“I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.” – Jedi Master Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
In the minds of most baseball fans, if Shohei Ohtani performs as expected as both a hitter and a pitcher, he’s the shoe-in for his league’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) Award. Despite doing exactly that for parts of this season, Ohtani has been limited and shut down completely from pitching, leveling the playing field for other National League (NL) candidates to make a run at the award. Enter Pete Crow-Armstrong, center fielder for the Chicago Cubs.
What makes Crow-Armstrong (PCA, as they call him) so tantalizing as a player is that he combines exceptional defensive range, blazing speed and a potential to hit for power at the plate. In 2026, all three of those qualities are on full display. Also in 2026, he added another quality to his already-elite repertoire: discipline. After spending two seasons swinging at everything, PCA has become more patient and more dangerous.
Drafted in 2020 by the New York Mets, PCA was viewed as “one of the best pure hitters” in the high school class. His power at the plate was a question mark, but he had an undeniable prowess in center field. He had quickness that was complemented by an innate ability to make accurate reads and routes on the ball.
Flipped to the Cubs at the 2021 trading deadline in the Javier Baez trade, PCA made strides in the power department, building on his already-plus bat. As is the case with a lot of hitters, a desire for power led to more of an inclination to swing… and miss.
And so, that was his knock. His flaw, you could say. He was too aggressive because he wanted to hit the ball further and hit the ball harder, likely overtaking any mental ability to stay patient. Every pitch seemed hittable.
Just look at his rookie season in 2024. His swing%, the rate at which he swung the bat versus the pitches he received, was 60.7%. That means he was swinging at around 6 pitches of every 10 he saw. League average that season sat at just under 48%. He swung at all those pitches despite the rate at which he saw pitches in the zone (Zone%) being just about 50%.
This approach was hurting him. He was chasing over 40% of the time at pitches outside the zone, 8 ticks or so above league average. His hard-hit rate sat at about 37% and in the league’s 30th percentile. His 5.1% walk rate was 11th percentile. There was room to grow.
2025 saw more of the same, despite having an MVP-caliber first half. Even though he hit 25 home runs, stole 27 bases, and had the 6th best slugging percentage (total bases/at-bats) in all of baseball to the All-Star break in mid-July, his on-base percentage was just .307 (how many times he got on base / plate appearances). His walk rate was even worse than the previous season. At 4.6%, it ranked bottom-8 among qualified hitters. He could still play amazing defense, run the bases, and hit for power. Those are all very valuable skills. It just felt like there was another level yet to be tapped into.
It got worse before it got better. His second half of 2025 was nothing short of disaster. His on-base and slugging percentages both dropped considerably, and he was significantly below league average at the plate in most categories.
That, in my opinion, is what makes the 2026 version of Pete Crow-Armstrong so compelling. Beyond the swagger demeanor, smooth speed, and twitchy range in center field, he’s a completely evolved hitter. Physically, he’s always had the ability to hit the ball well and hit the ball for power as a pro. It was the mental side that, from an outsider’s perspective, needed work.
He’s cut his swing rate down to 49%, meaning he’s swinging at less than half of his pitches. He’s showing a more-selective mentality, swinging at 67.8% of pitches in the zone in 2026 versus the 77-80% rate he did in ‘24 and ‘25.
There are countless benefits to this change. To name a couple, his chase rate is down considerably from about 42% to 34%, likely because he’s getting friendlier counts and not getting over anxious about needing to swing at pitches. Secondly, his hard-hit rate is up to 49.4% this season, good for 89th percentile in MLB. Because he’s waiting for a pitch he knows he can hit, he’s making better quality contact when he connects.
Perhaps most impressive, and in my opinion a truly astonishing development, is that PCA’s walk rate (which in the past two years has been 5% or lower) is at an astronomical 12.1% this year, good for 83rd percentile. He’s walking so much that his on-base percentage has increased from a combined .287 from 2024 and 2025 to .382 in 2026!
In sum, he’s found a way to become more disciplined AND more powerful, as his slugging percentage is also considerably higher than it’s been. He’s just 4 home runs shy of his previous career-high of 31, and he has a month and a half to eclipse that.
PCA is just one example of a player that’s made a change and seen positives as a result. That’s not always the case. Sometimes players can get too aggressive or too passive or too mentally-cluttered because they’re doing too much thinking. What PCA is showing is that players can undergo reworkings of their swing and of their approach and feel hope for improvement.
Will that improvement lead to his first NL MVP award? Maybe. His 8.0 fWAR (FanGraphs’ calculation of Wins Above Replacement) nearly doubles the next NL player’s total (Otto Lopez at 4.4 fWAR). He’s still got to outshine the likes of Ohtani, but there can be no doubt of his immense value towards the Cubs team as they hunt a playoff run akin to their own curse-breaking voyage exactly a decade ago.
Inner Half 