Fan fail: PCA winning on field despite losing popularity contest

Posted July 13, 2026 6:45 pm

Mike McGraw

The baseball world couldn't wait to turn on Pete Crow-Armstrong.

Cubs fans always appreciated him, but think about the booing on the road, the “overrated” chants, the all-star voting for gosh sakes.

Last year, PCA received more votes than any National League outfielder. This time, he finished 10th, with roughly half as many fan votes as he received in 2025.

Granted, there was an awfully slow start this season. As of May 29, Crow-Armstrong ranked 114th in OPS. But maybe there's something about him that makes opposing fans pull a little harder for failure.

Mark DeRosa, his manager on Team USA, said this week on MLB Network, “He's got that swaggy vibe to him.”

One opposing manager this season referred to him as the “blue-haired kid,” even though that dye faded away long ago.

It's not easy reading the minds of Brewers or Cardinals fans, so let's not try. But things seemed to turn around a day later, when PCA went 4-for-5 in a win at St. Louis and hit the home run that landed in the “tarps off” section of Cardinals fans who were chanting “overrated.”

That was one of the greatest examples of sticking it to the haters ever seen in the sports world.

Since that day, Crow-Armstrong has been the best player in MLB. He leads the league by a wide margin in OPS and wRC-plus since May 30. Over the full season, slow start included, he's No. 1 in position player WAR.

But the outfield starters for the National League on Tuesday will be Juan Soto, Andy Pages and Brandon Marsh. When the first half ended, Soto was second in the NL in OPS, Crow-Armstrong fifth, Marsh 22nd and Pages 31st.

Not exactly an all-star worthy lineup, but sometimes fans get it wrong. Marsh is at least playing in his home stadium in Philadelphia.

The Cubs' Pete Crow-Armstrong makes his way through a crowd to speak with members of the media during the MLB baseball All-Star Week on Monday in Philadelphia. AP

The bigger picture here is Crow-Armstrong showed he can make adjustments during the season and turn up his game to a loud volume. It didn't take analytics to tell what was wrong — he needed to stop swinging at bad pitches.

PCA had long been susceptible to downward breaking pitches. The more he swung, the more opposing pitchers would fling the low-and-inside curveballs. Sometimes, he'd hit them, but others were simply unhittable.

The Cubs had players in the past who never got better at swing decisions, so PCA's quick improvement has been especially impressive. He walked 29 times all of last season, and now is already at 47.

“The discipline in the strike zone has just changed so quickly, it's tough for the league to stay up with it,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said this week. “The league had been trying to get him to chase and had been good at it for a while, and it just stopped.”

One sequence worth pointing out happened in Baltimore against pitcher Dean Kremer. In PCA's first at-bat, he struck out swinging on a splitter. The second at-bat started with two more whiffs, then Kremer tried a third straight splitter on 0-2 and Crow-Armstrong took it out of the park for a home run.

A few innings later, Crow-Armstrong homered again on another splitter from Kremer. At the break, PCA has 21 home runs and 24 stolen bases, well on his way to a second-straight 30-30 season.

The question now is how long can PCA stay hot? Will he continue to go through extreme peaks and valleys throughout his career? The Cubs have plenty of other players who fit that description.

At the break, the Cubs are 12 games over .500 and have just the one all-star rep. That hardly seems possible, but it's just another example of how valuable PCA has been, love him or boo him.