Pete Crow-Armstrong hit five home runs against the Reds last weekend, three on Saturday and two more on Sunday, good for eight RBI and six runs scored across the two games. By Sunday night, Anthony Rizzo, working the broadcast as the Sunday Night Baseball booth analyst, was running segments with the rest of the crew dedicated to Crow-Armstrong's MVP case.
The Chicago Cubs kept the power going without him Monday, setting a franchise record with nine home runs in a 17-3 rout of the Brewers that capped a 62-homer August, an NL record for any calendar month. Crow-Armstrong's own 14 homers in August are still the most by a player 24 or younger in a single month since Ken Griffey Jr. hit 15 in August 1994.
Cubs fans don't need a national broadcast or a record book to tell them something big is happening in center field, but it's a useful marker of how loud this has gotten. The question worth answering isn't whether this season is good. It's exactly how good, measured against 150 years of Cubs history.
Where he actually ranks
Crow-Armstrong is in the middle of an MVP-caliber season, and it's worth putting a number on that before going further.
Games | 138 |
|---|---|
AVG/OBP/SLG | .283/.377/.577 |
Home Runs | 38 |
Stolen Bases | 32 |
OPS+ | 161 |
bWAR | 8.5 |
That WAR figure is tops among all Cubs position players this year and is the only discussion in the NL MVP conversation. It's also enough, on its own, to answer the question this piece set out to ask. Chicago Cubs history, going back to 1876, has produced exactly nine position-player seasons worth 8.5 WAR or more. Crow-Armstrong's 2026 is one of them.
Rank | Player | Season | Age | bWAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Rogers Hornsby | 1929 | 33 | 10.6 |
2 | Sammy Sosa | 2001 | 32 | 10.3 |
3 | Ernie Banks | 1959 | 28 | 10.2 |
4 | Ron Santo | 1967 | 27 | 9.8 |
5 | Ernie Banks | 1958 | 27 | 9.3 |
6 | Ron Santo | 1966 | 26 | 8.9 |
6 | Ron Santo | 1964 | 24 | 8.9 |
7 | Ryne Sandberg | 1984 | 24 | 8.5 |
7 | Pete Crow Armstrong | 2026* | 24 | 8.5 |
Crow-Armstrong sits behind five Hall of Fame-caliber seasons from Hornsby, Sosa and Banks. He is in a flat tie with Cubs' fan favorite Sandberg for the low end of the list. There is real time left in the season to move up that list. This is a top-nine offensive season in a franchise history that stretches back to the 1870s. This is a great year at Wrigley. It's one of the best individual seasons the Cubs have ever produced.
The age-24 club
In those nine seasons of records, there is one more tier. Of those nine seasons, only three came from a 24-year-old: Santo's 1964 (8.9 WAR), Sandberg's 1984 (8.5) and Crow-Armstrong's 2026. PCA isn't just on the franchise's short list of great seasons. He's tied for the second-best age-24 season a position player has ever had for this organization. He is a half win behind Santo's 1964, and he's gotten there in fewer games and plate appearances than either Santo or Sandberg needed. With 24 games left, he doesn't need a monster finish to pass Santo and take the record outright. At the pace he is on, he has the opportunity to move into fourth place in the Cubs' history books.
How he's doing it
The how behind it is worth talking about. It is not what you'd assume. Crow-Armstrong's pull rate is the fourth-highest of any Cubs hitter. Fangraphs has batted-ball data for since the early 2000s, but his hard-hit rate is nothing special. Its identical to Sammy Sosa's career mark and behind Bryant, Rizzo and Swanson. He isn't hitting the ball dramatically harder than his teammates ever have. What he did is rebuilt his swing to sell out for pull-side loft, running a 0.67 groundball-to-flyball ratio that's among the most extreme on the roster. The power output is the result of that decision rather than a hot streak of contact quality.
That decision has already reshaped how his whole career reads. Crow-Armstrong debuted at a minus-45 OPS+ in 2023 and needed two more uneven seasons to find his footing. This year alone pulled his four-season body of work up to a 120.8 career wRC+, good for 41st among 219 qualified hitters in Cubs history, sitting directly behind Andre Dawson's entire Cubs tenure. A player who was below replacement level as a rookie now owns a career line better than a Hall of Famer's full run in Chicago, almost entirely because of one summer.
What it means
None of this makes him the best the Cubs have ever had. Hornsby and Sosa remain a tier up, and a few weeks of even sensational baseball won't close a gap of a win and a half or more. But the reaction pouring in from national broadcasts and beat writers isn't overreacting. Crow-Armstrong is already inside the top nine offensive seasons in Cubs history, tied for the best age-24 season not held by Ron Santo, and he's doing it on a rookie-scale contract with years of control left. Whatever this season ends up ranking by October, the argument about what comes next for him and the Cubs is only getting louder.
All statistics from Baseball Reference and Fangraphs, current as of Sept. 1.
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