Pete Crow-Armstrong is a breakout star of the 2025 MLB season, utilizing an entertaining, free-swinging style that’s familiar to Chicago Cubs fans. It’s also one that’s been a work-in-progress amid the high production.
“The blue-haired kid is kind of a freak right now with the way that he’s playing.”
The blue-haired kid, that’s Pete Crow-Armstrong, the Chicago Cubs’ 23-year-old center fielder.
Pat Murphy, the Milwaukee Brewers manager, is doing the talking. Leave it to a skipper sanded down into a one-man archetype of “grizzled” to relate something truly notable via verbiage shot out of 1940s newspaper coverage but interpolated through YouTube.
But he’s spot on. (Not about the hair – it’s no longer blue.) Pete Crow-Armstrong is indeed playing like a freak right now.
A former first-round pick-turned trade chip-turned top prospect, Crow-Armstrong – also known as PCA when his play demands more syllabic speed – was always likely to secure playing time with elite center field defense. What wasn’t immediately clear, even as he landed his first full-time major-league stint in 2024, is whether he would hit enough to transcend the Kevin Kiermaier-esque realm of teleportation as carrying tool.
Crow-Armstrong has spent the beginning of the 2025 campaign demonstrating he can clear that bar, at least in short bursts. Whipping home runs over the fence – with nine, he’s three off the MLB high and just one shy of last season’s total – and batting .265 through 38 games, PCA has added a major dose of spice to the suddenly dynamic Cubs (the NL Central-leading squad ranks No. 1 in offensive TRACR).
Of course, he’s stealing bases with abandon that can’t even be deemed reckless: his ranks fifth with 12 stolen bases (on an 85.7% success rate).
The surge has arrived without much apparent change to the aggressive approach of last season, when he posted a mere 59 raw value+ (100 is league average). Raw value+ (RV+) measures discipline, contact and damage done upon contact all in one metric. A 116 RV+ this season counts as major news when it’s attached to such a thrillingly talented glove.
Over the past 20 years, seven center fielders have paired defensive seasons at least as valuable as Crow-Armstrong’s 2024 with offensive performances at least 20% above league average (per FanGraphs’ wRC+). Andruw Jones (who did it twice), Curtis Granderson, Carlos Beltran, Grady Sizemore, Jacoby Ellsbury and Lorenzo Cain all received MVP votes in those seasons. Only poor Andres Torres in 2010 went without recognition.
So is this a coronation in Chicago, or has Crow-Armstrong merely found a smokescreen for his limitations?
The Kid Who Can’t Sit Still
Crow-Armstrong is a TikTok-friendly ballplayer. He’s distinct, he has screen presence, and the gist of what’s happening is easily identifiable without sound. Also, there’s a lot of action.
He’s doing a great many things right in that action. He’ll combine hustle and extreme speed to turn a tried-and-true single into a daring double. He steals at will. He takes the extra base. He can bunt effectively.
He swings a lot – in fact, more than any hitter to date this season. That includes more hacks at balls outside the zone than anyone would consider part of a healthy hitting diet. Crow-Armstrong is chasing more than 45% of the balls he sees, second-worst in MLB.
His discipline+ is 69, more than 30% worse than the average hitter. Only five hitters with at least 100 plate appearances grade out worse, and you can see it on the stat line, where his .303 on-base percentage is subpar despite the solid batting average.
He’s gifted enough to swing and punish pitches he should swing at and pitches he shouldn’t. Right now, he’s doing that, which is why an opposing manager like Murphy thinks he’s kind of a freak. It (almost certainly) won’t always work this well.
All those individual swings often add up to bigger, broader swings in performance and ultimately in perception. Just ask Javier Baez, the former Cubs phenom who brought Crow-Armstrong to Chicago in a 2021 trade with the New York Mets.
Always a singular, jaw-dropping defender and baserunner, Baez has vacillated between star turns and unplayable seasons because his swing decisions (swing compulsions?) keep him on the roller coaster.
By FanGraphs WAR, Baez owns the two most valuable seasons of the pitch tracking era (since 2008) by a hitter who ran a chase rate over 40%. (In a telling example, Pablo Sandoval notched both the third-most valuable and the most negative season of this group.)
As recently as his 2019 season with the Cubs, the man they call El Mago was an All-Star who logged a solid 111 RV+ despite a grisly 59 discipline+ mark, but since then the calculus has been difficult to sustain. In 2023, he cratered at a 65 RV+.
PCA’s Path From ‘Right Now’ to ‘All-Star’
It’s possible to thrive in an unorthodox way, by making enough contact and doing enough damage with it. Crow-Armstrong’s uptick this season stems mostly from bat-to-ball improvements.
His contact rate on pitches in the zone has jumped up to league average, and his contact+ is up at 105 after coming at 98 in 2024. Pair that with a 144 BIP+, the damage metric in which Baez excels on his good days, and it all balances out evenly enough.
Over the past five full campaigns (so, not 2020), there have been 57 hitter seasons that combine sub-80 discipline+ and 100+ RV+, and only two players from the group – Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez and Atlanta Braves outfielder Michael Harris II – have had multiple seasons this way.
More hitters have dipped into this territory before stabilizing – Cincinnati Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz started out here in 2023, then improved his discipline last year. Reigning NL Rookie of the Year Jackson Merrill of the San Diego Padres ran a 79 discipline+ last year with good contact and damage numbers.
Where Crow-Armstrong settles in across a full season – and how much Mets fans rue the Baez trade, as the Cubs head to Citi Field this weekend for a matchup of division leaders – will depend on whether he can strike a less perilous balance.
It’s clear he has the right idea of how to make the most of it when he connects – almost a quarter of his batted balls are pulled in the air. That’s a decent start. He’ll still need to maintain his improving contact rate to set his sights on All-Star status.
This season, his whiff rate is actually higher against fastballs than secondary pitches, mostly because even meh pitchers can get him to swing at impossibly high fastballs. Better pitchers, meanwhile, can make him look somewhere between frustrated and resigned. That wasn’t the case a year ago, though, when breaking balls especially flummoxed him.
Crow-Armstrong’s baseline is nothing to sneeze at. Kevin Kiermaier, Kevin Pillar, elite center fielders not named Kevin, take your pick. PCA’s smooth, warp-speed wheels will make him a contributor in Wrigley Field.
Still, everyone can see there’s more with Pete Crow-Armstrong. There’s a freak in there.
Right now, he’s showing up on the field. History says he might have to play a little differently to keep the show going.
For more coverage, follow along on social media on Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook and X.
Freak or Fluke? Pete Crow-Armstrong’s Thrilling Emergence is All About the Swings Opta Analyst.
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