Let's acknowledge that there is no conversation to be had about who the best player in baseball is, so long as Shohei Ohtani is drawing breath and applying his skills as a two-way player. The gavel has long been banged on that issue. But there's a lot of baseball being played, and a lot of cool guys doing the playing, and one of those guys is Pete Crow-Armstrong, who in an Ohtani-less universe is the best player in baseball.
Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs beat the crap out of the Pirates last night, tagging Paul Skenes for five runs in an 11-0 victory. Crow-Armstrong was responsible for most of that damage, going 4-for-5 with a homer, three RBI, and three runs scored. He also hit two doubles and stole a base.
Saturday's performance raised Crow-Armstrong's OPS to .934, which looks pretty spiffy next to his 23 homers and 26 steals. His destruction of the Pirates was also enough to tick his fWAR up to a clean 7.0 for the season, which is the kind of number you don't expect to see on July 26 unless it's next to the name of the runaway MVP.
It is not entirely unexpected for a player who could call himself the best center fielder in baseball in his age-23 season to make a claim on being the game's best overall player (non-Shohei division) in his age-24 season, but Crow-Armstrong's development has been impressive nonetheless. The most important skill Crow-Armstrong has gained this season is one that all young hitters hope to find as they develop into seasoned pros: patience. When Crow-Armstrong broke out last season he fit into an easily recognizable profile. Here was a young, rambunctious hitter with enough power and athleticism to produce solid counting stats despite being a relatively unsophisticated batsman. In 2025, Crow-Armstrong was in the bottom five percent of the league in both chase rate and walk percentage, which made him one of the streakiest hitters in the league. The guy who hit 25 homers and had an .847 OPS in the first half of 2025 looked like one of the best hitters in baseball; the guy who hit six homers and dropped his OPS to .634 in the second half inflicted trauma on fans who once allowed themselves to become infatuated with Javier Baez.
In 2026, however, Crow-Armstrong has learned how to smooth things out. A lot of those concerningly blue sliders that marred his 2025 Statcast profile have started to turn red. He's swinging harder, making better contact, chasing less, and walking a lot more. His walk rate has risen from 4.5 percent in 2025 to 11.5 percent this season, and he's drawn three more walks over his last 455 plate appearances than he had in his previous 1,057.
Crow-Armstrong didn't draw a walk against the Pirates last night, but his hits demonstrated his increased control over the strike zone. Skenes is having a down season by his own absurd standards, but he still discomforts the league's best hitters, and had sharp enough stuff to rack up 11 strikeouts in 5.1 innings. It wasn't good enough to stop Crow-Armstrong, who led off the game by picking a 92 mph splitter off the outside corner and flicking it into opposite field for a single. It was the same story in the fifth inning, though this time Crow-Armstrong put a little more muscle into it, yanking a well-placed changeup for a double. Those are two pitches specifically designed to torment the kind of hitter Crow-Armstrong was last season, but this isn't last season.
It's a testament to Crow-Armstrong's abilities that so much can be said about his greatness in 2026 without mentioning his defense. Here again the gavel has struck: Crow-Armstrong is the best overall defender in the sport. He has already collected a career's worth of highlight-reel catches, and his combination of range and arm strength is unmatched. In fact, his defense is so great that one could make the argument that his two-way contributions are just as valuable as Ohtani's, and thus one could then argue that Crow-Armstrong is in fact the best player in baseball, no qualifiers necessary. No, no, no, no. That can't be true, can it? Can it?
This blog is over!