itself taunting Crow-Armstrong for his unbridled ambition.

Maybe he stewed on that more over the winter than he let on. Maybe he so hated losing that playoff series that he lost all sense of patience or perspective as he looked forward to beating the Brewers this year. Whatever the reason, Crow-Armstrong has showed up this year with exactly the same energy with which he finished last year—and that's a problem.

We've already talked about the drawbacks of Crow-Armstrong's huge increase in bat speed this year. It's a change that has the chance to make him a lethal slugger, but so far, it's mostly produced more pop-ups and rolled-over grounders, however sharply hit. You'd like to see him swinging more under control. To his credit, though, he has at least swung less often, by a considerable margin. In the past, his difficulty harnessing his immense talent has mostly taken the form of chasing everything. This year, though his swing is faster than he can handle and isn't generating the right kind of contact, he's found a bit of restraint about when to swing.

Even when that falters, sometimes, good things can happen. He swung at a 3-1 pitch he absolutely should not have chased in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Reds on May 6. It was a dumb, overcooked swing, at a moment when reaching base would have meant bringing the winning run to the plate and having Crow-Armstrong's speed carrying the tying one. On the next pitch, he chased outside the zone again, but he connected on a low-flying missile of an opposite-field homer, tying the game. He was playing out of control, governed only by adrenaline. That's how he's looked at all big moments this year. On that pitch, though, that adrenaline and his remarkable talent created an explosive play.

All year, Crow-Armstrong's bat speed has climbed. It's still climbing. Five of the six fastest swings of his career have come since April 27, peaking with this pass at a Jacob deGrom slider on Mothers Day.

The Statcast-reported swing speed on this was 87.9 MPH, the only time Crow-Armstrong has reached the maximum value the system spits out for public data purposes. As you can see, though, the result was another mishit, and watching the swing leaves one wondering more why he traded so much barrel accuracy for sheer swing speed on a two-strike count than how he can achieve such a thing.

On balance. you'd like to see Crow-Armstrong rein all that in, because the lineup needs him badly and he can't be his best self until he regains control of his swing. However, being slightly out of control in the batter's box is normal for Crow-Armstrong; he's just doing it in a different way this year. You can live with his indiscretions at bat.

You can't live with that throw we saw above. You can't live with this one, either, from April 13.

It's a testament to Crow-Armstrong's brilliance as a fielder that Brandon Marsh actually waited before heading home on this play. If The Flash had a jetpack, he still couldn't have caught that ball, but Crow-Armstrong got such a great jump and sold it so well that Marsh held at third a bit. 

That Crow-Armstrong then airmailed his cutoff men and fired all the way home, however, testifies only to his erratic mindset in the field this year. This throw, too, cost the Cubs a base. It left his hand at over 101 miles per hour, the hardest throw of his career. His form in charging and firing was, as always, superb. But the decision was dreadful—a bit of hubris that the Phillies easily punished. 

Almost every mistake Crow-Armstrong has made this season has come because he was trying to do way, way too much. He wants to be the best player in the sport, and to take over the game and will the Cubs to win. Instead, he's willing them closer to losses, at times. On the David Hamilton single which Crow-Armstrong played into a three-run round-tripper last week against Milwaukee, Crow-Armstrong was plotting another heroic bit of scoop-and-fire. He's trying to make up for the failure of his teammates to score runs in bunches. He's trying to mitigate his pitching staff's inability to rack up enough strikeouts. He's trying to deal with the fact that they keep giving up long fly balls, by hunting outs even when there are none to be found.

His wild desire for excellence has positives in the field, too. We've never seen a player get jumps on fly balls as good as Crow-Armstrong's. He's devised a pre-pitch setup and movement unique to him, which almost pushes him into some kind of magnetic suspension as he reads contact and begins to chase fly balls. He's dedicated himself to his craft, and he's doing some freakish things, in the field and at the plate.

At too many crucial moments—within games, but even within swings or just when he gets to the ball after some blindingly fast, arrow-straight route—he's way out of control, and it shows. That was more apparent than ever when he collided with the fence at Rate Field after a valiant but ludicrous attempt to catch something uncatchable. Taunted by a fan who'd ragged on him all game, he lashed out with profane and offensive ferocity. It was ugly, and Crow-Armstrong has been appropriately remorseful. It was also very real. That's where he is right now, mentally—on such a sharp, fine edge that any tip off the right track will leave someone wounded.

He's too good to be making the mistakes he's making this year, just as the Cubs are too good to have lost 14 of 16 games and be getting their doors blown off in most of those contests. As baseball people always say, though, you are what your record says you are after 162 games. The Cubs haven't played that many in 2026. They have time to get right. So does Crow-Armstrong. To begin fixing the problems at hand, though, both the team and the player have to reckon with an excruciating dual truth: their margin for error is gone, but they must stop playing like it. Their sense of urgency has become its own emergency.